A Fresh Fish Story: Why Digital is Above The Line

Welcome to RedLobster.com

Sssssssssssshhhhpopsssssssssssss. It’s the sound of flames licking butter and juices dripping from your lobster tail. You can almost feel the warmth of the wood fired grill and smell the wood-fired lobster tail looking through your monitor into Red Lobster. Can digital be as emotional and drive desire and reappraisal better than a TV spot? See for yourself. In this post I’ll point out some of the guided discoveries Red Lobster is earning through the digital channel.

Did you feel that?

In California, when we say “did you feel that?” we’re usually referring to an earthquake. We look around for others to validate the sensation or to scan other perception points for movement. In a way, our economy has us looking around for proof points and confidence too.

On January 5^th we asked, “did you feel that?” for a different reason. There was a palpable enthusiasm and optimism that entered the office that day. It was new car smell+first day of school+opening day kick-off+getting the band back together all rolled-up into one. It wasn’t just the reflection from a longer-than usual vacation, although that might have helped. It was the feeling of a team coming back together with good momentum and challenging work ahead that we love doing.

I encourage all of us to hold onto that feeling this year. Connect socially and share stories of your weekends, holidays and families. Laugh. Be excited about the work and the fact that we’re working. Be part of creating great value for our clients and their consumers so that their businesses remain healthy. Don’t suppress your excitement—no one does on the first day back. Don’t let it slip into routine. Be Great. Be the shaker that others feel good about having on the team.

And, yeah, you did feel that. It’s Real. Here’s to a transformational 2009.

Too Many In-Boxes

"Something came whizzing down the kitchen chimney as he spoke and caught him sharply on the back of the head. Next moment, thirty or forty letters came pelting out of the fireplace like bullets. The Dursleys ducked, but Harry leapt into the air trying to catch one."

There’s a b-plan in your inboxes, or specifically in their consolidation and management, and the key may be SocialMedia.

I’m reading the first Harry Potter book to my kids at bedtime. Remember the scene where the letters wanted so badly to get to Harry that they came shooting through every open space in the house? It’s a good visual for the flood of information we have coming into our inbox, the contempt many have for it and the joy someone can experience getting just the right message created expressly for them.

Your home mailbox–the one that’s got your Netflix red envelope in it–is rarely bringing you anything personal except during special events/holidays. Your office inbox rarely empties of those declining rags still distributed in print in spite of  the economic realites. If your Outlook email inbox is like mine, it’s full of disappointments for lower-priority senders (sorry) whose bold-faced salutations remind me they have not been read. My phone buzzes to let me know a direct message arrived from Twitter. And the SMS/Message app has a lengthy inbox–at least these have been read. My Facebook mailbox, once an uncluttered, pure environment of friendly connections and smiles, now buries threaded conversations pages deep as the volume grows.

Sometimes I forget which inbox I received a message and it takes time to cycle through the services–email, txt, twitter, fb and a growing number of small, function or topic-specific socialnets–to discover and recover the interaction.

David Armano has content coming through the context of our crowds, not just an editor's selection process.

If email applications were transportation, we’d be driving off the road with intent. It’s a bad user experience made only slightly better by search. Not as dangerous as driving a poorly designed automobile, but hazardous to our health all the same. I’ve been reproached about my email management, as though it were my fault the tool didn’t work better.  ”If I just put more effort and commitment,” the logic goes, “I could get my inbox to zero.”

To illustrate my point further, did someone have to show you how to use Google? The iPod album flipper? Even this blog platform from which we’re engaging is intuitive enough to execute frequent saves as I write the post so I don’t lose my content/flow if the browser decides to crash (which it did).

The first time I saw a Mac in 1984 I smiled–it got me out of command-line navigation and green type for something that looked intuitively like the real world. Same with the browser in 1993, iPhone and any number of other innovations that recognized me as a human with better things to do than to serve it. Each of these got us further from code and more into interaction. They blurred the lines between real world type, content and now physics.

