Hoi Polloi

Is it live, or is it on ShootLive?

What technology would PR companies, the police, and the paparazzi want to get their hands on?

It's delivery that basically sends raw images from a video camera direct to the consumer. It is a service from ShootLive,  news agency for the digital age based in Nottingham, UK. The ShootLive service was used in the coverage of David Beckham's game in July.

Why does this change the game? Because of the need for speed. In journalism and in PR, or even in law enforcement, seconds make a difference. The scoop, the intervention of a criminal, the ability to relay instantaneous pictures of a tragedy such as an earthquake can impact lives.

Images from camera are streamed (as an XML feed) to a mobile phone in less than 60 seconds, the company says. What I like about all this is it doesn't make the end-user jump through hoops to receive it. Images could arrive as a multi-media text alert.

What could this do for marketing? Apart from the obvious ones that ESPNs of this world will jump onto, and be able to monetize, marketers could get users to opt-in to premium content. Think: Olympics, stage acts such a Live Earth, and even regional ones. The McDonald's and IBM's could sponsor XML feeds . Down the line when the genie is out of the bottle, cell phone carriers will use the technology too. Already, AT&T has a similar service called VideoShare where subscribers could stream video with a camera phone to another phone --while talking! These are both low-end ($29.99 and $79.99) Samsung phones not some souped-up smart varieties.

Take time to ask. Take time to get to know.

As a freelance writer I get pitched a lot. I don't hit the delete key unless it's totally irrelevant. But I have to say there are several people who do take the time to ask if whom they represent is relevant, and they do their homework.

I had a pitch from a PR firm in the UK recently that really stood out. He promised he wouldn't flood my inbox, and offered an RSS feed as an alternative --something I opted for.

On a macro scale, how do you get to know an organization, its priorities, its strategic goals?

On Wednesday I was asked by a local firm to speak to a group of incoming account managers about strategic thinking and solutions selling. I used an example of how as 'transparent' as it may seem, a company's web site is the last place you'll find that kind of useful information. A Google search would be a hit or miss, unless you find a corporate blogger giving the inside scoop. Nor would a site map reveal the inner working groups, the nodes and the unofficial networks. Taking time to get to know this "inner-net" means putting our digital smarts aside, and falling back on our analog skills. I use the phrase "Think digital, act analog" (first used by Guy Kawasaki, I believe) to illustrate the point.

A good article on this also appeared in Fortune magazine last month (titled "The hidden workplace.") "There's the organization chart," it said. "And then there's the way things really work."

Bottom line: Take time to understand the analog networks. These power brokers, access points, nodes and human routers may not have a LinkedIn profile, but they sure make things happen!

Stories in PR and social media

Summing up a few interesting stories last week.

1. The walled garden of Times Select may soon open up to the rest of us who don't want to part with $7.95 a month.

2. AT&T 'censors' Pearl Jam's words. they didn't want to to get Dixie Chicked, for supporting an anti-Bush band.

3. A company called Fatdoor has come up with an interesting way to use social networking to get to know the neighbors. It's a mashup of public information, a wiki, maps etc. Good explanation here. 

4. A very cool idea from Edinburg, England. Using a camera phone and text messaging to detect art.

5. Taking story #3 to its logical conclusion, how about using a social network to get to know your dog's owners? Technology Review magazine had a story about how your dog's FaceBook-like page (called a PetWork, I kid you not!) could enhance your social life.

And when I die would you Twitter my buddies?

A story in the Arizona Republic yesterday about a Tucson company creating graveside memory capsule may seem a bit awkward, but the technology got me thinking. If you could make a digital tribute downloadable at the grave, it opens up many other possibilities.

Indeed John Stevenson's product is more low tech than the competition, which the article says, is a digital headstone that plays a video. A sort of a flat screen atop one's final resting place.

Ten years ago, we would have never thought the media or digital content would visit this fine and private place but let's get real. If we use digi-formats to preserve everything we do while we are around (Flickr family albums, Facebook profiles, digital photo frames, and people who Twitter about everything they do in life) someone might as well put these profiles to use after we have hit the final escape button. It seems to me these are opportunities waiting to be tapped. Some free advice:

1. MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn and Plaxo memorials

2. Turning expired (no pun intended, honest!) domains into permanent markers that redirect to online memorials. Perhaps an idea for GoDaddy.

3. Archiving of Google search results for a person's name as a legacy (OK, vanity) item to stuff into the graveside memorial.

4. Preserving tweets from a heavy Twitter user.

5. WiFi for cemeteries. I bet this exists.

6. Bluetooth connectivity on headstones --to download those digital memories. Right now one needs to bring a laptop and cable to the grave.

7. The ability for people to text message condolences to the family from anywhere and turn these into a card or book.

"Cult of the Amateur" argument, sounds like Maurice Saatchi

"These busted boomers," writes Constance Lavendar, "are clinging to an argument based on authority, hierarchy, and privilege; they despise digital democracy because it threatens their existence, challenges their authority, and breaks down their well-preserved hierarchy."

