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Brand Of The Day

May 7th, 2012

Part of this online journey I enjoy so much is the interaction I have with you. For my end, I try to be open and transparent as we explore this brave new world of branding and online communication together and you’ve held up your end of the bargain with enthusiasm, support, and the appropriate virtual ruler to my knuckles when I’ve made a mistake or gone too far.

So allow me to let you in on what I’ve been thinking about lately:

As I see it, there are two keys to success in this blog thing — having something to say and having a critical mass of people to say it to. The rest of the requirements — modest technical proficiency and an ability to write reasonably well, for example, are as much cost of entry as a decent computer and an Internet connection. But to have people to communicate with — ah — that’s the beauty part.

So it should come as no surprise that I spend part of every week thinking about ways to attract new readers and continue to please and delight my current readers (that’s you!).

Here’s my latest thought: We are going to post a daily branding tip on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. Each tip will be titled (brand-tip-of-the-day is the working title), numbered (87 of 365, e.g.), and include a link to the website where they’ll be compiled. At the end of year one we should have chronicled 365 tips and an untold number of interesting comments that will be repurposed as a book, flashcards, a calendar, or who knows what. Plus, each posting will allow interested readers to sign up for more information that will create additional readers for this blog as well. Of course, I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going so you can use a similar (but different) technique to enhance your online promotions.

With all this in mind, I started working on compiling the initial 365 branding aphorisms. The first 67 came easily. “This is a breeze,” I thought. “I’ll be done in no time.” Of course, pride goeth before a fall.

The next 40 were tough. It took me hours and hours to reach 100. I flashed on the story of the guy who wants to lift a 2,000-pound bull onto his shoulders. He started with a baby calf, which is relatively light, and then continued to pick up the animal as it grew, day by day, pound by pound, into a bull. But even with his incremental approach, there’s a reason why no one can lift a full-grown bovine.

But I stuck with the project just the same. The harder it got, the more resolute I became about slogging through. And every so often I’d come up with a new way of looking at the problem that rewarded me with numerous entries.

How about citing other famous people’s thoughts on branding? Oscar Wilde, Bill Bernbach, Mike Tesch, Steve Jobs, and others much smarter and more eloquent than me gave me a gaggle. How about highlighting great brand lines throughout history? BMW, GE, Evernote, and more also increased my census.

As you would imagine, some days are better than others. But, because of tried and true mantras such as “any job worth doing is worth doing well,” and “you can accomplish anything if you just stay with it,” I kept plugging. And the fact that I’ve spent the last 30 years creating great brands for our clients did give me a lot to draw on. Maybe I’ve even reached the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell suggests is necessary for true mastery of any activity.

But with the finish line well in sight, I’m starting to run out of steam. Which is why I thought of you. After all, the first word of social media is “social.” So why not reach out to my legion of faithful readers (that’s you!) for help? I’m sure you’ve got a few great branding tips to share, after all, I wrote an article on Bill Talbert’s 10 great micro branding tips and he’s already given me 10 more for the next article. If we crowd source branding tips, we should be able to easily surpass the additional posts needed.

So here are the rules of the game: All posts must be original or attributed to the original source. Each must be no longer than 76 characters including spaces, quote marks, and other hazarai because we need space for the title, post count, link, and room for retweeting. They need to be about branding. They need to be profound, clever, brilliant, useful, educational or hilarious. In the case of duplicate entries, I’ll credit the first person who sends the idea.

Send them to me via the comments link at the bottom of the blog or as a private email. Send them as you think of them or compiled on one page. But send them. Because together we can learn from one another and build something of value.

Thank you!

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Starbucks Envy

April 16th, 2012

Eddie and Bill were sitting at an outdoor table at Scotty’s Landing having lunch last Friday. I had run over to the bayside shack right after my downtown lunch meeting to chat with a potential client and then needed to zip out to check on a video production in Coral Gables. But I had a couple of minutes before I had to be at the edit suite so I finished my meeting and walked over to say hi to my friends.

Bill was in shorts and sporting two days of stubble. Ed was in khakis and sneakers. Ed had a beer. Bill was drinking wine. Neither one was looking at their smartphones. And did I mention that it was 1:30 p.m. on a workday?

“Look at the two of you – happy as pigs in mangos, enjoying a beautiful day with nowhere to go, I said. “Man, I want to be you when I grow up.”

I told them about Starbucks envy.

