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David Griner and The Social Path

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It's been over a year and a half now since I hung up my blogging hat. No fanfare, no goodbye. I just wandered off after a decidedly questionable post on bug advertising.

Until, May of 07, when David Griner, a snarky AdFreak blogger, called me out on the disappearance. His "Where is Advergirl" post ended up flooding my inbox with "yeah, what the heck happened" notes and trackbacks from other bloggers echoing the sentiment. I was compelled to return to posting. Since then, David has been something of a big brother of blogging - peer pressuring me to try new social media (damn twitter) and calling bullshit when I head out too far into the land of ranting.

So, I'm very excited to tell you about his new blog: The Social Path.

TSP is a social media blog that tears down the jargon of our cliquey chat and replaces it with great examples, advice and ideas. More about it in David's own words:

Advergirl: Your latest brainchild - The Social Path - launched this week. What's the big idea behind it?

David: I love social media. I love talking about social media. But I've never really liked reading about social media. For every good blog on the topic, there are hundreds packed with vague rhetoric and self-promotion. We wanted to start an agency blog that was conversational, practical and digestible for the masses.

But to be honest, I just wanted a place to rant on the company's dime.

Advergirl: You write for advertising's leading publisher, plus have a growing family, a full-time ad job and a blog of your own, what made you decide to take on this new venture?

David: I seriously felt like my life was missing something. I love writing about cool and strange stuff for AdFreak, but I also wanted a place to talk at length about trends and technology. Yeah, it spreads me  little thinner, but I've gotten a lot of support from all three bosses: my creative director, the AdFreak editor and my wife. I forgot to check with the dog.

Advergirl: (Karen: If you want to contest the boss order there, we welcome your comment!) Anyway, David, who are you writing for this time around?

David: I'm trying to keep the luddites in mind. I want to demystify social media, make it seem less scary for businesses and ordinary people. But I still want it to be interesting for the people who already read tons of sites about networking, conversation, etc. I figure clients and potential clients probably fall somewhere between those two extremes.

Advergirl: The Social Path is pretty prominently sponsored by your home agency, Luckie & Co. Last I checked, your gig was copywriting there, not chief blogger. Is this launch the start of a new role for you?

David: Time will tell, I guess. For now, still contently plugging away as a copywriter.

Advergirl: I know we have a lot of readers who are interested in introducing their bosses, co-workers and clients to social media. What advice to you have for promoting and teaching social media?

David: You can talk all you want, but the easiest way is to actually help them set up a few accounts on sites like Facebook, Blogger or Twitter. Then walk them through the process of getting started. That's the toughest hurdle to get over. For that reason, I prefer one-on-one training instead of trying to convert the masses all at once.

Advergirl: Do you think every brand should embrace social media?

David: Embrace it? Probably not. But every brand should be experimenting with the possibilities and keeping an eye on trends. Last I checked, half of the Top 10 Web sites in the U.S. were social. That's a hell of a boat to miss.

Advergirl: Is social media marketing, customer service, product development, or something new entirely?   

David: Social media is just a way to communicate. But when companies use it, I think it should be seen as a mix of PR and customer service — except good.

Advergirl: What tool do you hope comes next?

David: I love the idea behind FriendFeed, but I hate the interface and I never end up using it. It would be great to have a site that easily combines all these other things I use: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Lots of folks trying to do it, no one succeeding (yet).

Advergirl: What's the most un-social thing going on in social media today?

David: I still think about that MySpace suicide from time to time. It's becoming so easy for bullies to torment other kids online. Makes it more important than ever for parents and teachers to understand how all this technology works.

Advergirl: Now that you've spent some time with Lance, how would you weigh in on the Big Debate: Should he embrace the moniker Adverboyfriend? Or continue to seek his own identity?

David: I think he just needs to make Adverboyfriend his own, really feel out the potential. It worked for Dr. Girlfriend.

 

Ok, ready now? Visit the site. Or subscribe to the feed.

