advergirl

Sizing up Agencies: Check out the chic clothes

After yesterday's heady post on Ad guys and their socks, Shana challenged me to take on Ad women and their shoes. I'm definitely up for a dare, but...

I have a new hypothesis:  A woman's shoes say more about her agency than about her personal style

Part of an agency's culture is how it looks. From super casual to buttoned-up, from flip flops to stilettos, women take cues from their co-workers about how to dress and just what exactly will be seen as cool and compliment-able. The agency uniform may have different colors and styles, but it's still part of what defines the place...

Allow me to illustrate with these cases:

The look: Stilettos and crisp jeans
Type of agency you're likely in: These women wear their effortless style like their easy brand leadership. They're from a big name agency. Maybe the biggest one in town. They walk by a bulging awards case on the way to a white table cloth lunch on a patio. They're the agency people come to town talking about.

The look: Casual skirts, eclectic prints and modern flats
Type of agency you're likely in: These women are from an agency of specialists. Likely small and choosy. A little green, a little quirky. They eat their yogurt and soy on the patio behind their office. Clients who work with them swear by them. Most everyone else says - wait, who?

The look: Pencil skirts and pumps
Type of agency you're likely in: First up, they probably changed their shoes. These women are from a hip, urban agency. They're practical - probably came to work in walking shoes, probably have a process that "works every time."  They grab something for lunch on the run. Always have a granola bar and a slightly overripe piece of fruit on their desks, right beside three projects only half done. Clients trust their brand, but aren't always inspired by their work.

The look: Hoodies and pumas
Type of agency you're likely in: Well, first up, you're in the Midwest. This is the only place they even sell hoodies. Beyond that - you're probably at an agency that grew fast, that uses lots of young (read: cheap) talent and believes they work and play hard. Although, really, they probably scrape by on deadlines and have had quite enough of each other by the end of the day (thank you). They might split a pizza or divvy up meeting leftovers for lunch. They have a small front team and a big back office. They have lots of legends.

The look: Church clothes and practical shoes
Type of agency you're likely in: Market research. Enough said.

The look: Flowing pants and strappy sandals or knee-high boots (depending on the season)
Type of agency you're likely in: These women have a lot of corporate clients. They work in a big shop with lots of little practices. They spend a lot of time in front of people who they need to impress, but they also just spend a lot of time - long days, big commitments. They microwave calorie-controlled choices for lunch and sneak handfuls of mini reeses cups in the afternoon. They might be in a suburb and likely specialize in PR or niche advertising. People know them by their client roster.

The look: Corduroys and uggs or crocs 
Type of agency you're likely in: The local college assigned "open your own agency" as a class project. Or the freelancers are loose in the conference room.

Sizing up Ad Guys: Check out the socks

Say you're at a networking event or, worse, crammed in a packed house waiting for the local Addys to light up the night. You're likely being glad handed and checked out by any number of agency types ... from the ones you'd love to work for to the ... well, ones you'd rather avoid.

Quickly sorting out who to talk to and who to nudge out of the way to reach the buffet used to be a lot easier. Men flaunted their personality in ties, pocket squares, glasses, briefcases ... but, now that the ties have long let loose to open collars and Lasik has left most faces rimless, well... what's left?

The last vestige of male gives: the socks.

How to know what kind of Ad guy you're talking to by his socks:

• Basic black: Chances are you're talking to the new biz guy. Used to spending his day traveling from one cliche corporate headquarters to another, he's mastered the skill of the chameleon - blending in to his environs as if he had been there all along. Save the snazzy socks for those arty guys.
  
  But, there's a chance, too, that you're dealing with the most treacherous kind of ad guy: the irrelevant middle manager who doesn't yet know he's irrelevant. This guy had a good year. An incredible year. A year that has made the agency loyal to him. Sadly, that year was over a decade ago. And since then, things have been ... well, slow and sometimes, frankly, embarrassing. But, like the aging athlete who once won the big game in high school, this guy still believes he's in the glory years. Align with him and take on all his gossipy baggage as your very own.
  
  To tell the difference between these basic blacks, check the shoes. The new biz guy's will be plain and shiny. The irrelevant middle manager, genuinely bad. Possibly even striking a jarring and unpleasant contrast to his pants.