You know about Starbucks envy. That’s when you go to Starbucks and see those people just sitting there in the sun. Usually they have a bike leaning against their table or they’re there with their dog. They’re reading something on their iPad or thumbing through The New York Times. Not a care in the world and clearly nowhere to rush off to — just enjoying being there.  They remind me of Satchel Paige’s old quote, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.”

When I go to Starbucks, it’s usually to meet someone on the run — I’m meeting Marcos at the Starbucks in the Grove at 9 a.m. or Kim at the Starbucks on 69th Street at two in the afternoon. We’ll grab a cup of coffee or tea, share pleasantries for a moment or two, and then get down to work — exchanging ideas and layouts, strategizing next steps — and then run off to our next meeting. Of course, while we’re meeting we’re fielding text messages and calls, mostly about where we’re going next, who we’re going to meet, and what time we’ll be getting together.

But just to sit there and take in the scene, with nothing pressing to run off to… wow. My desires might be simple but that kind of takes my breath away.

So anyway, I told Bill and Ed about my fantasy — my Starbucks envy. Ed laughed and told me a story:

“I was walking through Coconut Grove one night and there were a couple of guys playing music on the street corner. They had a guitar case out in front of them and a few people gathered around and they were having a great time. I thought, ‘I want to do that, too.’ So that weekend I went out and bought a guitar and have been taking weekly guitar lessons ever since. I’m not so good yet but I’m giving myself 10 years because I want to be just like Turkel.” ( -PAUSE- Hey wait a minute, that’s me.)

Here’s the funny part. Until Ed mentioned that it was me and my buddy he stumbled upon playing music on that street corner in the Grove, I was listening to his story thinking, “I want to do that, too.” It wasn’t until he mentioned who he saw playing that evening that it dawned on me that I already do that.

It’s more than the old paradigm to “be careful what you wish for because you might get it.” In this case, it’s about realizing what you’ve already got, what the perception is of what you’ve got, and what your perception is of what else is out there. The grass is always greener, indeed.

And it’s not just a good thing to think about when you’re evaluating your life. It’s also a good exercise to do when you’re thinking about your brand. After all, a brand is not what you think of your company, it’s what the employees and your customers — and your potential customers — think about it, and what they feel about it. And it’s very possible that those two viewpoints are not in sync.

Kodak thought it stood for the finest in photography until its customers cared only about digital photography and Kodak found itself in bankruptcy. It might not have happened quite that quickly, but it did happen.

Palm thought its brand stood for PDAs until it realized that RIM’s Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone had stolen its market share.

And Blackberry, who thought its brand was de rigueur for portable communication in the corporate boardroom, is quickly discovering that its customers no longer agree.

Even powerhouse Google, which preemptively purchased YouTube to maintain their superiority in search technology, is now concerned that Facebook and the voice-recognition company Nuance, will take their place in both search and ad sales.

So whether you’re dashing to a meeting, playing music on a street corner or piloting the marketing activities of some of the world’s most important companies, remember that when it comes to your brand, perception IS reality. Even at Starbucks.

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But Enough About Me. What Do You Think About Me?

April 4th, 2012

Creative designer David Kustin was sitting comfortably behind a steaming cup of coffee at our conference table. He was starting to tell me about his background and how he got into the branding business.

“I’m a South Florida native,” he said. (I’m a South Florida native too, I thought. Wonder where he was born.)

“…went to FIU,” he continued. (FIU? My son is about to graduate from FIU. My wife got her master’s degree at FIU. I’m on their President’s Circle board. That reminds me, I need to call them.)

“…and then I moved out to LA…” (Hey, my sister lived in LA. My friend Brian lives there too. I’ve got to go to LA soon to try and sell our new TV show project. Oh yeah, I’ve got to call Michael and Chris about that project. Should I write that down so I don’t forget?)

That’s when it hit me. During Dave’s passionate and interesting pitch, I was thinking about myself and about things that concerned me. Am I really that selfish and self-centered? And if I am, are others as well? How often have I been making a sales presentation or just having a simple conversation where the person I was talking to wasn’t hearing what I was saying because they were too busy hearing what they were thinking?

How often have you suffered from the same problem?

For the next week I did an experiment. In every conversation and interaction, I would try to focus my entire attention on the words and responses of the person I was talking with. If they’d interrupt me when I was talking, I’d stop speaking immediately — even if I was in the middle of a sentence or a word. I’d just stop dead in my tracks, mid-word, and listen.