Breaking through: Asheville supports the 5-day weekend

We are - in a word - overwhelmed by choice. So much to read and do and participate in. A lot of it clever and intriguing and really kind of delightful.  To get your message heard, to get past our savvy consumer filters, you need a special kind of engagement - the kind that breaks through.

In this series, I'll share examples of brands that have broken through and show how they used the principles of social to do it.

Kicking off with: Luckie & Company's Five Day Weekend campaign for the Asheville (NC) Convention and Tourism Bureau:

What they were up against: Like most cities that never have red carpet events or celebrity homes to happen by, Asheville has an awareness challenge. How do they make sure vacation planners everywhere know how much great stuff they have to offer?

For years, Asheville went about tourism advertising in the usual way - visit Asheville for X, Y and Z. Calls trickled in. Weekend vacations were had. But, Asheville wanted something more - longer vacations, more interest, higher engagement.

So they challenged a number of agencies - including Luckie - to come up with the idea that would help them break through.

What they did: Luckie knew that it was going to take more than bucolic photography of green mountains and the promise of a ride on the rapids to put Asheville on the map. So they looked for an angle that would get people talking about something people are naturally passionate about: getting a break from their demanding worklife.

The pitch & the eventual campaign was called Friends of the Five Day Weekend. And it was a call to stop working longer and harder. It was time to take leisure back.

Through newspaper ads, posters, sandwich boards, TV spots, and radio ads, Luckie drove the curious and overworked to learn more on a Web site, sign petitions of support and even attend rallies in key cities.

What happened next: 7000 people signed an online petition that was sent on to Congress and the presidential primary contenders. Hundreds joined homegrown Five Day Weekend groups on Facebook. Average people bought and wore the brand. They not only attended the planned rallies, but some even set up their own rally. Hundreds of bloggers - including the feisty Donald - blogged. And - even with no concentrated media outreach effort - Michael Medved invited the campaign spokesman on for a lengthy debate about the economics of the issue. Fox News did a national piece on it, focusing on overwork but also interviewing the head of Asheville tourism. And, the AP ran with it.

Importantly, the story of Asheville came through. Not only as the transparent sponsor of the "movement," but also as a place where people do care about the very real issue of work-life balance.

Oh, and there's this: long after the campaign ran, this little gem popped up.

How it's social: This campaign has literal social elements - like the Facebook groups, blogging, etc. But its success is arguably built on the solid social principles of what makes WOM happen. To borrow from Steve Knox, CEO of Tremor, it was a story that was true to the core of the brand and disruptive to the conversation. The kind of social marketing that creates results, not just impressions. It was something that people could care about and it was easy for them to pass on.

Break through? Absolutely.

 

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

Groundswell. A book about a movement.

I almost don't want to tell you about this book.

I laughed. I dog-eared a ridiculous number of pages. I found cause to clamor for a notebook to jot, nay, furiously scribble down an idea. I'm already retelling the stories.

It's almost too good to share.

I should back up...

In general, I think good marketers come from two basic camps. Statistics and experience. Or, how we can model and measure likely success vs. how we can learn from what's worked and hasn't worked in the past. Heady or intuitive.

Groundswell author's Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff are from Forrester Research. So, it was no surprise that they could write analytics well. Could  lay out an infinitely logical and actionable model for how to  do social media with your customer audience.

What was a surprise is what amazing storytellers they are and how willing they were to bluntly - sometimes harshly - tell it like it is.

Li and Bernoff start of by setting aside particular technologies and diving deep into the ways social media has changed us. Increasingly, they argue, we get what we need (news, reviews, shopping, etc.) from other people rather than from traditional institutions (like business or media).

Then, they systematically answer the questions a lot of digital immigrants ask in the meetings we've all sat in (over and over and over again):

• How does it work?
• Why do people spend their time on this?
• How is this going to impact - threaten / totally screw up / help - my business?