• Striped - horizontal: Ah, this guy. If basic black is the real sales guy, striped horizontal sees himself as the closer. He's the free-wheeling relationship guy. Probably a creative, maybe a strategist. The one who asks about your kids, knows the baseball score and is forgiven for otherwise meeting-inappropriate behavior by the mere fact that everyone loves him. Maybe a former fraternity president or the son of a preacher man, this guy has been center stage his whole life. And, he loves it. He'll be someone you want to meet, but probably won't have a chance to because he'll be busy working his contacts around the room. Hey, Tom, I haven't seen you since [insert event you totally wanted to go to]


• Striped - vertical: Mr. Orderly. Probably has a heavily marked up to-do list in his pocket. Unless he's under 40 - then, it's probably all tucked away in a well-appointed iPhone. Unless he's wearing a tie - then it's definitely a Blackberry. Mr Orderly likely has one of two jobs - account director or information architect. Either way, he's got it together and can probably help you network your way into his agency castle ... IF You can answer the exacting questions he's chef-ed up to weed out candidates who wouldn't positively reflect on his reputation


• Colors - bright: Media department.


• Colors - dull: Oh, the practical creative. The guy who gets the work done. This guy is a little cynical. He's talented, but probably only really shines in one best-at niche. He's got a lot of opinions and big ideas... although, the big ideas are usually about something other than his own job, clients, life. He's great to grouse and drink with... and, could probably help you get your foot in the door, but make no mistake - he's a worker bee (who just might try to convince you he's the one "really" running the show.)
  


• Argyle: Ah, prep school. These simple socks will often be paired with grungy jeans and a freshly dry-cleaned white button up. Yeah, he's a suit. A contemporary one. Who summers with his extended family in a great place on a blue lake that his dad rents out for the whole month of August. He drives an amazing car that he treats like shit. He goes about his gig with malaise. Stressed? Nah. He's the one guy who can get through the agency ringer unscathed by urgency. And, importantly, he KNOWS EVERYONE. Well, everyone worth knowing.


• White: Who invited the production department?


• None: Web guy! He'll still be talking about the days of playing foosball with Don Norman over beers in the main conference room on a Monday afternoon. A refugee of dot-com, he's trying to make it work in an integrated agency, but is totally jonesing for the days when geeks could be geeks and make a huge fat wad of cash doing it. Better throw in some talk of the newest grand theft auto or feed app to get the chatter flowing.

Obsessed with Noah Brier's Brand Tags

Ok, so when Noah first launched his brand perception project a few weeks ago, I jumped on, tagged some brands, clicked around, wandered off elsewhere...

But now that he's logged over 600,000 tags, I'm obsessed with the browse.

If you're just checking out Brand Tags now, here's the back story:

When you hit the site, you see the name of a brand. All you have to do is type in the first word(s) that come to mind.

Here's Noah's thinking: If you ask a bunch of people what a brand is and make a tag cloud, you should have a pretty accurate look at what the brand represents.

The data is already HUGE. And, really addicting to check out. Especially the smaller print - catching what pesky outlying perceptions are detracting from your brand.

Participate
Browse the data

In other shiny new news. Google's collaboration tool is now live and (of course) free to all. Read about it on Faster Future or just go explore. If you work with a nonprofit or head up a community org, make sure to check it out. Great tools for sharing docs, ideas, pics and more among a dispersed group without a lot of setup / maintenance / management.

iCitizen Wrapup from Columbus

iCitizen Video from Mark Hillman on Vimeo.

Day 2 of iCitizen kicked off with a slightly homespun look at what exactly we've gotten ourselves into here!? Check out Mark's video of an apparent 'conference crasher' trying to take it all in above.

Casual chats with hosts of the social media cafe (featuring lattes and laptops loaded with dummy accounts and personal tours of all the hottest social apps) reminded us just how new all this really is: Digital-savvy marketers had been sneaking out mid-presentation during Day 1 to ask just what the presenters and audience were talking about. What is Twitter? Lemonade? Kaboodle? And, importantly, can I check my email before I go back in??

Over in the blogger bailiwick*, Holly, Karen, David and I were doing about what you'd expect: taking ourselves too seriously, engaging in a little snark, and representing real iCitizens amongst all the talk about people like us...

See pics from iCitizen
Read Karen's live blog
See the Twitter stream

(*gross misuse of a word for the sake of alliteration)

Onto coverage of today's presenters:

Doc Searls—Harvard Fellow at the Berkman Center, Coauthor, The Cluetrain Manifesto

Jump back 5 years. If around that time, someone had started talking about carrying all your music, pictures, and movies on a device that both fit in your pocket and worked as a cell phone, limited-use computer and general personal planner.... well, that person would probably have received a similar response to what Doc Searls got at iCitizen today: sounds intriguing, but what, what?

Doc talked about "vendor relationship manangement." It's what's needed when the "attention economy" makes a decision to act or buy and - thus - becomes the "intention economy." And, has something to do with using your data & personal and logical preferences to define rather than accommodate how you'll buy / share your information / relate to the companies you do business with. Everything from owning your own healthcare data to setting your own privacy expectations to pre-defining how much you'll pay for the exact thing that you really want.