Rather than tell my own story or try to further my own agenda, I would only ask questions designed to get the other person to talk. And when I needed to write an email or a note to someone, I would give careful consideration to what the other person cared about and crafted my words only to embrace their interests.

Want to know what I discovered?

In every single instance, the person I was talking to happily filled in the gaps in my spiel and told me more about their activities and interests. Even when I stopped talking mid-word, not one person noticed, stopped, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I interrupted you. Please continue.” Instead they went on their way, chattering happily about whatever subject they found interesting. I learned more than I ever thought possible about Bruce Springsteen, how local government works, using Pinterest, the future of health care, and the difference between ophthalmologists and optometrists.

The comedian Gary Shandling built an entire career on the simple question, “How’s my hair look?” But my casual research would suggest that a better way to build your career would be to compliment somebody else’s hair and ask them how they keep it so shiny, manageable, full, dark, thick, wavy, straight, curly, beautiful, glossy, or whatever, and then shut up and listen.

If my theory is correct, it’s little wonder that the typical lines overheard at networking events all sound like this:

 “You look great.”

“Love your hair.”

“Love your tie.”

“You lose weight?”

“How’re things?”

“How’re your folks?”

“How’re your kids?”

“How’s your dog?”

“How’s business?”

“How’s everything?”

“Let’s do breakfast / lunch / dinner.”

“Call me.”

“Email me.”

“Text me.”

“Have your service call my service.”

“Gimme your card.”

Each line is just a little bon mot tossed off with the sole intention of reassuring the listener that the speaker cares passionately about them. After all, they say that the two keys to a compelling presentation are honesty and sincerity…and when you can fake that, the rest is easy.

Pardon me if I sound cynical — that’s not my intention. What I want to make crystal clear is that whether we’re having a conversation with one person at a party, Facebooking to hundreds, Tweeting to thousands or sending advertising messages to millions, the way to connect is to make sure we’re talking to our audiences and focusing on what they care most about.

Come to think about it, that’s why the first chapter and branding rule in my latest book Building Brand Value is titled, “All About Them.” And if you keep this in mind when crafting your communications, you’re on the right path to getting the response you’re hoping for, too.

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You Must Be Present To Win.

March 12th, 2012

Most mornings my running group meets bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 5:45 AM. Of course, even at that peaceful time in the early morning we have to watch out for oncoming traffic. No matter how sleepy I am, nothing’s more bracing than the slipstream of speeding cars racing by. So I’m very tuned into the commuters that zoom past.

Here’s the odd thing: Even at that hour, the people who zip by are almost always on their cell phones.

Not so strange, of course, except that it’s a quarter to six in the morning! Who the hell are they talking to, anyway?

At the movies, at the gym, right outside my office window, even at lunch today while I was writing this post (see photo), almost everyone’s busy staring at their smart phones and exercising their thumbs.

Who in the world are they communicating with?

This morning on my drive to work I almost killed a bike rider who was looking at his phone while pedaling directly into oncoming traffic.

What in the world was he reading that was so important?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m just as guilty as the people I bitch about. I look forward to stopping at red lights just so I can read my email even though I already checked it two or three blocks before. And twice this week I had to apologize in meetings because I was reading something on my iPad instead of paying attention to what was being said around me.

What I can’t figure out is why the come-hither call of our online networks is so damn enticing. Sure, I’ve read about the little dopamine rush we get each time our devices beckon, but is that really stronger than the limbic charge of honest to goodness face-to-face interaction?

Apparently so, as so many of us stand on virtual street corners just waiting for our digital Johns to drive up. “Going my way, big boy?” indeed.

Knowing what a pathetic digital junkie I am, I try very hard to corral my inner Zen master and be present. I turn my phone face down in meetings and blacken my computer screen when I’m taking phone calls at my desk. But I still find I’m slowly and inexorably sucked back into online exchanges with people who aren’t even in the room.

By the way, please spare me the ADD/multitasking argument about how you get so much more accomplished because you can do so many things at once. Study after study proves what we already knew deep down inside to begin with — multitasking is simply the au courant definition for doing many different things at the same time badly.

Believe me, the problem’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. With the proliferation of digital devices and the ubiquitousness of networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, et al, we’re all going to be harder and harder pressed to resist the sirens’ call to dash our ships on the digital shoals. Eventually, new social constructs and procedures will emerge to deal with the new normal, but like most evolutionary changes, that’ll take time that we can’t really afford.