I’m convinced a better solution is near. As Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody,” says, “there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” I believe in the stronger filters. Already more robust algorythmic filters have gotten rid of much of my SPAM email. But there are also human filters to content: I follow hundreds of people on Twitter and friend even more in Facebook. In my twitterstream and socialgraph they’ve broken news more quickly than any other medium. My “crowd” also has better taste in selecting rore relevant articles in greater quantities for me than any issue of newspaper or trade can offer. This doesn’t completely solve the issues from “too many inboxes,” but it starts to prune the activity in my main channels.

The key may lie in initiatives we’ve heard announced and seen coming out of Yahoo! and Facebook lately, allowing SocialNets into their email platform and other “inboxes” to bring in SocialNets through their “Connect” program respectively. Built into their social platforms are features around what they call “Dynamic Privacy.” That means the system is aware or can become more aware about who you value more in your connections and how. With whom do you share or tag photos? To whom do you forward interesting content and do the click or pass it along? Is that a professional, university or family contact? Do you share common interests? These can become powerful enablers and filters in the context of the in-box.

Facebook, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and others have all announced and are rolling out some version of their “Connect” programs. Many in the Valley have talked about this as a “single-user login” benefit for the consumer and owning the login or attention currency equivalent of “wallet.” It’s like not having to get carded everywhere you go, nor populate more accounts. I believe the single-user login benefit is huge, and I think that it may also be secondary in the long run to helping clear inbox proliferation.

Note: quick word of caution navigating the waters of people-filtered inboxes. The other day I pinged a professional associate who quickly informed me that they weren’t available in Facebook for connecting professionally. You have to respect the boundaries of how people want to use their inboxes, when and with whom.

Will close with this letter for my most bloated inbox: 

Dear email inbox, I’m not trying to be difficult, but you really don’t get me. And I think it’s time we take a little break. We’ve tried it your way for many years with pretty much the same result, now it’s time we try it my way. As of today, I’m taking a break from you. I need some space to redefine our relationship. I’m packing up my closest peeps and taking them with me over to the socialnets; that’s where you can find me if you need something. I’m going to throw away all the news articles, press clippings and stuff you’ve got stashed everywhere, so round-up what you need quickly and store it somewhere safe. 

It’s been a blast. I mean literraly. Most marketers still call you their “email blast.” They carpet bomb inboxes on time with an interesting item at best or with the randomness and relevance of an unwanted advance at worse. You’ve been loyally shielding me from the worst offenders, but my crowd gets me better.

If it makes you feel better, it’s not about you. It’s all me. I mean, you haven’t changed a bit. But I have. I found better, more interesting and related things from my crowd. I’ve grown to trust them and they helped me realize how far we’ve grown apart. I hope we can stay friends or at least professional. We still have all the business affairs we need to deal with. I think with time you’ll find this was really the right decision for both of us. Maybe with time you’ll slim down some, get active and grow in new directions. That would be really interesting for both of us. Here’s looking at you, kid.

From the Twitterstream this week: “Filing a cease and desist… against my inbox.” Chris Sacca.

When Every Little Bit Really Does Count

The Good Cause

Tonight at 9:12pm David created a blog post for a friend in need. Daniela, with her three youngsters, made the courageous decision to exit a physically abusive marriage. Now homeless and far from home and support, her friends came to her aid. David posted a picture, an entreaty for donations and included a widget from ChipIn–a PayPal enabled payment system–to raise money that would provide Daniela the means to rent a small apartment for her family. His target was $5,000 and within two hours it easily passed $7,000 in donations.

To be fair, David is just any guy. He’s David Armano,  or @Armano on Twitter where you may already be one of his 8000+ followers. I am. You should. He puts great thinking and creativity into the SocialSphere everyday through his Logic+Emotion blog, twitterstream, twitpics, flickr visualizations, slideshare decks, bookmarks and more.  David populates and prolifically fills his SocialMap with an abundance of original thought, discoveries and insights. So, when he finally asked for something in return, the community answered his call. When he posted to his blog, he also asked in addition to giving that people help him spread the word by “retweeting” his link. They did and the response was immediate.

The widget allows you to track progress and it’s clear by the decimal point movement that people were making payments of all sizes, including very small, but meaningful ones. Because with The Long Tail and micropayments, a little can add up to a lot. In this case, a families dreams of a better life. Currently 218 donors have raised $7,099.31 or $32.56 per person on average.