She is commenting on a post in the Chronicle, about The Cult of the Amateur argument by Andrew Keen in his book about how "experts" are more valuable than the chattering masses, and the internet is killing culture.

She could well have been commenting on Lord Maurice Saatchi's "Google Data Vs Human Nature" in The Financial Times in May. The core of his argument is in this sentence

"It is an inconvenient and stubborn fact that outside Newton’s universe, where physical laws govern reality, the world is conditioned by perception."

Attacking the predictive model of marketing is not different from dismissing the hoi polloi who are suddenly on equal footing with experts. The old guard wishes it --and wikipedia, and blogs, and the ability for non-agency folk to come up with hugely popular Diet Coke/mentos uncommercials-- were not so.

In a later column, Mr. Saatchi wrote: "Sometimes I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising." You know he is troubled by this algorithm thing. It must be tough watching the digital natives over-run the place.

Harry Potter’s social media impact on branding

Harry Potter is an extended tale of no, not just wizards and magic but the wisdom of the crowds in action. But that story got buried in the hoopla around the launch of Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows last Saturday.

Very predictably, the traditional news media covered the event in the same way they did, say, the iPhone. Too much attention to people queuing up for the book, the parties, the ‘education’ component, but very little about the phenomenon itself.

The fact is, the Harry Potter franchise just doesn’t belong to J.K. Rowling anymore. The books may be in 200 countries and 63 languages, but the Potter brand goes beyond that geographic reach. It’s been open-sourced in more ways than you could imagine; the wisdom of the Potter crowds has always ruled when it comes to creating their own message channels, cranking out their own Potter-esqe stories etc. Despite the fact that this is a book, and not a digital product, the fans are all over the social media map. There is:
    * The Mugglecast podcast run by high school students, that has some 50,000 listeners a week, and features Elton John and Bono.
    * The Leaky Cauldron leaks news about the books and carries a disclosure that it is in “no way affiliated with J.K. Rowling.”
    * No shortage of Potter blogs, including one that suggests a Bollywood storyline for an Indian audience.
    * The Harry Potter Fiction store, that’s not managed by Scholastic, the book publisher; it’s also “unofficial.”
    * The Academy of Virtual Wizardry, at “Caledon Highlands” in you guessed it, Second Life!

I could go on…

So I wanted to track how the raving fans were behaving. I had a haunch that there would be an equal outpouring of passion on Saturday the 20th July around midnight not in front of the bookstores where the TV crews were waiting in hoardes, but on Wikipedia. At 11.00 pm Pacific Time the discussion (on the “comments” page of the Harry Potter Wikipedia showed signs that things were heating up. The Wikipedians had been discussing the value of locking down the Wiki, since everyone knew the book had leaked and the plot was being discussed elsewhere.

“Just wait until the official release time. Then we can put everything up in 5 minutes or so, considering the number of wikipedians interested in this.” said one editor at 11.03 pm. This was clearly a hard core editor, but also a big Potter fan. “Most people, me included, will be too busy reading the book on Saturday to check the article.” Others like him (or her) were unhappy that some editors had moved to freeze the pages until a week after the launch. Fan passion was expressed in the form of outrage that some newspapers’ reviewers had created spoilers by discussing the plot before the launch. Reading through their discussion gives you a glimpse of not just how these unpaid wikipedians work, but how fans operate late at night, doing a thankless job for what? To them this isn’t JK’s book. This is theirs.

If only other brands let their customers work their magic this way!

Two stories, different brand awareness

You've probably seen or heard stories about food marketers, supposedly scaling down their marketing to children. Great story, except they have a lot of wiggle room about what they plan to market, and how. Packaging is the one place they obviously won't give up, with boxes of cereal saying more about the characters like Shrek and Spiderman than the contents.

So while the Grocery Manufacturer's Association is busy debating the topic how to do the minimum and seem like its members are helping the consumer, it's good to take a look at another story about actually anticipating a target audience's needs and doing something about it.

Samsung has started installing charging stations for cell-phone and mobile accessory  at Los Angeles International Airport. It sems so simple, that you wonder why carriers like Verizon or T-Mobile hadn't thought of it before. It's a great way for a brand to communicate that it understands what its customers (and all potential ones) face when traveling.

Where SEO meets social media meets PR

Yesterday, IABC's Phoenix chapter put together a terrific meeting on something that's on everyone's radar. I suspect the topic ("Using SEO & Other PR Tactics to Communicate with Social Communities in a Web 2.0 World") was intentionally long and geeky to make a point. More on this later.

MarketWire had pried open the controversial but hot topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media. Whenever these two buzz phrases occur in one sentence, advertising agencies, media relations people and marketers get a little hot around the collar. I know, because I used to work for a SEO-meets marketing company. There are lots of myths and concerns out there. Just a year ago SEO seemed like a lot of pixie dust before things like Twitter and User generated Content showed up. "Social bookmarking" sounded like something Paris Hilton does when thumbing through National Inquirer.