I mentioned the response to a theoretical iPhone 5 years ago because what hangs in the balance for Doc's theory is what "thing" will make his idea concrete and easy vs. wildly theoretical and seeming like a massive-new-responsibility-and-time-investment-this-convenience-girl- wants-nothing-in-the-world-to-do-with.

Check out Andrea's coverage for more background.

Twittering:

• Doc calls Web "the Net." Love the anachronisms when digital adopters talk 'what's coming'


• Doc talks about approach - "we list all the things we think are true that no one's talking about" So us.


• Key driver of open source, not just anyone can create and use, but anyone can IMPROVE IT.


• Attention economy has evolved to intention economy on the live Web ... what you get when a customers mind is made up.


• Attention economy until point of decision then intention economy. Using car rental as example of industry without intention.


• What could car rental do if it knew customer intention. If it stopped "trap and hold" tactics like "car you want or similar"


• Want to express logical and personal preferences, like no ads when calling tech support or will pay for faster service


• Doc's point seems to be: smartest people about the right experience are your customers, not your employees or competitiros.


• Doc pokes at a big box retailer for saying they want to "own the customer." Another term for owning humans? Slavery. Why do we talk that way? Because we're too busy talking to ourselves and not our customers.


• Doc must be part of RenGen. So far referenced Rousseau, Whitman, Marx ... waiting for the test at this point


• Doc unfinished biz of Cluetrain is Vendor Relationship Mgt - control by customers who are in free markets & engaging with vendors


• VRM is not necessarily social because social makes assumption we have power in numbers. We have power as individuals, not from vendors who want to leverage our mass.


• In identity world, cards /prices/ rels not issued to you. You issue your own card / intention / "RFP" http://snurl.com/29x75


• Doc's VRM sounds way hard. I don't want to manage my relationship with Target or write a RFP for a blender. I don't have an acquisition dept.


• In simplest form, Doc's ideas seem like convenience of Canada's Airmiles. www.airmiles.ca - all data in one place for one purpose / reward


• Bigger than that Doc's approach seems so high engagement and limited in audience ... but says something will come along to make it simple


• Kind of scares me that I can't get on board with this. Newest ideas coming from oldest guy in room. 30-somethings snarking.

Doc is joined by a panel talking about personal data portability:

Rooley Eliezerov—President and Cofounder, Gigya
Bill Washburn—Executive Director, Open ID
Kelly O'Neill—Commerce Product Marketing Director, ATG

Twittering:

• Aside: Can I say how impressed I am by how many women are speaking at iCitizen? Largely due to Resource's leaders, but clients, too


• Reality check from   Kelly: It's important to understand your purchase process and how much engagement / consideration / relationship it will support


• Bill: OpenID is a movement that comes out of the idea that there's far too much pain around user name / password pairs.


• Bill: OpenID can also potentially insure that you're not a machine / spam, creates access


• Bill: Bigger issue than people who don't have access to the Internet is people who choose not to access. They think of it as just a big arcade. We need to build trust.


• Doc: Any attempt to regulate things we don't understand is dangerous


• Cool Deborah Schultz just showed up with a powerstrip and a laptop. Love the community power share.

Panel: Have Phone, Will Travel Panel
John Harrobin—SVP of Marketing and Digital Media, Verizon
Will Hodgman—CEO, M:Metrics
Riccardo Spina—Senior Director of Digital Media, Integrated Marketing, Wal-Mart

After the fact, I noticed that there had been no discussion of proximity SMS marketing among this group... would have been interesting to talk about that sort of push / experience content in terms of iCitizen engagement.

Twittering:

• John launched cellfire. Waiting for that channel to get big. But, might not work wth expectations retail has for coupons (they assume medium impressions, low redemption ... what happens to the bottom line when coupons get convenient?)


• Wal-Mart guy is unexpectedly chic. Great lime-rimmed glasses and matching polo. Stripey socks? Of course. (Direct tweet revealed: he's a former Resource creative director ... no wonder the on-brand gear)


• Will says used to buy "FSIs and yidda-yadda, hooda-hooda." Reeeeeally?


• Riccardo talking about Wal-Mart secret item holiday event. Tested before, on, after Black Friday. Clues via text.


• Riccardo: Mobile initiative ran under radar until WSJ picked it up then a little top-down panic about what did we do?


• Riccardo: People find what they need


• John: Think about text messaging. You only have 160 characters. Have to triple tap to get a letter. And you have to pay for it. If you were to put that through any market research industry, they would say that would never succeed. Today our customers exchange 150 billion messages a year. People tried it and we made it addictive.

Listening to Riccardo reminds me to get back to the argument that, for retailers, you don't have to wait to adopt technology until it's ubiquitous. Tools (like RSS, text) don't have to be for EVERYONE. Rather, they cost-effectively reach people already using them and build relevancy and personalization.

