paulgillin.com

Early this week, candy maker Skittles rocked the media by giving over its entire home page to a list of Twitter postings labeled with the #skittles hash tag. The experiment initially provoked excitement, then doubt and finally alarm as pranksters used the opportunity to post all manner of negative and even obscene comments that had very little to do with the fruit candy.

As the volume of trash talk swelled, Mars Snackfood US pulled down the Twitter search page and replaced it with a Facebook profile. Today the site features a Wikipedia entry. Skittles’ branding consists of an overlay window that links to various references to the product in social media outposts. Basically, Mars reconfigured the brand’s website as a package of consumer-generated content.

A lot of people are trashing Mars for this bold experiment. “Disastrous” says Apryl Duncan on About.com. “Gimmicky” says VentureBeat. “Humiliating disaster” says SmartCompany. While some people are praising Mars for originality, the early consensus is that this campaign is not a good idea for the Skittles brand.

Bold Move

 

I beg to differ. While Mars certainly could have better anticipated the frat-boy efforts to undermine the program, the Skittles experiment is a bold statement about where the company is taking its marketing tactics. Full disclosure: I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the Mars marketers on a paid basis over the past year. Unlike many other corporations I’ve encountered, these people get it. Sure, they’re still feeling their way through the process of working with uncensored customer conversations, but they’re on the right track and they’re taking the right risks.

 

In January, Mars held a day-long offsite meeting with more than 100 of its global marketers to talk about word-of-mouth marketing. I was there, along with many of the company’s agency and branding partners. I was impressed with the commitment the company is making to understanding and working with social media. While many of their peers still regard online forums with a mixture of suspicion and disgust, the Mars marketers see it as an opportunity. They’re also fully aware of the risks. One breakout session at the meeting was devoted almost entirely to an analysis of Johnson & Johnson’s Motrin Moms fiasco.

There’s no question Mars could have thought through this experiment somewhat better. Twitter was a bad place to start and under the circumstances, some filtering would have been appropriate. However, the whole concept of giving over the Skittles Web presence to customer conversations is daring and innovative. It’s unfortunate that some of the same people who trash brands for not being more hip to social media are now trashing Mars for almost being too hip.

Proof in the Pudding

Also, look at the coverage this story has generated: The Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Fast Company, CNET and the list goes on and on. If you believe Oscar Wilde’s theory that “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” then this campaign is a hit. If Skittles sales don’t jump 15% in the next month, I’ll eat a bag of the candy, including the bag.

Experimentation is central to new media marketing and negative reactions to bold ideas are nothing to be feared. Nearly three years ago, General Motors invited visitors to stitch together their own video ads for the Chevrolet Tahoe SUV. About 15% of the videos people created were negative, prompting critics to call the campaign a disaster. But inside General Motors the project was considered an unqualified success. The Tahoe hit 30% market share shortly after the Web promotion began, outpacing its closest competitor two to one.

The Skittles campaign is outside-the-box thinking. Despite its shortcomings, it deserves praise.

How Not to be a Key Online Influencer

David Henderson tells a jaw-dropping story of how a PR executive shot himself in the foot with a Twitter message that insulted a big client. This is a public forum, people.

Sephora Helps Selection Process With Mobile User Reviews

The beauty products retailer has had success with user reviews on its website, so now it’s going mobile. In-store promotions encourage shoppers to access the website for customer ratings of products on the shelves in front of them. Amazon is also testing a service that enables shoppers to snap photos of merchandise in retail stores and quickly order them on Amazon. The lines between physical and virtual shopping continue to blur.

This Contest Blows

Smule has the winners of a video contest it calls “This Contest Blows.” Entrants were asked to demonstrate their facility with the first software application that turns the iPhone into a musical instrument. There were many creative submissions and some true virtuosity. Winners got a $1,000 prize.

A Toolset for Learning 2009

Here’s a nice list of the latest and most popular software tools that can be applied to education. Some are well known (PowerPoint), but the author also offers alternatives that offer specialized features or are free.

The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook: The Most Egregious Sins on Social Media Sites, Exposed

Tamar Weinberg has a terrific list of sins to avoid on social networks, blogs, YouTube, Twitter and other services. Bottom line: be genuine, not promotional. Deliver useful information and never steal, conceal, spam or flame. More than 200 comments and pingbacks.