So for now, a valiant fight against the persistent tide is what’s called for. To rally my internal troops to action, I use the battle cry, “You must be present to win.” After all, if I’m not paying full attention, how can I even know what I’m missing — let alone come up with the best response or course of action?

If you’ve decided to fight the same fight against persistent inattention, I hope my mantra helps you, too. And even though I’d love to discuss it with you further, my phone just lit up and I gotta go.

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How To Generate Buzz

December 20th, 2011

In today’s media-savvy world, one of the most important things you can do to increase your opportunities is to generate buzz. There are a number of activities you can undertake to increase your public perception and generate the kind of buzz that has the potential to expose you and your brand to new revenue opportunities. I say, “has the potential” because the unfortunate reality of this method is that there are no guarantees that generating buzz will generate business. But the other realities are that 1) there is more chance that increased buzz will present you with chances to generate business and 2) you can do a lot of this work yourself so at least your activities don’t have to be expensive.

All of your activities will relate around media — specifically you’ll be dealing with both public media (newspaper, radio, TV news shows, etc.) and private media (blogs and social media sites). Interestingly, the two have a symbiotic relationship — public media will increase your blog readership and your blogging will entice public media to cover you.

Creating the actual blog is easy. Just go to www.wordpress.com and register for a free account. Then contact an administrator to build your initial site and host it for you. You could do that yourself but since you most likely have no idea what you’re doing, I suggest you find someone to help you. You want to look for someone who is knowledgeable, responsive, and inexpensive.

Setting the blog up is the easy part. What’s harder is having something worthwhile to say day after day and week after week. There’s not much I can do to help you with this except to suggest that you’ll grow into it over time as you experiment with what works and what doesn’t and as you begin to find your own unique voice. Things I can tell you from experience is that consistency is critical, shorter posts (two pages max) are better than complicated, multi-part documents, and a personal view or revelation is better received than a pure business-like essay. Most important, be sure to write about things that both interest and help your audience instead of posting updates about what you or your company has been up to lately.

I’m too impatient to wait for readers to find my blog on their own, and I’m neither popular enough nor presumptuous enough to believe people care about what I write enough to search me down, so I chose to send my blog out to an ever-growing list of readers. This adds some expense and effort but I believe it’s well worth it in reader volume. Still, most bloggers just post their data and hope the rest of the world beats a path to their literary mousetrap. I know many bloggers think my technique is akin to spamming but it works for me.

Because my entire strategy is built around getting people to read my blog (and then hire me to speak at their conferences and then hire my firm to build their brands), I use the other social media sites (specifically LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) to generate traffic to my blog. For that reason, I accept almost every single person who invites me to join their SM rosters and I post to those sites with the goal of generating interest in who I am and what I write about.

To make life a little easier, I use www.ping.fm to send my messages to all three sites simultaneously. To make my Twitter management as painless as possible, I use TweetDeck to segregate both my followers and those I follow so I can continue to accept and “refollow” anyone who wants to follow me while having immediate access to the tweets of those I care most about. And I’ve ended any concern about whom I accept on Facebook by accepting the fact that I use the site for business, not as a personal communication device.

Once you’ve established your blog — both technically and as part of your weekly To-do list — the next activity is to create podcasts and post the videos on YouTube. An oft-repeated statistic is that YouTube is currently the world’s second most visited search engine (after its parent, Google) and soon its volume of searches will outpace Google itself. Because different people consume information in different ways, these video posts can be simple re-reads of your written posts or new content that takes advantage of the video format (you can show examples of your points, for example, or do magic tricks or hand puppets or whatever else you think will add interest).

These activities may seem overwhelming, but they’re really not. They just require a little bit of knowledge, a commitment of time to both learn the techniques and create the content, and the discipline to do them time after time, week after week. But after a couple of months of activity, you’ll have enough critical mass of content established online to undertake stage two — pursuing public media.

Here’s where you’re going to reach out to various reporters and other bloggers to get them to write about you and direct people to your online persona. The easiest way to do this is to simply call them. Consider your public relations outreach to be a daily part of your new business cold-calling activities and set aside the time to establish relationships with reporters and bloggers. Once they know who you are and what you do, they’ll be much more likely to want to include you in their stories and come to you for information.

Here are a few rules to keep in mind when dealing with reporters:

1.    Never lie to them. Even in today’s shifting journalistic environment when standards are dropping faster than a hooker’s panties, most journalists still live and die by their reputations. The worst thing that can happen to a reporter (other than being fired) is for their editor to have to print a retraction because they got something wrong. If you don’t know an answer, either say so or change the subject. Don’t make it up.