Avinash Kaushik—Analytics Evangelist, Google

Avinash talked about metrics beyond / before the purchase. Calls them "microconversions" - all those valuable behaviors consumers exhibit - and that we should support and track - that aren't buying.

He's one of those presenters who makes everyone giggle and poke their neighbor and generally remember the clever phrasings as much as the content. So, if this Twittering isn't as meaty, don't count it against the presenter, attribute it to my general tendency toward shiny object syndrome.

Twittering:

• Avinash calls online marketing faith-based behavior. Because we have all this data, but don’t understand the ‘whys’


• Google analytics uses indexes and visual intelligence ... clarity without "thinking"


• Online buying isn't "one night stand" - takes 3, 4, more visits to make a purchase


• Just takes fundemental Qs to uncover insights
  • Why are you here
  
  
  • Were you able to complete task you came here to do
  
  
  • If not, why not?


• Example: a pharma site had 90% bounce rate. The call to action and content was perfectly aimed at "buy." But the actual reason people visited was research: where is the product made, how much does it cost, etc. They bounced because they couldn't find what they wanted


• Most decisions made by HIPPOs – highest paid person's opinion. Furthest removed from customer


• All the tools I showed you today are free. The insignts have to come from you.


• Personalization is identifying insights and needs among microsegments

Last panel: Who Keeps Moving the Goalpost? Identifying relevant metrics...
Dr. Robert Leone—Professor, Texas Christian University
Pete Blackshaw—CMO, Nielsen Online
Steve Kahn—VP of Internet Marketing, DSW
Paul Horstmeier—VP of HP.com, Hewlett-Packard

Twittering:

• Paul: I've seen metrics so abused by marketers; I think we do ourselves a huge disservice


• Surprised to hear from retailers that there are people in their organizations who should want online metrics, but don't. Isn't retail addicted to numbers of just about any kind?


• Paul: Challenge is metrics to analytics to consulting. Translate it to something stakeholders would care about. Relevance.


• Dr Bob: Social media is silver bullet. Something in all the metrics talk made me miss what we're shooting...


• Dr Bob: Every media writer has a cheat sheet of bloggers they use to inform coverage. Creates echoing effect. How do all connect?

To wrapup:

Thank you to Holly, Nancy, Kelly and the whole Resource crew for doing / showing (not just telling) by including real iCitizens in the conference. For me, it was a great opportunity to be in a room with savvy marketers from truly ubiquitous consumer brands who get that this "social media" phenom has reached critical mass and is an essential part of reputation management and marketing (not just the stuff of "geeks".)

Oh, and can I say - AWESOME how many people read and recognize Advergirl. Who knew everyone from the team at Resource to an exec at Coke would haunt these pages? Love that!

Finally, in closing, I can only say one thing: let's all please come together and find examples of iCitizen impact BEYOND JEFF JARVIS! David Griner got Jarvis Bingo today when he was the first to hear the FOURTH speaker lean on the Dell Hell story.

Advergirl out.

iCitizen: Call to open your brand

I camped out on a sideline couch today at Resource Interactive's iCitizen symposium with Holly Davis and David Griner to watch the story of open brands unfold.

Nancy Kramer kicked off the day with our shared win: social media is now accepted by the C-suite.

But as the speakers and audience questions progressed, it became clear that despite support from CEOs and consumers alike, the bigger questions still remained: who to talk to, how to do it and what to expect.

Below, take a look at today’s agenda and a transcript of my live “Twitter coverage.” I’ve added in a few extra stories and comments as well.

But, first, it would be great to have all of you talk about this open imperative from the perspective of the people who live it and power it. If you’re looking for blog subjects over the next few days, I’d love it if you’d tackle one of these:

• What brands do you find yourself routinely talking about and why?


• How are the things you talk about online different than the things you talk about offline?


• What are the biggest misses by companies trying out the social Web –or offending the social Web- in the last year?


• What do you wish brands would do to engage you (whether that means use your ideas, reward you, inform you, etc.

Read more about iCitizen on the collected tweme or on the live blog.

Onto the coverage.

Opening Remarks: Nancy Kramer—CEO and Founder, Resource Interactive      

Twitter:

• Glam president Nancy Kramer is kicking off.


• Visualization guy is scribbling a conversation map in real time. Lots of Sharpie


• Perfectly branded space. Every detail. Down to literally laying new carpet to match conference brand. http://tinyurl.com/6zk6y5


• Seriously. Weird jokester guitar comedian singing 'thanks to the Internet' song. Totally need more coffee

iTalk: Kelly Mooney—President and CXO, Resource Interactive

• Mooney asks one of the big questions we all struggle with when dissecting online trends: "how the heck did that happen?"


• Would take 412.3 years to view all the material on YouTube. Don't give up, though, boys.


