A gem of a thought on social media from a guy who would know

Mullen Was a Shoo-in: Grasping Zappos' Culture Key to Shop's Win

Boston Agency Also Saw That You Can't Tack Social Media on as Afterthought

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via adage.com

"Embarking on a social-media strategy to help with marketing is like embarking on a facial muscle strategy to help with smiling."

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (@zappos) tweeted this gem while in the final stages of his company's review.

Kudos to Mullen out of Boston for winning the business. Not since Crispin's Microsoft win will work be more anticipated than when Mullen's first Zappos campaign hits in early 2010.

As fascinating as the story of the pitch may (or may not) have been, I kept gravitating back to Hsieh's comment. It was a great way to explain how intuitive social media has to be to your company's core. If you only use it as an add-on tactic intended to attract new business and not to better your shop’s competency, learn and share, you are driven by the wrong motives.

Companies that generally excel in social media are their own case study. While not everyone can have enough news said about them to generate and populate an entirely social media-driven site ala Crispin, any company can engage expose themselves to the outside world. Joining in conversations, starting conversations, avoiding sales pitches and instead conveying great thoughts, ideas, contributing without expecting anything in return (which, by the way, is when you tend to see the greatest returns).

A smart marketer (whether they are socially savvy or not) can smell sales bullshit from a mile away. They can also see the real thing for what it is. Account Mangers, take account of your company’s culture and see what level of social engagement you have. Who has blogs? Who tweets, is on speaking panels, engages in online discuss forums, etc.? You may not realize how social your agency is until you take inventory. Be sure your company’s website and blog (if they are different) aggregate every social media element related to your shop. Make it visible enough that business prospects can easily run a litmus test.

To Hsieh’s point, don’t do it as a thought to help with marketing. Let what’s done socially be visible, and let your social efforts be done with the intent of adding substance to conversations. In a time where only great work gets shared, those kinds of contributions will market themselves without pretense.

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Keep 'em guessing

During a recent layover at Denver International Airport, I was thinking about the decline of the airline industry's customer experience over recent years. First it was was no food in coach class, with an option to pay $5 for a k-ration-like offering of cheese and crackers or an old sandwich. Then it was a $25 charge per checked bag (except Southwest of course). Visit any consumer reports blog focused on air travel, and you are likely to see cynical customers pondering what charges will be next...perhaps a 25 cents per minute bathroom charge? The point is that people are wondering and guessing what's next for all the wrong reasons.

On the flip side, think about brands like Apple or Google, or popular shows like Grey's Anatomy and The Office. These are brands and experiences have fans and customers asking "what's next" and "what now" with unbridled enthusiasm. It's because every evolution of the product or experience has surprised and delighted customers.

Now, put a twist on the concept as someone in Account Service. Look at the state of your relationships with your client. Which of the above areas do they fall in? Do they cynically react when you tell them about a new idea because of the cost or due to past failed experiments? Or, are they chomping at the bit for your next idea? Do you bring unexpected approaches and concepts on a consistent basis. Do you teach them more than they teach you? This is an important self-evaluation you should conduct on a monthly basis.

Remember to keep 'em guessing (for the right reasons).

More writing, less typing

Interesting post from Umberto Eco at guardian.uk about the deteriorating quality of handwriting is commensurate with the skyrocketing proficiency younger consumers have both in typing and texting. There’s a great analogy to a challenge I see every day in the ad industry.

Handwriting (even really bad handwriting in my case) is an investment in thought. Putting thought to (literal) paper requires more focus and less auto-pilot than typing. Because you are more invested in the process, you can quickly shoot holes, improve organization, judge flow, etc. Flaws in writing and presentations don’t present themselves as readily when done on screen, especially if you don’t have an outline. If you haven’t tried in a while, you’d be surprised at the improved quality of work by simply doing outlines for persuasive memos and presentations by hand before typing a word (John Steel agrees) To an art director or copywriter, this idea is completely intuitive. It tends not to be for those of us in Account Management hard-wired to deliver work as efficiently as possible.

There’s a fine balancing skill rarely found in people on the account side of our business between speedy service and big ideas. Technology is a beautiful facilitator of speed, but it can sometimes actually stifle idea development because of it’s perceived ease of use. Next time you have to write a persuasive memo or assemble a presentation, make yourself sit down and at least scribble out an outline if not a rough draft. You’ll be surprised how much better the work is.

Bing's positioning exercise

via realtimeadvertisingweek.com

Interesting take on how JWT combatted Google with their Bing campaign.

While I don't know how Bing is a better "decision" engine than Google, I appreciate the delineation between "search" and "decide". It also touched on the challenge to sort through the infinity of search results any novice Google user can face. Decide is a much more powerful evocative word.

This is a good example of competitive positioning, especially against a brand such as Google, whose public reputation is almost beyond reproach. As long as the product pays it off, failure won't be for lack of good positioning.

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Your Most Valuable Assets

On this Friday afternoon, I wanted to post a quick reminder for all of you managers out there to not lose perspective of your company's most valuable assets. They'll be walking out the door shortly to hopefully enjoy a nice weekend, or perhaps only to return tomorrow to prepare for a big pitch on Monday.

I think it's a myth to say that talent isn't as plentiful as it once was. It's just not as concentrated, thus harder to find. Which makes it that much more important to make sure that EVERY day you remind those who are on your team how much you appreciate their efforts and that EVERY day you find new ways to empower and motivate them to do the best work they can.

Even in today's economic environment where jobs are scarce, never think anyone is lucky to be working at your shop. You are lucky to have them. If you are a good manager and think someone is lucky to be working for you, you a) made a poor hire and b) have broken the golden rule about hiring the best people you can find.