To bluntly and awkwardly bring this back to the business of digital marketing and Real Branding, here are some lessons David delivered tonight:

• Brands that create value have the right to make the ask on occasion and their fans will respond
• Micro is the new black. Sure widgets have been around for at least three years when RockYou put its code up on MySpace and started tearing at the walled gardens creating a distribution and value-creating revolution. But now they’re getting people elected, or into their new home
• Blog post alone isn’t the solution as Forrester’s Jermiah Owyang has recently discovered; need to add viral and urgency through twitter. Add a twitter url and hashtag for your followers to use, making it easier to promote, track, aggregate through search and measure
• We digital folks never fail to be amazed when our magic works for us–and it does

Thanks David and family for the lessons from the heart. Every little bit counts. You can help the cause by clicking over and making your donation now (I don’t know how to embed widgets in WordPress otherwise you would be able to do it right here; don’t tell anyone . Be Great.

Twitter Teaches Facebook How To Brand

Twitter alerts users to an emerging issue.

This weekend a Phishing scam erupted around Facebook and Twitter. For those fortunate enough to have not been introduced, Phishing is the act of acquiring someone’s information by misrepresentation as a trusted entity. In this case people received email messages from their friends’ Twitter or Facebook accounts who had been duped by the scam, clicked to a site that looked like your Facebook or Twitter login page and entered their name and passwords. Then all their friends got direct-messaged and solicited and so on. If it got you, don’t feel too badly; even some of the most experienced get scammed sometimes.

Quickly Twitter engineers and operations teams responded to defend their service integrity and community. They also alerted their friends at Facebook about the scam. And they whipped up a quick blog postfor reference/search benefits. Then a new slug of text appeared between the Twitter enter form and a user’s Twitterstream: “HEY!If you get an email masquerading as a DM with a link, it could be Phishing.”

Did they have to go to these lengths for their community? These issues come and go so quickly most people wouldn’t notice. To this point, the message was gone a couple of hours later. And, think about what it takes to make a change on your corporate website. Now consider what it takes to change the User Interface of a webservices application. Nothing changes that doesn’t absolutely have to. So to answer the question above, Twitter clearly felt they needed to do something for their community and brand.

I thought it was interesting that the community was also helping out on Twitter–and therefore in Facebook for those that update their Facebook Status with Twitter–by warning others of the threat. In a way, Twitter can counter viral activity because its citizens wish to keep it pure. In a way, it’s the “diseconomy” or “deviralization” of a person or issue at work. There are those that believe Multi-Level Marketers can better exploit a platform like Twitter, but I disagree. The community will gang up against exploitive behavior faster than it can regenerate.

Protip: If you think something’s not right on Twitter you can also “Follow” @spam to direct-message them with suspicious activities or accounts. They’re great at removing the weeds and debris from their garden and rely on the crowd to help with vigilance.

How Facebook could have responded to Phishing scam.

Meanwhile, the silence at Facebook was telling. By my count and without altering their current message carriers Facebook could have warned its community in half a dozen intuitive ways. In its socialgraph, inbox, activity notification bar, status feeds, profile alerts and even in its ad space it could have notified users of the emerging issue. Instead, it acted more like a large, traditional institution that either can’t marshall the resources and authorizations to react in real-time or won’t as a matter of policy.

I’d say for this round, Twitter acted more like the Real Brand and served a good lesson in brand-as-service for its larger SocialMedia bretheren. Here’s a good link if you want to take your own precautions against Phish feeding, courtesy of Twitter.

Update: CNET’s Rafe Needleman reports that this Phish situation is ongoing. Seen many tweets requesting to be notified “if you get a DM from me.”

Update: Brittany Spears gets hacked on Twitter by the Physhing scam.

Lessons from Book Quote’s Viral FB Meme

The Book Quote Game Goes Viral in Facebook

Virally speaking based on watching my own response along with others in my social graph, a clever little meme called the “Book Quote Game” is exploding over on Facebook. Over the weekend a quick challenge gambit  appeared in my Facebook socialgraph and I took it. I responded in to a friend’s post asking me to find a random but specifically-placed quote from “a book near me.”