• Thinking about idea of "share unprecendented" in the context of Jill Bolte Taylor's TED speech. Tricky. http://snurl.com/29r7i


• Mooney calls Al Gore iCitizen. Opening the conversation. Affirms Wal-Mart for accepting criticism on environmental responsibility, too (theirs and their customers')


• Talking about "love triangle." New relationship model with brand, community and consumers making up the points


• Mooney says anecdotal examples are most powerful. Not sure I agree. Can quickly be written off as exceptions, "geeks," not rule


• Ubiquitous Jaffe up next. Looking forward to hearing first hand...

Keynote: Joseph Jaffe—Author, Join the Conversation

Twitter:

• CNN strategically uses iCitizens - not for authenticity or depth - but to get video / events / moments first.


• Jaffe calls old way "Spray and pray" ... definitely my favorite handle for one-to-many marketing


• "Targeted has become targeter." iCitizens capable of getting millions of impressions about your brand.


• re: TMobile Sucks - Conversations is between 2 or more sides. W/o debate, intensity, it's just choir preaching to each other


• Jaffe's called out Kodak's "winds of change" as listening and responding relevantly to what iCitizens say http://snurl.com/29rgr


• Three rules = humanity, humility, & humor


• "A lot of change in corporations is rogue today." Makes me think of Blue Shirt Nation's first server hidden under a desk.


• Jaffe as if speaking to most agencies I've worked at says: Don't cheat in social media, you'll be found out.


• Biggest risk we can take today is spending $4 million on a campaign no one notices


• Retweeting @hdavis: Are you in the campaign or commitment business? Are you willing to commit to customers for life?


• Jeff Jarvis, you're a powerhouse, but, really, the world needs some new examples already! (Seriously old Jeff Jarvis circa Dell Hell 05 was trotted out by no fewer than three presenters today!)

More stories:

• Jaffe talked a lot about the "T-Mobile sucks" revolt. Remember the story. T-mobile claimed they own trademark on the color magenta and issued a cease & desist letter to engadget. In response, many bloggers displayed "T-mobile sucks" magenta badges. As ridiculous as the company was, Jaffe was also self aware that bloggers were essentially preaching to the choir ...saying the same messages again and again rather than creating new messages or engaging in real debate. Love the practical analysis.

Panel: And Community Makes Three

Adam Brown—Director, Digital Communications, The Coca-Cola Company
Jan Valentic—SVP of Marketing, The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company
Stan Joosten—Innovation Manager, Holistic Consumer Communication, Procter & Gamble

Twittering:

• Couple cool things from over the break. Jim Oswald visualizing the live conversation http://snurl.com/29rv1


• Friend Marti teaching social tools in the social media cafe http://snurl.com/29rv9


• Doc Searls: Any question based on fear is the wrong question.


• Stan: When we talk open it's a mindset, but marketers want the 10 steps to do it. Really need to create mindset, not follow recipe


• Jan / Scotts: Always been a conversation in our industry. Storytelling from individual to individual Neighbors, garden clubs, hardware store.


• Stan: When you have a brand that has a point of view, you have to build in that there's a counter point of view. And build a conversation around that. Something that we're not very good at anticipating yet. But, it's going to happen. Have to plan for it.


• Jan: There is going to be negative talk about your brand. It's what you do about it. Own up to it. Address it.


• Q from audience: How are you mobilizing your staff. Adam: Step 1, get legal to sign off


• To get our execs blogging we're talking about doing more manageable limited engagement. Two week topics that start a conversation, but set expectations that they'll be an end date

More stories:

• Adam said that after legal signed off on getting involved in the conversation the next step was to get the executives comfortable with employees engaging social media. To do that, they started with existing, approved company spokespeople. Sounds kind of scary, right? A PR person on myspace...
  
  But, Adam's group went farther. Hand selected spokespeople who would both be comfortable with the medium and uniquely close to whatever culture or issues needed response. Plus, they're all getting their feet wet with their own blogs, social accounts, etc.

Marsha Collier—Author, over 15 books on eBay

Twittering:

• Salads with flowers and Marsha Collier talking eBay... it's an iCitizen lunch


• I'm an iCitizen and i'm not in my 20s. In fact i have a daughter in her 20s


• For the people who read my books, i'm a gateway drug to the internet


• I would never work for eBay because someone would tell me what i could say. It's about integrity.


• Hard for you to hear, but not everyone is on the internet


• Some people tweet too much. Hmmm. Feeling a hint of personal relevance

Keynote: Duncan Watts—Principal Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research

• One in ten Americans tells the other 9 how to vote, where to eat, what to buy (Keller and Berry, 2003)


• Wonderful American story, we have super heroes and free lunches


• Every day every hipster has to get out of bed & decide what faded retro t-shirt to wear and most of the time no one cares. Why did hush puppies take off and other hipster picks didn't? Not simple formula of cause and effect.