2.    Ever notice how reporters tend to quote the same people over and over? Every wonder how you can become one of those people? Make yourself available to the reporter when they want to write about you and when they don’t. Your goal is not to generate lines in the paper or minutes on air but to build a relationship with the reporters so they come to think of you as the expert in your specific field. That way, they’ll use you as a research source and will be much more likely to think of you when they need a quote or an example.

3.    Take them to lunch. These are the four magic words of PR as far as I’m concerned and a great way to establish a relationship that’ll pay off many times over. And, by the way, don’t only take working reporters to lunch. Because their world is so volatile, reporters live in a very unstable environment right now. If they are unlucky enough to be laid off, they find it an added indignity to be dropped by all of the fair-weather friends who used them when they had a public outlet but no longer see any value in the relationship. Remember that many reporters will be back in the public reporting sector sooner or later. They will certainly remember those who were supportive when things were tough. They’ll also remember who stiffed them. Who would you rather be?

Your bottom line should be to generate as much interest in you and your activities as possible. While there are no direct metrics to extrapolate how many blog readers or magazine articles it takes to generate additional income, a good rule of thumb is the more the merrier. Work hard to make your professional persona ubiquitous and it will pay off in perception and interest.

The other day the CEO of one our largest clients was sitting in my conference room discussing a project he wanted us to do for him. While he was talking, his phone rang and he glanced at the screen. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s one of my board members. Pardon me while I take this.” During the conversation, he mentioned to the board member that he was in my office talking to me about the new project. “Oh, you know Bruce?” he asked the person on the phone. “Do you know him from when he presented at our board meeting?” He listened. “Oh, you know him from his blog.”

Here’s the beauty part: My client and I were just talking about us starting a robust social media program for him and now he saw the direct benefit of what we do. I was no longer a vendor selling a service but an expert who clearly practices what he preaches. I don’t yet know what the financial result of the project will be and there’s no reason to believe that we wouldn’t have gotten the project without the unplanned interaction but it certainly helped sell my point of view.

These sorts of things happen to me all the time. With a little work, they can happen to you, too.

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I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

September 6th, 2011

When I started my business my father called my action “the confidence of ignorance.” I didn’t really know what I didn’t know so I held my nose and jumped right in. And with some long hours, perseverance, the hard work of lots of great people, and some good luck it turned out pretty well. Yet almost thirty years later it’s finally dawned on me that my dad was right – I often have no idea what I’m doing.

Do you?

Social media has become a critical part of our agency’s branding and marketing. I’m promoting my ad agency, my speaking, and my books on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and whatever new technology has emerged since I wrote this post. But I have no idea what I’m doing.

I blog about branding and marketing and my own personal opinion about what’s going on in those worlds. I post it all online and send it out to my mailing list and try to promote it on all the social media sites that’ll have me. But I have no idea what I’m doing.

I travel around the world speaking at conferences and corporate meetings and attend acting classes and speaking workshops to try to make my platform skills better. Even with all the time spent and experienced gained, I still have no idea what I’m doing.

I’m starting to shoot videos and produce podcasts about branding and marketing and post them on YouTube. I’m taking videos of speeches I’ve given and learning how to edit them in Apple’s Final Cut and sending them out online and on CDs.  But I have no idea what I’m doing.

I wrote a couple books on branding and produced them with traditional publishers. Then I self-published the latest book and we distributed it ourselves. Finally, I wrote a novel called The Mouth of the South and didn’t even self-publish it, just uploaded it to Amazon as a Kindle book. But I have no idea what I’m doing.

We’re creating a new website, trying to make it as interactive, mobile-friendly and user-friendly as possible and all at the same time. But I have no idea what I’m doing.

When people ask me if they should promote themselves or their companies on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn; if they should blog, tweet, email or send handwritten letters; if they should shoot videos, record podcasts, write books, or speak at conferences; if they should offer discounts on couponing sites, or run ads on TV, radio, newspapers or billboards, my answer is a resounding “yes.” When they tell me they don’t know how to do it, I say, “don’t worry, I have no idea what I’m doing either.”

I’m not smart enough to figure out SEO and SEM. I don’t have enough time to respond to all the tweets I receive. I don’t like Facebook enough to really want to dive into it. I think I only use about 11% of the capabilities of Final Cut. And not one of my books has become a bestseller regardless of how much time, effort, and money I’ve spent on them.