An agency head at one of my previous employers used to constantly thank us for working there. And he meant it. It's funny how a simple, genuine comment like that can endear you to a place even more.

Keep that in mind as you see your team head out the door tonight.

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Mother's value to New Balance

via 574clips.com

Interesting site created for New Balance by Mother. I love how they decided to pay off the literal authenticity of every pair of shoes for the 574 line. Each pair is absolutely unique, thus Mother went and assembled a video and polaroid mini-documentary tailored to each set.

What I like best is each customer lucky enough to claim a pair of limited edition shoes can visit the website, find their pair and publicly stake their claim as the proud owner.

New Balance is getting more longevity out of a limited edition supply than they could have ever hoped for.

I say it all the time...real value is when the consumer's takeaway from a product exceeds the investment. By executing a brilliant creative idea, Mother added elements to the brand experience that will no doubt spike highly on the real value scale.

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Crowdsourcing creates consternation

Agency-client relationships are funny. Especially today. There's a built-in irony that makes agencies feel extremely vulnerable. Agencies care about clients who are good partners that are loyal, give freedom to do great work and pay them fairly. Clients are much more pragmatic - rightly so in this day and age. All they care about is getting ideas that will drive their business. And they don't care where it comes from. Which leads to the latest generator of agency agita...

Crowdsourcing. For those of you who aren't familiar, it's the process of bidding work out to the world and paying a set amount for the best idea. It's a little different than consumer-generated work in that brands aren't necessarily looking for fans to do the work. Brands are looking for more polished, less amateur thoughts. For smaller businesses who can't pay agencies to do the work, it makes sense. What's causing the stir, though, is when mega multinational brands and (God forbid) agencies throw a line in the water.

I give you Unilever and Crispin Porter Bogusky.

Unilever just fired their London agency (Lowe) in favor of crowdsourcing to market their Peperami snack brand. Think about that. Instead of trusting a professional services firm to do the work, they instead threw it out to the masses. While clearly this is (at least in part) a financially driven motive, I think it speaks more to the a) lack of good, business-changing ideas coming from the agency and b)precipitous, pressure-soaked position client side marketers find themselves in. While companies like Unilever and P&G are known for their internal research and insights processes, I still find it remarkable they didn't think highly enough of even Lowe's account planning team to let them play any part in the process.

Crispin, on the other hand, is known for taking risks. They elected to crowdsource logo work for Brammo, a maker of electric motorcycles. What's odd, though, is that a shop so passionate and particular about the ideas they deliver to clients is willing to open themselves up to the outside designs. Some would say this shows a willingness to swallow their pride. Honestly, I think they looked at situation as a low risk, high reward enterprise. For a pittance of $1,000, if they get great logo ideas, they've paid far less internally than the man hours they would have accrued and had to bill the client. If they don't get great stuff, they still have one of the world's top design shops as an internal resource. Either way, they get added publicity and maybe even great work on the cheap.

After seeing the results of many crowdsources experiments, I think designers should take heart that the winners often are less than stellar. I understand the devaluation arguments those in the design industry have. My answer is that this is a simple matter of economics. If there is someone somewhere (say, India or China) that is willing to design logos for $1,000 or less, there will be a market for crowdsourcing. And with the proliferation of small business and the "flattening" of the world as Thomas Friedman put it, the crowdsourcing labor supply is only growing.

The first example should scare the hell out of agencies that don't do great work. If you give your clients a reason to look elsewhere (anywhere) for solutions, they will. As an account guy or gal, you should know I don't see crowdsourcing being limited to creative. The same concept works work for account planning, social media, digital...the list goes on. All of your revenue streams are in jeopardy if you don't strive to have your teams consistently doing work that delivers positive results.

Bottom line, don't give your clients a chance to look elsewhere. Keep them wowed. Focus on your relationship and make sure you have a bead on when they are getting unhappy or (even worse because it's hard to pick up on) ambivalent about your shop's work.

Here's some links to a few crowdsourcing sites for reference...
http://www.crowdspring.com/
http://99designs.com/

A taste of my own medicine

We all have our faults. Me, I could make an extensive list. Perhaps one of my more obvious ones is that I'm overly critical of myself. If not for a wife who never fails to put things in perspective and help me see my efforts for what they really are, I'd be in big trouble.

Thus, this blog entry is a bit cathartic. Another one of faults is not following my own advice. Quite a ways back, I posted commentary on Russell Davies' thoughts on "being interesting". In the blogosphere, it's the price of entry if you want any kind of readership. Personal brands are only memorable if the author's online persona is "interesting". People (should) only get hired if they are interesting.

The quality of any blog lies not only in the level of the thinking, but in consistently providing readers with fresh interesting content that they, in turn, want to share with others. By said criteria, my blog hasn't been very interesting as of late. Consider this my pledge to rededicate my efforts to Account Management 2.0. I will provide readers with fresh ideas that are worth discussing, be it within this forum or elsewhere. I also would like to thank those who continuously visit and push me for commentary on a wide variety of subjects.

I have a deep-rooted, passionate belief that Account Management (and there's a better term for our role out there) can evolve into much more than it is. I welcome those who would join the cause and look forward to discussing how we can grow as a discipline (and don't let anyone tell you it isn't one). The main way I can help that cause is by delivering content worthy of discussion. Wow, I kind of sound like a brand trying to find its way in the social media realm.

Onward.

The Making of the Prius "Harmony" TV Commercial

via youtube.com

What I love most about this spot is the esoteric way of linking humans and humanity to the Prius. Absolutely remarkable. It's stuff like this that helps me keep the faith that brand advertising isn't dead. Memorable content like this will always be relevant.

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