What followed surprised me: within 12 hours 18 others added their quotes–more comments than my FB posts usually get; their socialgraph represents 3641 people and inspired another 23 comments. I didn’t crawl their comments to see the network effect in added reach, but if we use the averages based on mine, the echo would include another 9300 in reach. With an average friend duplication of 7.75% you still reach over 10,000 people per post in the first two generations of the meme. Because the active socialgraph/profile will bury this meme, it needs to reappear at different times, which it does as others replicate and comment. I expect to see this meme come back around many times in the coming months.

More surprising is that this isn’t even a Facebook application. It’s an activity that’s as catchy as an application but relies on The Groundswell to crawl all the SocialNetwork’s carriers to produce the Metacalfe effect. So, without any programming and low-production content you can create a viral campaign by following the best practices of The Book Quote Game.

I’ll give more evidence and details then see if there are best practices that can be applied for Marketers. Please add your reactions below in the comments area as well.

Ben and Jerry’s Killer Facebook Ad Integration

Check out this page. It’s content right? This is the Election ‘08 page on Facebook.

It’s got your voting booth location mash-up powered by Google Maps, some info graphics and even a gift/badge for you to wear your colors–Red or Blue. It showed volumes in real-time as people clicked the “I voted” link on their Facebook profile page after visiting the polls. I tweeted about the page in the morning of election day when 1.1 million people had already been counted and watched the numbers swell each hour until the polls closed. Nearly 5.5 million acted making it one of the highest daily-use apps to date (think about how few YouTube videos get that much play in a single day, let alone month for comparison).

The genius is in the Ben & Jerry’s map/application integration. This is content, but it’s also a delivery mechanism for the advertising sponsorship by Ben & Jerry. Simple. Natural (as in additive and not interruptive). Brilliant.

In this case you were able to find the local Ben & Jerry’s store to get the free icecream cone they were offering for those that voted IRL and in the integrated link you could also send a “vote cone” virtual gift to your friends in Facebook.

For Ben & Jerry’s it’s a win across the board. The association is perfect for a brand that has in its roots social change and political activision. That future analysis will likely attribute SocialMedia and Facebook’s influence on 14mm new young voters heavily skewed to Obama as a determing factor in the race can’t hurt the brand. And the message was party-neutral regardless of the results. These are the kind of brand-fit filters every connection planner should find: Content, Context and mission.

As a campaign tracking mechanism, free cone redemptions will be an easy metric. Virtual gift talleys will also be telling as will traffic to the Election ‘08 page. Without a doubt, Buzzmetrics and other influence trackers will be tallying total blog mentions and related viewership. And, I’d love to see the total impressions this campaign earned from the SocialGraph as well. We’ll reach out to Facebook, the brand and related agencies to see if we can get the numbers. And, if you’re related to the brand and know, feel free to share below.

Ben & Jerry’s won big on this campaign–even before all the numbers are in–by hitting the right tone of placement and pitch. I learned about new retail locations in a relevant way. I also didn’t feel like they were selling me. In fact, they were offering a number of value-exchanges I couldn’t get without them entering my social interactions on Facebook. Consider how different this is from the “Market Stall” approach of fast and casual food retail where the strategy based on ad spend (shout louder, sooner and with a better offer than your competitors) dominates their consumer communications. The Market Stall has 90%+ of ad spend concentrated on TV and traditional media in a cluttered, interruptive market place. Ben & Jerry’s essentially opened a new market away from the noise, clutter and lack of relevance of the traditional approach.

Every brand marketer should be asking themselves and their agencies: What’s our occasion(s) that should be so integrated with Facebook? And then buy the date to lock out your competition and outplay them.

Added: was reminded that I previously posted about Lee LeFever’s Common Craft show,  “SocialMedia in Plain English” and it was the metaphor told via Ice Cream retail. Fun conincidence. All our SM Answers Haz Ice Cream.

 

SocialMedia with Obama As President

Ellen McGirt of Fast Company asked a couple of questions about the new administration and SocialMedia which she summarized in a moving, personal post that combined fresh reactions to the President-elect and perspective from a wide range of respondents. The two questions and my quickly prepared response follow:

How Do You Do Digital Focus Groups?