• Multiplier effect isn't one holy grail opinion leader, it's many relationships and influence-able groups


• "Unpredictability only increasing." Some in room clearly uncomfortable. Looking for actionable advice, not worst fears!


• Great Duncan point - measurable ROI happens way before rapid viral. Set expectations for success vs. tipping point.


• Tsk. Tsk. Reference to Ohio "cow tipping" - doesn't match up with vibrant, cultural Columbus


• Distracted by Jim Oswald's visualizing of conversation .. sort of cross between sharpie stenography and graffiti tagging


• Retweeting @jaffejuice: New Yahoo research has central hypothesis: people assume more in common with their friends than actually exists...


• Great audience Q: How will we define friend when we're connected to so many people?


• More Yahoo development - how to differentiate types of ties on FB. Better view of relevant social networks... Overlapping networks of real friends and strangers with overlapping interests. Different relevant networks for different questions
  

More stories

• The most important thing is getting extremely good at understanding what's already happening and moving resources to take advantage ... Take the Gap. Every season they put out several colors of T-Shirts. When they find out that the orange one is selling like crazy, they don't ask why orange, they move resources to quickly put out more orange.

iTalk: Steve Knox—CEO, Tremor (WOM at P&G)

Twittering:

• Man after my own heart, reason most WOM fails is that the message isn't simple. When we talk to our friends, we want simple


• Buzz marketing is danger zone. Office Max made 100 million elves, but same store sales dropped 7%


• Whole industry is built backwards. Lots of people want to build you a viral video, throw them out of your office


• If it isn't a disruptive message attached to the foundation of the brand, it's just more elves


• All of our data about real advocacy today is face-to-face conversations, not online


• Lots of talk of tampons

More from Steve:

What's the right message? There are two factors:

• Advocacy: Do I care enough about your brand to talk about it?


• Amplification: Have you made it easy for me to talk about?

#2 is where most WOM dies. Message needs to be simple. The things you talk about with your friends are always simple.

Panel: What Consumers Can Do
Sam Decker—CMO, Bazaarvoice
Tim Smith—Chief Strategy Officer, Lemonade, Inc.
Manish Chandra—CEO, Kaboodle
Adam Weinroth—Director of Product Marketing, Pluck

Twitter:

• Manish: We measure velocity of engagement by the volume of products being added, volume recently added, & traffic back to site


• Pluck: How many people who come to your site do something social … rate of contribution is a key metric


• Sam: “Start metrics with the P&L, where it’s important to CEO, move out from there.” Really?


• Tom: Lemonade users are highly sophisticated. Using stands as side business. Have high expectation, low patience.


• Adoption has really been fast paced. Only a few years ago, I’d be in a meeting and first Q was: what is a blog??


• Adam: Reward not just quantity but content. Elevate / spotlight their voice. 


• Manish: Sweepstakes / campaigns incent specific behaviors vs. ongoing rewards that can become negative to site


• Manish: Lifestyle shopping is much more discovery and emotionally oriented. Comparing handbags is much different than cameras.

iTalk: Tom Venable—EVP, InnoCentive

Twitter:

• Innocentive clients are reaching out to creative minds to fast-track R&D and product development


• Natural problem solvers want to create solutions. Open innovation. Awarding winning solutions. (Sample prizes: Asari X, DARP)


• There are a finite number of resources in your company. They're smart, know your industry, but they’re finite. There are millions of other people who could help


• Generation coming up now is going to find a way to make a living on their own terms, using the Web


• Humana currently has a challenge out to identify ways to improve healthcare in the U.S. 2000 solvers responding


• Other end of spectrum, statistical methods for software something-something


• Ah ha moment is when you realize how many projects are stuck in the pipeline w/ no R&D budget to solve

Other notes:

Great examples of the Innocentive model:

• Concrete guy solves decades old oil problem:
  
  20 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, there was stil a lot of oil on the ocean floor. The problem was that Exxon couldn’t figure out how to separate frozen oil from water. So, they worked with Innocentive to put out an open call for a solution.
  
  An Illinois chemists from the concrete industry saw the problem and quickly scribbled an idea on the back of a napkin. He sent that scan in with a half-page write up about a certain kind of oscillator working at s certain speed and solved the problem Exxon had been wrestling with for 20 years. Their engineers had a conference call with the chemist to discuss and "you could hear the collective duh!"
• Hippie keeps $100 million of product on the market
  
  Another client needed to replace an art restoration chemical that was being phased out by EPA. They couldn't find a solution internally and were about to pull $100 million of product to stay in compliance.
  
  They farmed the problem out over the same network and a 20 year old chemist who used tie die t-shirts at the kitchen table with his mother applied that their color preserving solution to the art restoration chemical and saved the product. 

One thing I love about how Tom described "how to make it work." You have to change your perceived career role / value from problem solver to solution finder.