But, the best part is the back 2/3s of the book where Li and Bernoff dig into various strategies to tap into the groundswell with stories about the success and failure of brands brave enough to give it a try.

Some of them are parts of the story I never knew. Like the Mini marketing that we hold up all the time as so savvy and talky and in-the-tent started by listening to the (later named) groundswell online. Or how the awkwardness of the internal conversation become part of the impetus of P&G's broadly cited Beingagirl.com

And some reveal surprising results. Like how Blendtec's funny 'will it blend' videos (crunching up iPods and other odd things) popped sales of the absurdly expensive kitchen device 20%. Or just how much of Ernst & Young's recruiting is powered by Facebook.

And some were simply inspiring. Like the oft-told story of Best Buy's Blue Shirt Nation (btw - next time I talk about my home agency, let's remember - it's not self serving, I'm just an Orange Shirt) or the all-too-human ways execs at Avenue A / Razorfish connect with employees.

Every story is accompanied by the business plan behind it. Why it worked. What the ROI was. How to know if it's right for your audience.

You can probably guess which parts I dog-eared.

Chics Who Click: Which new women's site wins?

When a couple of media powerhouses launch competitive sites in the same month, it tends to make a little noise. Especially when they're both going after 40+ women. A demo they'd like us to believe is veiled in mystery, heretofore only defrocked by Lifetime and iVillage. A demo largely ignored by online marketers and jonesing for some real content.

Back to the powerhouses. We're talking about one of the founders of the Internet vs. the real-world lipstick mafia:

• Shine: Yahoo's latest attempt to win over the world with content comes to life in this editorial-style portal.


• WowOwow: By chics, for chics, this portal is the self-funded creation of Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Peggy Noonan, Mary Wells and Joni Evans.

Well, a month has gone by since the shiny new sites were unveiled. Plenty of time for a little investigation and trial and error.

What's working:

• Shine is smart to lead with thoughtful editorial. A big smart topic that is at once personal, female and thought provoking. Even women who love Oprah and Sex and the City have a conflicted relationship with their girly side. Leading with content and following with dish lets people get comfortable.


• WowOwow is making great use of its own real network. Offline heros - like Candice Bergen, Marlo Thomas, Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg - are creating fresh content for the site.


• I've come to really dig the Hair Day forecast on WowOwow. At first I thought it was vaguely insulting, but, really, it's chat-able and iconic and works for me.


• Shine feels like a magazine. The buckets of content. The reader feedback. It has excelled at taking an offline guilty pleasure and delivering it online completely intact.

What's not:

• WowOwow, meet Ajax. Ajax, Wowowow. It's easy to see the difference between savvy Yahoo and this group of newbies. The usability of the site is aggravating. Always more clicks. Even for easy little widgets and polls that should be included inline with the content.


• Shine's top nav is a little reductive considering the pop of everything else. They've designed it to encourage a full scroll. Which is interesting and oh-so-tabloid, but I think users are used to being able to increasingly limit their content to what's most relevant to them. That feels underplayed here.


• WowOwow strikes me as a little too reliant on community content. Everything is an open-ended question with a click to see what other people said. Couldn't we take some learnings from Twitter on this interaction?


• WowOwow gave up their above-masthead real estate to advertising. Ouch. Unless done incredibly well, that's a killer in editorial. And this snowy site is not done well enough to pull it off

Final word:
WowOwow walks away from some of the proven-for-a-reason principles of user experience. And community. And, for what? A 40+ Facebook group? Uh uh. 40 is the new 25. Your audience doesn't need Internet for Dummies.

Meanwhile Yahoo steps up the plate with one of the best sites I've seen from them. It's clever. Approachable. Content rich. Comfortable.

I hate to say it, but: I'm going with Goliath on this one. Go Shine!

Online early adopters programming for the masses

Are we moving too fast?

Last week, over on Compete’s blog, Cynthia Stephens wrote about the incredible impact Oprah’s live, online book club event has had on site traffic.