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website

Cool and comprehensive list of tools and techniques for adding all kinds of gadgets, widgets, players and feeds to a website.

The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council held an informative seminar at Communispace this morning entitled “Getting Started with Social Media — Lessons from the Front Lines.” I took notes of the comments by the four speakers and pulled out a few highlights to share:

Perry Allison (left), Vice President of Social Marketing Innovation at Eons.com talked about the value of gathering detailed feedback from a small number of people. Referring to a project that Eons conducted with Quaker Oats, she said she was initially concerned that only 80 members of the baby boomer site offered comments. “I thought Quaker wouldn’t be excited about 80 members, because this is a company that advertises on television to millions. But the brand manager was ecstatic because of the feedback and insight they were getting.”

It’s the engagement that gets clients energized, she said. “Advertising currently drives more revenue, but what gets brands most excited is engagement marketing.”

---

Allison offered a list of common mistakes that companies make in creating online communities:  “Overloading people with information, not having a clear concept of the goals, not defining a clear value proposition, using marketing speak, and viewing the destination as a thing rather than a process.”  That last point is particularly important.  Markers have been taught to treat campaigns as projects with defined beginnings and ends.  But customer communities, if well managed, can last for years.  The value is in the process, not the deliverable.

---

A couple of the panelists commented on the dilemma facing mainstream media organizations today as their power is eroded by the influence of new sources.

Pam Johnston (left), Vice President of Member Experience at Gather.com, brought an interesting background to the discussion.  She spent more than 15 years in television news before joining Gather, which means she understands the mainstream media mindset.  The most disruptive force in social media is its ability to define new trusted sources, she said. “People are looking for a trusted source and it may not be the Boston Globe. It may be your neighbor.

“I can tell you from experience that traditional media don’t want to be a hub,” she said. “They have a top-down mentality: ‘If you want it, you have to come to my site to get it.’”

---

Dan Kennedy, Assistant Professor at the Northeastern School Of Journalism and author of the Media Nation blog, was even more blunt about the challenges facing mainstream media. “The question of how news organizations are going to monetize anything they’re doing is the question facing the industry right now. The Boston Globe may have the largest audience its’ ever had and it’s losing $1 million a week,” he said.

---

Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, offered a five-step approach to getting started with social media:

1. Start a blog. It’s a living breathing thing.

2. Create interesting content. If you do that, people will link to you.

3. Publish everywhere: Use Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and any other channel you have available.

4. Optimize for search engines. If you’ve got a good pithy title (Top 10 Tips, anyone?), then publicize it. Make it easy for people to post your content right to Twitter, Digg, Facebook and other destinations.

5. Measure it. Look at your traffic, page views, unique visitors, time spent on site. That’s how you know whether your hard work is paying off.

---

Sound easy? Creating remarkable content isn’t instinctive for everyone. That’s why Gather’s Johnston was dismayed when Burger King backed down last week on its audacious “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign on Facebook. The program got lots of attention for originality, even if its premise – members “unfriended” others in exchange for free hamburgers – was controversial. Burger King yanked the campaign last week over complaints that it was encouraging antisocial behavior.

“It was probably the most successful campaign Facebook has ever done,” she said. “I thought it was funny and memorable. It got people talking and those are important qualities for a memorable campaign.”

---

On the always popular issue of return on investment, Halligan had this to say: “Most of our customers create a LinkedIn group or Facebook page and see, on average, a 13% month-over-month growth in leads. I’d advise jumping into this. You don’t need venture backing to start a Twitter account. If you’ve got time and energy and something to say, then do it.”

---

Finally, Halligan got my vote for best quote with this one: “”Marketers are lions looking for elephants in the jungle. But the elephants have all left the jungle and they’re at watering holes out on the savannah. Those watering holes are called Google and Facebook and Twitter and Gather and Eons.”

So get your tail out of the jungle.

From my weekly newsletter. To subscribe, just fill out the short form to the right.

At this time of year, many publishers and bloggers do one of two things: look ahead at the future or back at the year just ending. Since Joe Pulizzi, Fast Company and iMedia Connection did a great job at social media predictions, I thought I’d rummage through my digital archives and offer my completely unscientific list of what made this year special for me.