PRSA Followup

I still had a few questions to answer from the PRSA event. So, belatedly, here we go:

Q: How does a trackback work and is it annoying to other bloggers?

I answered this Q for one of my offline friends this week, too. Great example of a simple concept way over complicated by technology and specialists.

It's just a notice that someone is linking to or referencing one of your posts.

It's also called a linkback.

Short story: At the end of most posts on Wordpress and SixApart, there's a link called Trackback. If you click it, it gives you a special address. If you take that address and enter it on one of your own posts (there's a special field in the software) it pings the original post's server and the author gets an email that someone is referencing their post.

Basically a digital nod. One I believe is universally appreciated.

Q: What blogs and books do I read to stay on top of trends?

Well, I should say that 'staying on top of trends' is a pretty relative term these days. But, to stay somewhat aware of the cool stuff in my tiny area of addiction/interest, here are my top picks:

Blogs:

Adaptive Path

Advertising Age - CMO Strategy

Andrea Hill

B&A

Bokardo

ChangeThis Newsletter

Chief Marketer

Church of the Customer

Compete

Cowshed Productions

eBusiness.org

Emergence Marketing

Groundswell

Hill | Holliday

Hitwise Intelligence

Horse Pig Cow

How Advertising Spoiled Me

I Believe in Advertising

indexed

Jeremiah Owyang

Jeremiah Owyang

Joe Niedecken

Kelly Mooney

Logic+Emotion

Lynetter's Online Dev Slides

Marketing Profs Daily Fix

Media Buyer Planner

Noah Brier

Own Your Identity

Paul Isakson

Pleasure and Pain

SAW a good idea

StickyFigure

The Brand Builder

Todd And

Tom Fishburne: Brand Camp

Trendwatching

Books:

Andy Beal: Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online

Patricia Martin: Rengen: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer - and What It Means to Your Business

Joseph Jaffe: Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Weary Consumers with the Power of Community, Dialogue, and Partnership

Rohit Bhargava: Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Brands Get it Back

Kelly Mooney: The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World

Charlene Li: Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Mark Penn: Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes

 

Q: Two questions condensed to one - how can I connect with doctors and moms online?

Honestly, I have no idea. I think the advice I gave in person was with docs it's probably a closed community of your most passionate users; for moms, it's probably real moms already in your organization, already talking online.

But, for more on-target advice, a few experts from my extended network:

Pierce Mattie PR talks about Pitching Mommie Bloggers

Consultant Bill Ives talks about physicians and social media

Q: How do I avoid a 1000 new friends?

First, can I say - nice problem to have! If you start out in social media and garner 1000 quick followers, you're doing something right.

But, to handle it, it's a matter of managing your pipe. Do you want strangers to be able to 'be-friend' you in every medium? Or will you limit, say, FB to people you know in the flesh and LI to interested onlookers and professional contacts?

Also, boil up your communications. That's a big "why" social media was created. People are increasingly exhausted and overwhelmed by 1:1 email. Social media starts to solve that problem by letting us broadcast content to entire networks. And, pick up or ignore what we want.

So, if you're getting a lot of input, answer general topics via social media rather than returning a slew of emails. Use the tools to manage communications within the time / interest you have rather than letting them push you around.

Q: How do you pull together the group of brand enthusiasts to talk about your brand? It might seem easy to just contact those that are blogging about your brand but would that seem less "real"... recruited/corporate? Is it better to recruit from an existing list of folks that interact with your brand?

Short answer: There are a few companies that will do this for you. Set up and recruit to a closed community for ~$250k. But, I say if the Zappos CEO can stop for coffee with customers, we can probably be a little more organic than writing a check.

If it were me, I'd leverage my customer service data. People who email in. Good or bad. Especially problem solvers (I saw this was broken / here's how I'd fix it). If they took enough time to track down your email form, they're probably an engaged shopper (one way or the other).  (P.S. All the more reason to bury your contact info, uh, Amazon :)

Q: How do you initially prioritize and engage the customer? A traditional focus group? How do you find and engage these customers?

Part of this question is answered in the above. But, there's also an element of segmentation here. How do you prioritize your customer types? I think that question gets kicked back to the statistics gurus, but is informed by social media. Yes, you want to know that your customer is x years old, watches these three television programs and has z number of kids. But, you also want to know what they do online. How they interact. What types of tools they use. How many people they talk to in a week. That will help you find the groups that CAN be targeted by WOM or social media marketing.

As for how you engage them, that's the toughest part. And it's different for every brand. The trick is to figure out what they'll want to participate in and deliver it. With a little luck, you can find an insight in the above (like the Mini example) that will help inform that.

Q: What are your thoughts about second life? The success of it seems limited to the academic arena.