Why not? Could it be because I have no idea what I’m doing?

My marathon times aren’t dropping, my harmonica playing’s not getting much better, and the TV show I’m trying to create isn’t rushing itself into production. You already know the reasons why. It’s because I have no idea what I’m doing.

Are you starting to see a pattern here? Have you gotten the message? As much as I’d love to use this page to brag about all the brilliant things I’m trying to accomplish I have no idea what I’m doing.

Do you?

I think that my feeling is the true zeitgeist of what’s going on today in the world of online marketing, new entrepreneurship, and personal development. Of course we can listen to the experts pontificate about whatever it is they know about, but just like the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, what they know and talk about is just a small portion of what’s really out there.

What I have in common with those experts is that they don’t have any idea what they’re doing anymore than I do.

They just do it anyway. And so do I. And, truth be told, so should you.

The key, as Nike taught us, is to “Just Do It.” Microsoft has built an enormous company around the notion of implementing first and perfecting later. Or as my dad also used to say, “There’s never time to do it right but there’s always time to do it over.”

So blog, post, tweet, self-publish, promote, and sell, to your heart’s content. And don’t worry if you don’t quite know what you’re doing. Why not? Because I have no idea what I’m doing, either.

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Dying To Be In Facebook

August 30th, 2011

Has anyone else noticed the recent rash of Millennials hurting themselves or dying preventable deaths falling off of waterfalls, mountains, and bridges?

A 26-year old from San Ramon “…hiked with three other people to the peak of Half Dome. She fell 600 feet to her death Sunday while trying to descend a landmark rock formation.”

Here’s one from the Northwest:

“An Oregon woman was in a Portland hospital Wednesday after falling 50 feet from a wilderness cliff, breaking her leg in two places and surviving more than three days on wild berries, caterpillars, and creek water.”

Here’s one that happened in Yosemite a couple weeks back:

“A young man lost his footing, slipping close to the edge of a waterfall. A female companion frantically grabbed for him but stumbled. Another hiker followed and the three were swept over the powerful 317-foot Vernal Falls. Authorities at Yosemite National Park are still searching for two of the bodies.”

Yosemite alone has recorded 17 deaths in an unusually fatal year. “While five visitors have died…from natural causes, the others were accidental and often preventable,” officials interviewed by CNN said.

Authorities are desperately searching for answers to explain the recent rash of deaths. In other words, what the hell is going on?

The common factors between many of these recent accidents are the age of the victims and that several of them were venturing into spots they didn’t belong so they could take photographs.

People falling off of mountains while taking pictures isn’t new, of course. The most famous may have been Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside who fell to his death while snapping Rosalind Russell in the 1958 movie version of the Broadway musical Mame. But today’s death count is unprecedented.

Why the sudden need for these pictures of daring-do?

To post on Facebook, I’m sure. Today’s Millennial generation doesn’t merit an experience for the value of the experience itself; rather they value the documentation and distribution of those experiences on social media sites such as Facebook. In other words, an activity is not real unless someone else sees you do it.

Millennials have lost the ability to determine what should be private about their lives in general. Larry Constantine put it this way on his blog anaLOG: “…If I stand on a soapbox in a public square, the default assumption is that everything I say or do is grist for the mill…If I lean over to you on a panel while covering the microphone…the default assumption is that the aside is a private exchange.

(Now) there is a generation coming up that does not understand these distinctions… Couples fighting on Facebook and people throwing tantrums on Twitter are all symptoms that we are losing a crucial distinction between public and private domains…” So are people falling off mountains while taking photos.

But that’s only half the answer. The other common denominator is that today’s victims are members of the Trophy Generation where everybody wins, nobody is a loser, and there are no negative consequences. Why not ignore warning signs and railings or hike up mountainous trails in flip-flops if all the danger has always been sanitized out of your life? Millennials often haven’t learned that life is not like a video game where you can go down in flames and then just hit the reset button. There are no do-overs in the analog world — physics simply wins. That’s why it’s not called the “theory of gravity” — it’s the law.