Digital Focus Group research is a subject we’d really like to hear your thoughts and input on. Occasionally we commission unique Focus Groups to vet our digital content and distribution strategies. Usually digital is tested along with all other media in larger Focus Groups covering multiple cities and target segments. There are pros and cons to both.

Without delving into the merits or demerits of the Focus Group format, we find them beneficial and additive to our thinking on the whole. There’s always a gem or two of Insight that we can synthesize from participant attitudes and comments. And we expect to get a thematic “zinger” comment that flavors our understanding of the target or our proposition. An example of this is when exploring attitudes about where we could take a certain beverage category a few years back, one participant called it a “chick drink” in less polite terms and that moniker flavored our consumer understanding and marketing approach.

One of the challenges we face in digital is that many Focus Group facilitators, while comfortable with the advertising creative and media of traditional media–a familiarity developed over 60 years of representative experience–simply can not successfully moderate around digital and emerging platforms. We’ve consistently seen digital thinking represented in the “Integrated Media Focus Group” as flats or print campaign equivalents. Or, even in animated form, presented as a website and not as an element in a holistic digital marketing approach. It’s challenging to take the armada of activity around which we go to market and have most moderators–let alone consumers–be informed about various digital media and interpret feedback on digital. Without good interpretation, it’s difficult to get a feedback loop that drives to the most insightful places.

The reason we do less focus group research in digital is because we have the laboratory of real time data, A/B testing, instant SocialNetwork surveys, campaign qualitative research and search as a proxy for intention and needs. At the same time, we’ve yet to find a better substitute for a client to participate “behind the glass” with our team hearing directly from consumer groups what they think, what informs their opinions and how they’re willing to behave around a variety propositions.

So, here’s the request and challenge to you: Who are the best at directing in-person Focus Groups for Digital and/or what other alternatives to you use? Let’s use the comment section below to create our compendium of resources.

Somethings About Influence

I’m going to try something different for “Share of Voice” based on my previous post about spending more screen time on other social media tools besides the blog. Periodically I am going to post an edited and organized bundle of links around a related topic. There are some heavy bloggers who can’t stand re-link population and I respect their perspective for the most part, although I think it’s a wee bit elite and assumes the masses follow the firehose of information they consume daily.  Bless them for their original links; as you’ll see below it’s why they become “Super Influencers.” I think I’ve changed these enough with context and commentary to justify this different form. If these links get used it will show up in my log-files and confirm their value. Consider this a beta-post format for me.

So let’s get this started. The link-theme today is Influence.

The Power of a Good Referral-Social Influence

Digg CEO, Jay Adelson, talks Facebook Connect & Collaborative Filtering

Good article from TechCrunch, great developments and quality video presentation at the end of this article. When you’re done reviewing, think about the game-changing implications this can mean at an enterprise and community level. Digg or similar service can essentially become our digital editorial staff. With the network effect, it could also be one of the largest unpaid distribution/traffic-driver. This is big.

Super Influence

Universal McCann’s Take on The Groundswell (16mb pdf file will open in new window)

Key takeaways about “influencer economies,” super-influencers and the democratization of influence. Titled, “When did we start trusting strangers?” this multi-country, multi-age longitudinal study supports a lot of what we already know about Web2.0 and the SocialWeb with a few new areas of focus. I like the super-influencer target and can imagine a future study that can assign volumetrics or “valuemetrics” to these brand movers.

Collective Influence

Check out this directory of presentations from last week’s Web2.0 expo in NY; it’s a great collection of people who consistently influence and inform my views on digital. Some gems in here. Some of my favorites:

• Clay Shirky’s “it’s not about information overload it’s filter failure”
• David Armano, “Micro-Internactions,  how brands can influence consumer behavior in a 2.0 world”
• Mike Lazerow, ”Why Brand Advertisers Will Be the Biggest Beneficiaries of Social Media and How You Can Participate”
• Jay Adelman, “Social Collaborative Filtering”

Reactions? Do you like these collections? Comment below or contact me directly via twitter, facebook or any number of other social/direct paths.