At the conference, Billy Fischer asked how we know what the next big trend in social media will be. Truth is, unfortunately, we don't.

The best we can do is pay attention to what the leaders in the last new thing are trying or what big groups of previously unengaged people are engaging in and ... well, guess. Second LIfe - in my opinion - is the ultimate example of a bad guess. 

A super high engagement  "game" in a medium (Web) that traditionally inspires skimming and scanning ... eh, I was suspect from the beginning, but I understand why brands rushed in. Initial trial (signups) was high. Although actual adoption was low. And the environment itself gave agencies the chance to strut great new creative and strategy skills. 

All that said, I think some brands made it work. Like Case Western. Recreating their campus in the medium and making it accessible to members and nonmembers alike.

Q: How do you have time for all this?

According to my co-workers, it's the time I save by not having babies, car pool or other offspring-related stress.

Temporary Insights Disruption

Friends of Advergirl:  Please check back on Friday for the start of a series of new posts on social media, crack-the-code advertising, (live coverage of) iCitizen and high-engagement e-commerce. Until then ... well, they'll be a bit of a service disruption while I manage a mad week offline.

PRSA and Social Media

Thank you to everyone who attended the PRSA conference this morning. Below is a copy of the presentation I shared:

If you want to connect with me online, take a spin around the blog. There are links for just about all of my online contact points. If you want to connect with me offline, call Ologie at 614-221-1107.

 

 

Strategic Twitter Challenge

Advergirl readers may remember the name David Griner. Either from his much-more-successful blog or - I can hope - from our fabled battle over the rightness of Wendy's Red Wig. (Speaking of - I noticed they didn't get bought out until after they dumped my favorite wig for that squeaky Girl Wendy rehab. Moving on...)

Today Griner spotted a great class project for readers and writers of the social web. I'd love it if we could all get involved:

Background: This week, a fair-trade coffee roaster is promoting his new bakery on Twitter by offering to give out free coffee after reaching 100 (Twitter) followers. (Griner was Follower No. 2.)

A rather un-authentic approach, but, hey, at least he's trying to use the medium.

So, here's the strategic challenge: Begin by logging on to Twitter. (If you're not signed up yet, this is a great opportunity to try it out and be part of a productive little case study at the same time.)

Then, tweet how you would use Twitter to promote a bakery you've just opened.

Griner's already collected some responses that are pretty interesting, but we think this can go much farther in showing the possibilities of social media.

One rule: Remember to put #bakery at the end of each Twitter post, so that Griner can track the answers here: http://twemes.com/bakery

Follow Griner @griner

Advice for Newbies: The Wrap Up

Time to wrap up rookie week on Advergirl with these three last things:

A list of all the articles, ideas and tools for people just starting out in ad agencies:

• Resume makeovers
  • General advice
  • Makeover 1
  • Makeover 2
  • Makeover 3
  • How to write a cover letter
• Getting and winning interviews
  • How to build a professional network
  • Interview tips
  • Questions you (the candidate) should ask in an interview
  • What to do when you're offered a job
• Getting started at the agency
  
  • Meet your new boss
  • Four rules for career success
  • Advice for getting started at an agency
  • Three pillars of success at (nearly) any ad agency
  • Seducing the Boys Club: Advice from Nina DiSeso
  • Be as valuable your fifth year as your first
• Advice just for AEs
  • Your real job description
  • Interactive toolkit for AEs: part 1
  • Interactive toolkit for AEs: part 2
  • Two completely relevant and totally shameless tricks for AEs

A huge THANK YOU to all the people who contributed content, ideas and "bad" resumes:

• Nina DiSesa, Chairman, McCann Erickson New York
• Miguel Perez, Account Director, Ologie
• Lance Dooley, Creative Director, SBC Advertising
• Jennifer Fleishman, Account Director, Ologie
• Joe Meadows, Producer, Beyond Interactive
• Melissa Harbin, Account Director, Goodby Silverstein & Partners
• Dirk Defenbaugh, Executive Director, Fitch
• Pete Scantland, President, Orange Barrel Media
• Gordon Robertson, Creative Director, MARC
• John Reid, formerly associate creative director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, currently footloose freelancer about to start a month at Chiat / Day
• Joe Niedecken, Art Director, Resource Interactive
• Ross Popoff-Walker, Interactive + Youth Design Strategist, Forrester
• Julie Hamlin, Public Relations Director, Burkholder Flint & Associates
• Emily Peterson, Account Supervisor, engauge
• Patti Cullen, Account Supervisor, engauge
• Len Damico, Art Director, The Star Group
• Kate Lindsay
• Danielle Hueston
• That mystery guy from Quebec

And one more great newbie find: Joe Meadows recommended this CMYK article about friend Brandon's pursuit of the elusive "second job":

Back to my regularly scheduled commentary on all things advertising tomorrow...