Best Social Media Tool - That’s easy. It’s Twitter, the super-simple, deceptively powerful micro-blogging service that has people sharing their lives in 140-character increments. If you still don’t get Twitter, I feel your pain, but anyone who wants to practice marketing in the new media world needs to get with the program. If you need help, I’ll get on the phone with your people and tell them why it’s so important.

Best Social Media Disaster Story — Johnson & Johnson’s well-intentioned Motrin video turned into a PR nightmare thanks to — you guessed it — Twitter. To its credit, J&J earnestly listened, but the marketers’ failure to anticipate negativity and their eagerness to respond too hastily made this a bigger problem than it had to be.

Best New Face – Chris Brogan blew out of the pack to become one of the world’s top bloggers thanks to his prodigious output and shrewd self-promotion. He’ll soon hit 30,000 followers on Twitter and the 14,600 subscribers to his blog are a thing of wonder. I don’t know when the guy finds time to sleep. I’m fortunate to work with him on the New Marketing Summit conference and have a chance to learn from his success.

Best Book – Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li broke new ground by attempting to apply research and metrics to social media marketing. The book also told some great stories. Conflict of interest prevents me from choosing my own Secrets of Social Media Marketing, but that shouldn’t stop you from buying it!

Best New Software Application — In the ranks of software that tries to bring order to the barely contained chaos that is Twitter, TweetDeck does the best job I’ve seen.

Best Fall to Earth – Forrester reported that corporate enthusiasm for blogging was beginning to wane. That’s not surprising; most big companies do a lousy job of it. Expect retooling and new growth in the new year.

Best Viral Marketing Success – Cindy Gordon told just seven people about Universal Orlando’s plans to launch a Harry Potter theme park. Word of mouth spread the story to 350 million others in a matter of a couple of days. David Meerman Scott has the story.

Best New Product – The Apple iPhone 3G became the first true mobile Internet device and sold 3 million units in its first month. Expect plenty of new competition in 2009, which is only going to be good for consumers.Nokia has yet to play its cards.

Best Podcast – In the archives of the MediaBlather program that I do with David Strom, there were too many good interviews to choose just one. Among my favorites of 2008 were Mommycast, Brains on Fire/Fiskars, IDG’s Pat McGovern, Eric Schwartzman, Shel Israel and Brian Halligan of HubSpot. I think the most interesting podcast I listened to all year was Schwartzman’s interview with search-engine optimization expert Russell Wright.

Most Useful Blog Entry – Interactive Insights Group created a superlist of organizations using social media. You can find practically any case study on the Web by starting there. We have yet to hear what Tamar Weinberg has up her sleeve, though! Her 2007 superlist was a thing of beauty.

Best Article on the Media – The International Herald Tribune’s “Web Ushers in Age of Ambient Intimacy” explained the visceral appeal of Twitter and Facebook with admirable clarity. Eric Alterman’s epic examination of the collapse of the newspaper industry in The New Yorker was magnificent in its detail and insight.

Best Just For Fun – The most popular item in my newsletter is the squib about some crazy new Web resource we’ve found. Here are two of my favorites of 2008:

People always celebrate success, but they don’t give enough credit to really creative failure. Thank goodness, then, for The Fail Blog, a photographic tribute to failures big and small. Don’t look at this site in the office. Your colleagues will wonder why you’re laughing so hard. And don’t, under any circumstances, view it while you’re drinking milk, if you know what I mean…

Buddy Greene is the Yo-Yo Ma of the harmonica, and in this amazing clip from a Carnegie Hall concert, he will change forever your impressions of the capability and range of this tiny instrument.

Traditional Media Hit Harder Than In Past Recessions

It used to be that three mainstream media channels – newspapers, radio and magazines – reliably predicted the economy’s decline into a recession and its recovery. That all changed about three years ago. Newspapers and magazines fell while the economy was rising and show no sign of anticipating a recovery. The results, writes Erik Sass:

While softening ad revenue anticipated the two previous economic downturns by about a year, in the most recent case, the slowdown for magazines, newspapers and radio began about three years before. In addition, the declines have already proven to be steeper in this pre-recession period than at the height of the previous ones. This suggests that all three traditional media, suffering from both secular and macroeconomic trends, are poised to suffer unprecedented losses in the economic downturn that is now unfolding.