Unfortunately, the world inside corporate marketing is still looking at what's unfolding before us as pixie dust 2.0. Look around you. The world of marketing and PR is roughly divided into people who think "we don't have a budget for this crap" and those who go "could we upload this sucker to YouTube?" So it's about time we discuss Google Juice, and Digg, and the social media press release, and what in the world is Facebook up to, trying to upstage our beloved search engines.

Could people game the search engine, someone asked? Do "Diggs" mean anything a few days after the story breaks? Was there some 'white-hat' way to get better rankings on search results? Everyone probably knew the answer to that last one. Sure, there are black-hat methods of sneaking past the algorithm, and there's marketing.

You don't need to know how this algorithm thing works, but if you accept the logic behind it, then you gotta work on it. Good case in point: Southwest Airlines. Three years ago, they optimized a press release by editing it based on search terms they had been tracking. They tracked the results and saw a direct correlation to a spike in sales. They won an award for this. It's a matter of crafting headlines and knowing where to drop in a hyperlink, and a meta tag.

Which brings me to the MarketWire topic. Google (or Yahoo) the words "SEO PR social media" and see if IABC Phoenix is anywhere in sight. Now Google (or Yahoo) the topic (Using SEO & Other PR Tactics to Communicate with Social Communities in a Web 2.0 World) and see what pops up at the top of your search results. Brilliant huh?

Or is it still pixie dust?

Die, phone tree, die! (and marketing opportunities that come with its demise)

So you've been placed on hold (again) and are convinced that customer service has left the building --for Bangalore, perhaps.

But there's a neat solution taking shape. It's called NoPhoneTrees.com, and it could eliminate the phone-tree headache. It's from a San Francisco-based company called Bringo. How it works is amazing: You click on the company you want to call, and enter your phone number and hang up. NoPhoneTrees dials the company, circumvents their phone tree, and calls you back when you are in queue for the next customer service rep., shaving off valuable on-hold time. Perfect for days when you're multi-tasking, or your minutes are running out.

It's still in demo mode so it looks like a web site with limited lists of lists. (In insurance, Humana and Geico are listed, but no State Farm). But The company says the full service will launch soon.

I see great potential. I don't know about you, but I add pauses into my speed dials so that the technology zips through the phone tree of frequently called numbers --airlines, credit card companies, even calling cards, and doctor's offices. I would like to see how this could work when I'm driving, and don't want to tie up the phone while waiting in the queue to check a flight status. What if the service wold allow us to set a day and time in advance, so we could get into the phone queue of the airline, three days down the road just to make sure the flight's not delayed?

What's this to do with marketing communication? Consider this. It's a free service to anyone, but as the go-between, it could easily ask customers to pay back for the service with their attention. No I don't mean listen to an ad --through that's the predictable model to go after. It could be a 15- second survey of the company you just spoke to. Surveys are everywhere. You've seen companies use register receipts inviting customers to do a phone survey, redeemable for a gift card or generous coupon. To use the airline example again, if US Airways gave you 100 air miles if you answered a 5-question survey at the end of your phone-tree-avoided call to Flight Reservations, would you say no? If Kinkos gave offered 10-color copies, or Borders gave you a coupon for a latte for taking a survey?

Customers will trade off  attention for value-added service or products. Marketers value timely feedback. Someone who allows you to to put a spike through the heart of the phone tree could create a win-win situation for both.   

What Ogilvy would have said about Flickr

If David Ogilvy was alive, I bet he'd have very cool blog. He'd have a podcast and rant about writing and pig-headed Creatives. And a Flickr account, for sure. More about David at the end of this post. 

Why do I make this strange correlation between a dead adman and a new media-slash-social media company like Flickr? I got an email from Yahoo Photos yesterday informing me that they were porting my albums to Flickr, which as most of you know, is owned by Yahoo. They were all cheery about this, and I followed their prompt. Within ten minutes I had a response from “The Flickreenos.” It started out with “Yee har! All your photos have been imported from your Yahoo! Photos account…”

Before this were two other emails written by a seemingly highly caffeinated communicator (or very human one) in the tech department. Zero corporate-speak, almost like the buddy-talk we engage in on Facebook. Coming from a mega company like Flickr, that's now in eight countries, and has some 24 million visitors a month, I must say I was impressed.

It’s this kind of upbeat communication that I miss, when someone sends me a legally-whetted, PR-sanctioned postcard or email these days, with my name dropped into appropriate slots to personalize it and make it look like they know me.

My point? Variable-data printing, a sophisticated form of mail-merge is great, but should not be a crutch. It should not replace genuine, passionate communication. I don’t know where the good writers have been locked up in organizations these days, but we don’t see a lot of Flickreenos-type communications.

Which brings me to Mr. Ogilvy. I was thumbing through my old copy of The Unpublished Ogilvy, and couldn't help noticing that this copywriter at heart sort of anticipated the Cluetrain idea, often asking people to spike their college-bred stilted communication and communicate like humans. He came out with such gems as “Woolly people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.”  This was in the early eighties, when we all know, MBA-speak was all the rage! “Write the way you talk. Naturally,” he often said.

I could just hear the man who once wrote stunningly human copy for Mercedes Rolls-Royce go Yeeeee har! about Flickr’s un-woolly communication.