Quick catch-up for those of us not in the Oprah know: The show’s book club read for February was A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. To promote the author and the book, Oprah is hosting a 10-week online class on Awakening Your Life’s Purpose with the author.

Participants can watch the classes live or archived and each registered fan gets a workbook to track their own learnings and observations.

Technologically speaking, this isn’t a big break through. Most of us have been enduring Web conferences since the late 90s. But, the content was so compelling and so well-fit for the audience that the response nearly crashed the live programming and quickly catapulted Oprah’s site ahead of traditional American favorites:

"The number of visitors to Oprah.com topped five million in February, making her site one of the top 225 ranked sites in the United States. To put this in perspective, more people went to check out Oprah.com in February than the popular NASCAR, eHarmony, Fidelity, Barnes and Noble or Walgreens sites." __Compete blog (Lots more stats here.)

Meanwhile, locally, I was following David Armano and others on Twitter as they covered Ad Age's Digital Marketing Summit. As thrilling as it was for me, when I tried to share the content about what was going on with friends and colleagues, I pretty much got the blank stare of … what?

Or, more broadly, I’ve been watching StrawberryFrog's news mini-cooper-ization of Scion at scionspeaks.com:

"Scion owners design their own personal “coat of arms” online, a piece of owner-generated art that is meant to reflect their job, hobbies and — um, O.K. — karma.

In making their personalized crests, Scion owners can choose from among hundreds of symbols, all designed by a professional graffiti artist. The symbols range from an eagle, a jester, a king’s crown and a worker’s fist to Japanese anime-style flowers, a three-person family and a yin-yang circle. Customers can download their designs and have them made into window decals or take them to an auto airbrushing shop to have them professionally painted onto their cars." _NYTimes

Incredibly cool, right? But what will the adoption really be like?

And don't even get me started about last year's speculation Second Life.

The Oprah story is a great reminder to pause and think about what we should do as much as what we could do.

In the end, the rules of great online experience marketing are simple:

• Understand the objective: Why are we doing this?
• Know your audience: Care about what they care about
• Know your audience (again): Grow with or just barely ahead of their technology adoption
• Invest in content: If it’s not valuable to your audience, they won’t come back or pass it on

It should always be...

This EASY to use a press room:

The media room for Andy Beal's Radically Transparent offers enough content to power six news articles, four custom reviews, a buying decision and an ongoing relationship.

All in one place. All super easy to navigate.

This FUN to watch a branded video:

AKQA and Cake really fundamentally get it. It being social media and brands. You have to be able to take liberties - with yourself, your culture and your customers. You have to be able to delight and entertain and be completely different than a 30 second spot.

Little escapes the snark of this video from Pot Noodle. A piece that 200,000 people have already watched this month.

This PERSONAL to watch a recruitment video:

When Molly posted this video on Twitter, I had to ask her if it was sanctioned or organic ... the very simple delivery is so brimming with personality and conversation that I couldn't imagine it making it through any agency's self-marketing process.

But, somehow it did.

And, the simplicity of it - from an agency that COULD do anything - might just make it even more compelling.

This SIMPLE to share information:

Speaking of Twitter, I've been logged on for the past two days reading some of your favorite bloggers cover Ad Age's Digital Marketing summit in real time.

The posts include verbatims, analysis and a little argument. It's addictive.

This OPTIMISTIC to profile an audience:

After it sat for months on my teetering bedside stack of good intentions, I've finally picked up RenGen and dug in. Definitely my favorite industry book of this year... as much for its optimism as its smarts and illustrative examples.

Martin connects the dots from our creative and intellectual selves to a theory of renaissance that will define a generation.

Friday afternoon fun

A few things to lighten your afternoon... if the agency beer cart isn't quite enough.

An object lesson on why people don't trust advertising:

 

And, a few interesting projects from ad people who moonlight as real people:

• IADBIC: The Creative Director at Barefoot is the mastermind behind these wacky poems riffing on advertising. A little fine art meets our art. What was that quote that used to hang on my office wall ... something like welcome to our everyday struggle between capitalism and grace.