Magazine Ad Pages Drop, Holiday Season Looks Grim

OMG, these numbers are terrible. At least we’re all in this together. Quoting:

On Oct. 28, the Conference Board announced that its consumer confidence index had plummeted to an all-time low of about 38 out of 100, a drop of over one-third from its level of 61.4 in September. The expectations index–which evaluates consumer sentiment about the future–went even lower, dropping from 61.5 to 35.5. Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board’s research center, said the decline in the confidence index was “the lowest reading on record” since the index began tracking consumer attitudes in 1985

Macy’s said it will eliminate all magazine advertising in the first half of 2009, although its holiday marketing budget is still largely intact. Subsequently, The New York Times reported that Neiman’s specialty retail segment–including Neiman Marcus Stores and Bergdorf Goodman–saw sales tumble 27.6% in October, while Nordstrom is down 15.7%, and Target fell 4.8%.

Online Retailers Tightening Belts

Here’s one explanation for the story above. Quoting:

• In a Shop.org holiday survey, 30% of online retail marketers said they were trimming marketing budgets, while 16% said they were reducing promotional spending.
• 45% of retailers said their budgets for free-shipping promotions were either significantly or somewhat higher compared to last year.
• Forrester projects sales this holiday season will grow at the slowest rate ever, 12% vs. 21% a year ago.
• 45% of online consumers plan to buy less overall this holiday due to uncertainty about the economy, up from 20% in 2007.
• A full 21% of consumers plan to shop primarily or entirely online this season, up from 19% last year. And 24% of total dollars spent this season are expected to be spent online, compared with 22% last year.

Marketing Executives Networking Group Survey Finds Social Media Practices Still in Infancy Stages

A survey last month and found that 67% of respondents consider themselves beginners at using social media for marketing purposes. Additionally, more than 87% of respondents are not regularly measuring the ROI of their social media marketing efforts. “

The Viral Video Marketing Dilemma

Metrics expert Mark Ghuneim suggests that we still have a long way to go in evolving our thinking about viral video metrics beyond view counts. Marketers are beginning to think more holistically about how to measure success. Quoting:

According to a recent FEED Company study, some 70% of ad-agency and media-buying executives plan to increase budgets for viral video marketing in 2009. In addition, 72% of ad-agency executives and media buyers say their clients are “interested” or “very interested” in using viral video as an integral part of their marketing campaigns.

“Favoriting,” commenting, linking to, embedding, social network amplification and other action all constitute a level of user attention that must somehow be accounted for and given appropriate value.

In addition, a marketing executive would also want to know how users were discovering their video, as well as how quickly the view counts were growing. The velocity of consumption and adoption is an important indicator as well as factors beyond the standard impression and stream data. For example, are bloggers talking about the video? Are users micro-blogging about the video?

The Vote: A Victory for Social Media, Too

BusinessWeek is all breathless about the energy that social networks brought to election day, and there are some good stories/examples here. However, also listen to NPR’s story on turnout levels for a more sobering view. Turnout was good for the US, but we still lag far behind other democracies.

Top Five Ways to Piss off a Blogger

With tongue only partly in cheek, Peter Shankman lists Stupid PR Mistakes that annoy bloggers. Most of these have been annoying reporters for years!

Google Aims To Predict Flu Outbreaks

Privacy advocates may blanch, but I think this is a totally cool way to mine patterns from search behavior that contributes to the common good. What an innovative idea!

LinkedIn cuts 10 percent of its workforce

With an average member earning about $110,000 a year and more than $100 million in investment capital in the bank, you’d think LinkedIn would be sitting pretty. Yet the company is laying off about 36 people. Smart move. Don’t let VC love make you fat and happy.

Yahoo’s Yang Has No Regrets — He Should

Om Malik has little nice to say about Jerry Yang’s stewardship of Yahoo. Yang now basically admits he should have sold to Microsoft when he had the chance and the collapse of a partnership with Google is particularly painful. With the economy now in the tank, what’s next?