I hate to be too mercurial about such an unhappy and preventable state of affairs but there’s an important seismic shift occurring here. If young consumers are risking their lives to share the evidence of their exploits then surely this behavior will manifest itself in other areas of their lives, including their purchasing tendencies. This should be a wake-up call to marketers, especially older, less tech-savvy ones, who pooh-pooh online marketing and communities. Companies must create opportunities for their Millennial customers to interact online and share their product-centric experiences. For example, cruise lines must provide online posting sites; hotels and destinations need to allow their customers to show and tell both their upcoming plans and their experiences; and banks and restaurants alike need to post and link photos and recaps from their networking opportunities. In fact, businesses in all verticals must find opportunities for their Millennial customers to express themselves and communicate with their cohorts. After all, while Millennial customers may be less brand loyal than their older peers, they’re just dying to be in Facebook.

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Seven Steps for Successful Tweeting.

June 27th, 2011

Ryan Dunn's Facebook post

Jackass star Ryan Dunn was killed when he crashed his Porsche 911 GT3 early Monday morning. A few hours before the 3 a.m. accident, Dunn had posted a photo on Twitter in which he is seen drinking with friends. Hours later, movie critic Roger Ebert tweeted: “Friends don’t let jackasses drink and drive.” By Tuesday, Ebert apologized on his blog, “I was probably too quick to tweet. That was unseemly.”

Dunn's car after the accident

Unseemly?? Now that’s an understatement.

In the meantime, the tweet prompted an outpouring of criticism against Ebert on Facebook and Twitter, so much of it profane that Facebook removed Ebert’s page.

Ebert might have felt marginally contrite about his insensitive tweet, but certainly not about Facebook cutting his ties with his followers. “Facebook! My page is harmless and an asset to you,” he wrote. “Why did you remove it in response to anonymous jerks? Makes you look bad.”

Roger Ebert

Facebook promptly returned Ebert’s page with a quick statement: “The page was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Heidi Montag, The Hills starlet obsessed with plastic surgery, lost her favorite surgeon, Frank Ryan, in a fatal car accident.

“He lived up in Malibu on a tiny street and he was texting while driving and he accidentally went over the cliff,” the surgeon’s ex-girlfriend told People Magazine. More specifically, he was tweeting. Below a picture of his dog, he wrote, “Border collie jill (sic) surveying the view from atop the sand dune.”

And don’t even get me started about Anthony Weiner, the married US congressman who lost his seat because he was caught sexting with a Las Vegas blackjack dealer and then lied about it. Without even commenting on the banality of his texts, didn’t he know that the Internet is forever? (Obviously not, the question was rhetorical.)

Has the world gone insane? People are dying to tweet and tweeting about people dying. Politicians are posting public messages that they wouldn’t dare to whisper out loud. And then a whole online keiretsu of statements are released about the tweets and the comments.

Look, we all know texting and driving is a really bad idea. Recent studies show that it’s even more dangerous than drinking and driving. But that study wouldn’t have helped Ebert, Ryan or Weiner. They weren’t DWI (driving while intoxicated); they were TWS (texting while stupid). And as comedian Ron White says, “You can’t fix stupid.”

Common sense tells us that when you’re in a hole and you want to get out, the first thing to do is stop digging. But the better thing is not to fall in the hole in the first place.

Maybe it’s time for some marketing lines to come to the rescue. Want to know what to do when you’re on fire? “Stop, drop, and roll.” How about when you approach a busy intersection? “Stop, look, and listen.”

Those lines work. After all, how often do you read about flaming pedestrians being hit by speeding cars?

So why don’t we take a page from elementary school safety campaigns and  and adopt The Seven Steps for Successful tweeting? “Think. Write. STOP. Edit. Decide. STOP. Post.”

If people would just pause for a moment to think about what they’re posting, texting, and tweeting – or where and when they’re doing it – maybe they’d think twice before endangering themselves, their brands, and all the people around them.

Naaaaaaaah.

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The Instant On Generation

June 13th, 2011

I was a kid back in the dark ages of transistor radios. If a friend told me about a cool new song, I’d tune in to WQAM and wait until they played what I was waiting for. Usually it would take an hour or more if the song was hot. While I waited I’d get my cassette recorder plugged in and loaded so I could tape the song. Invariably, I’d miss the beginning and inadvertently record my mom calling me for dinner over one of the verses.

Sometimes I had a little allowance money burning a hole in my pocket and wanted to order something from the ads on the back of my comic books – sea monkeys, say, or X-ray specs. I’d get my mom to write a check, put it in an envelope and root around for a stamp. Then I’d drop it in the mailbox and wait the four to six weeks the small print warned me about. I’d religiously check the mailbox every day after school but that didn’t make the package arrive any sooner.