Steve's looking for submissions - so, grab your fountain pen and your issue of Ad Busters and get to it. Here's a little inspiration from his site:

"Where I will spread this couplet on spaceships and title it:
Flirt.
Taxi. Or
Atomic Burrito."

• Indexed: Copywriter turned comic Jessica Hagy recently published her first book of clever (sometimes zany) Venn diagrams. I just got the book in the mail - and, it's fab, but there's lots to enjoy on demand, too:
  • The Indexed Blog
  • Jessica guest blogging on Penguin Books
  • And, her Change This Venn manifesto

My faves:

Blogging Anniversary

This  month marks my fourth year yapping away online.

Three blogs and over a thousand posts later, I still log on a few times a week to share an opinion, a great find or a little wisdom earned during the last 10 years of surviving clients / bosses / and impossible deadlines. I still get excited to see new comments in my inbox and watch the traffic numbers with more than a little ego in play.

I've made new friends (some of whom I know in the real world, too), reconnected with old ones, and have been challenged by peers I genuinely respect. I always have offline conversation from the people I'm connected to online. And, all this banter has definitely had a positive impact on my career.

Every now and again, someone asks me why I do this. Why I invest time in talking about work when I'm not at work. Since bloggers love bullet points, I'll answer that in my native medium:

• I've never in my life taken a job I was actually qualified for... but, I try not to let that stand in my way. That's actually why I started this blog in the first place. I knew I wanted to do well at the advertising agency - for my clients as much as for myself - but with a background in technology marketing and PR, I didn't even know what I didn't know. So, I bought some books, signed up for way-too-many RSS feeds (now brutally edited down) and started up conversations anywhere I could... and, the easiest place to do that (particularly as an AE) happened to be right here.


• I'm used to having a wildly unfair share of voice. When I was a kid, I found it easier to get along with grownups. When I went to a wildly liberal college, I was a loud-mouthed, boot-straps Republican (although I have long-since gone the other way). When I worked at a traditional agency, all I wanted to talk about was Interactive. I'm the consummate contrarian. Which, when paired with a little confidence and an ability to go on (and on) = an unequal share of voice. So, naturally, the 1% rule, the existence of trackbacks, the ability to be considered an 'expert' voice for little more than a clever soapbox ... well, it's all very motivating and appealing. 


• I really do have an opinion about just about everything. Where are we going to go to dinner? Would my hair look good with blue highlights? Should the logo be bigger? Who will win the next season of Top Chef? I have an opinion about all of it. I'm madly, annoyingly decisive. Online, that's personality. Offline, it's didactic. I try to get all of the fight out of me right here!

So why? I get more from it than I put in. It's easy. And, it keeps me nicer in the real world.

Here's to another 4 years.

Internet Famous

Another great find sent along by friend Marti: Parsons Grad school is offering a class called Internet Famous.*

Students are charged with creating content to release on the Web. Content designed to get high traffic, pass along ... and well fabulous Internet famousness. The class is graded by custom Internet software that catalogs sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Technorati, Alexa, Google to evaluate the overall popularity of the content (in a single refined score).

What I love about this is how targeted it is at experiencing the way things really work. At the very essence of how universally accessible the Internet is. That you can just dive in with a little reading and smidge of fiddling around and really DO it, not just have someone tell you about an abstraction.

One of my biggest frustrations in interviewing AEs in the last few years is how theoretical their online knowledge is - as far as actual technology, ethnography, or even simple user experience.

At my last job, I test-drove these great interview questions from David Armano and was disappointed to get a combination of 'No's and blank stares. Even among digital natives, it's surprising how many advertising/marketing people aren't really using/creating on/diving deep in the Internet so much as marketing to it. If you do blog, read blogs, use social networks, tag, or otherwise live online, talk about it in interviews. You have hands-on experience in a medium that a lot of your peers surf on by...

*Cool article from Time