• WOMMA’s Influencer Handbook

  The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has come up with a compact and useful set of guidelines for marketing to social media influencers. It’s available for review and comment through Oct. 20, after which it will be published.

  tags: daily_reading

• MediaPost Publications – Imagination

  Here is a passionate argument for a new form of engagement marketing in which the marketer’s task is to find where the customers are already going and to meet them there. Unlike a lot of social media enthusiasts, Tobaccowala sees a need for conventional as well as conversational marketing. The trick is to achieve a blend that invites interaction that enables customers to market to each other.

  tags: daily_reading

• Is Your Blog Leaking Trade Secrets?

  More than 20% of US companies have investigated “the exposure of confidential, sensitive or private information via a blog or message board posting in the past 12 months,” according to Forrester Research. Data is leaking out of companies at increasing rates as Web 2.0 tools spread and media becomes more portable.

  tags: daily_reading, security

• Five things social networks can’t easily do

  My Podcast partner, David Strom, has some practical insight on the limitations of social networks. The problem of separately work and personal identities is particularly annoying for marketers.

  tags: daily_reading

• SpokenWord.org

  Doug Kaye, the innovator who came up with the IT Conversations podcast site, continues to pursue his goal of capturing important events in audio. What’s “important?” Well, in true Web 2.0 spirit, Doug leaves that in the eye of the beholder. SpokenWord.org is a new effort to catalog all kinds of spoken content.

  tags: daily_reading, podcasting

• Nat Torkington – Open Source Therapy

  In this fast-paced and hilarious audio keynote from the O’Reilly Open Source Conference, Nat Torkington contrasts the major components of the open source stack to teenage children at various stages of development. It’s 15 minutes well spent.

  tags: daily_reading, open_source

• MapTube

  Cool maps mashup site that lets you combine two maps; for example, a map of the London underground overlaid on a map of the city of London.

  tags: daily_reading, mashups

• Protect Your Company’s Stock Prices From Noise Through Social Media | WATBlog.com

  Sound advice from a blog in India about how to make your story heard amid media noise

  tags: daily_reading, blog_business

While the venture capital picture might not be so rosy in New England, there was still some interesting technology to see during a demo session at Nantucket Conference on Friday:

Zink is a printing technology developed by some former Polaroid engineers that eliminates the need for ink by embedding dye crystals in the paper. It’s basically an evolution of the Polaroid photo technology. This makes it possible to produce printers that are an order of magnitude smaller than those based on jets or ribbons. Wendy Frey Caswell, CEO, showed off a printer that fits in your shirt pocket and produces beautiful 2”X3” color images. The initial target market is cell phone users who want to print the photos they take with their phones’ integrated cameras.

I don’t know if that market is very big, but there are some interesting potential applications of this technology. It could be used to create point-of-sale ticket printers, for example, or to produce much more sophisticated and detailed ID tags. Larger but still portable versions of Zink printers could be used to deliver prints instantaneously to people at theme parks and events or to produce printed collateral on the spot. I’d personally like to be able to print out business cards when I’m on the road and run out my supply. Zink paper can also be produced in continuous rolls, making it easier to print banners and posters.

Zink will leave it to partners to figure out applications while it focuses on producing technology.

——————————-

Turbine showed off its new Lord of the Rings multi-player game, which just hit the shelves. I was impressed with the scope of work that was needed to create this product. It includes more than 3,000 monsters and 2,000 actors, each of which had to be designed by hand. The company has 25 engineers on staff, but outsources a lot of its development, as is typical in the games business. There are more than 40 developers in China, for example. The whole package probably involved more than 500 person-years of development.

Turbine CEO Jeff Anderson said early results are promising. More than 200,000 people have signed up for the online service that back-ends the game, and conversion rates are running at 70% for the $15/month service. The company is also enabling viral marketing to promote the product. Gamers are already posting customized characters and scenes on the Web

——————————-

PublicDisplay is a small Providence, RI-based software startup (really; it has no website yet) that’s building a prototype of what’s often called the semantic Web (I hate that term; no one can understand it). Its service filters lists of information into a format that can be imported into a calendar or spreadsheet. CEO Bill O’Farrell used his hectic personal schedule as a demo. His son’s spring lacrosse schedule is posted on a website, but the flat text document can’t be easily imported into his calendar. PublicDisplay parses the schedule and turns it into an iCal file of individual entries. You could potentially do the same thing with a financial report, price list or any other tabular data. PublicDisplay hopes to have a beta service by late this year.