Things are different today. When my daughter gets a text message about a great new band she has to hear, an MP4 file of the actual song usually accompanies the SMS. If not, she can go to YouTube or the iTunes store, download the song to her phone and listen to it right away.

If my son wants to buy something, he can simply order it online and have it Fed-Ex’d to him in a day or two. And while he waits he can track his package as it wings its way across the country. No one over 45 actually cares where the package is until it arrives in their hot little hands but younger consumers need to know when it’s in Tulsa, when it’s in Memphis, and when it’s on the delivery truck.

Of course if it’s a book he wants, he can just one-click order it on Amazon and have it transmitted to a Kindle, iPad, or laptop in less than 60 seconds.

These buyers are labeled by a lot of names these days, – Generation X, Generation Y, Echo Boomers, Millennials – demographic titles based on when they were born. But I think it would be more accurate to name them psychographically, based on the trait they all share: their instant gratification addiction. My genius friend David calls them The Instant On Generation – the hordes of people who have grown up with the “what have you done for me next” demands of digital technology and don’t know how to function in an analog environment.

Unfortunately for them, world events are conspiring to make things very difficult for Instant-ons. Thanks to the combined effects of a burgeoning world population, expanded financial opportunity in the under-developed world and the democratization of technology, there are more people on airplanes, more people in restaurants, more people consuming natural and man made resources, and more people traveling around the world than ever before. And while Instant-ons are perfectly happy to zoom along in their digital environments, finding their friends on FourSquare, making reservations on OpenTable, and communicating with each other 24/7 across Facebook and Twitter, the sheer number of people expecting immediate service in the carbon universe is an unscalable mess that slows everything down.

Before you start pining for the good old days, remember that things weren’t that fast before. It’s just that there were far fewer people clamoring for service and those people were way more willing to wait their turn. But older consumers didn’t grow up with the instant reward and response of videos games. They didn’t grow up with the instant gratification of flash frozen prepared foods heated in a microwave. And they didn’t grow up with a 24/7 communication device glowing greedily in their pocket.

Tomorrow’s consumer did, and tomorrow’s marketer is going to have to figure out how to successfully service people who live the lyrics to the Queen song: “I want it all and I want it now.”

Talking about today’s sped up world, Steven Wright said, “If you put instant coffee in a microwave you almost go back in time.” Funny thing is I don’t smell coffee. I smell opportunity. Specifically, how to make Instant-ons happy? An improved customer experience is one way: think Disney World’s line management techniques or the TSA security experience at Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport. Here in Miami, wealthy wannabe American Instant-ons can even hire people to stand in line for them at immigration.

But all of these solutions are just Band-Aids. The true moneymakers will be the ones who figure out how to reconcile Instant-ons’ digital expectations with analog reality.

 

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The Revolution Might Be Televised. You May or May Not Notice.

April 12th, 2011

Some revolutions start with a bang. “The shot heard ‘round the world” is how Ralph Waldo Emerson waxed poetic about the opening salvos of the American Revolution at the battles of Lexington and Concord.

About 135 years later, “The shot heard ‘round the world” was used to describe the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria that plunged Europe into World War I.

Other revolutions don’t announce themselves with such fervor. Do you remember when you started using a cell phone, started emailing or first used Facebook? Those activities probably didn’t seem like such big deals then but one day you woke up and everyone was doing it. Unlike the introduction of Apple’s iPod, iPhone, and iPad, most technological advances seem to just kind of happen. One day you know a little bit about them and by the next week they’re ubiquitous. When you weren’t watching the world just seemed to change, causing enormous upheavals in various industries including journalism, advertising, education, and banking. As I’ve said before, “The future started yesterday.”

There’s an old wife’s tale about boiling frogs. Why any old wives would want to actually boil a frog is beyond me. But that’s not the point of this story so please bear with me.

The idea is that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water it will jump out the very second it feels the heat. But if you start the frog off in a pot of cool water and then slowly turn the heat up, the frog will sit quietly until it’s parboiled.

Some revolutions are like that. They happen so quietly and so discreetly that you don’t even realize that they’ve occurred. They just become part of the air we breathe and the ground we walk on and we take them for granted as if they’ve always been there.

With that in mind, take a look at this Starbucks’ ad created by advertising wunderkind Dave Lubars, creative director at BBDO.Study it carefully and tell me what you find unusual. The letters in the headline are in different shades of brown but that’s not so odd. The descriptors Starbucks uses to identify their drinks (“Decaf,” “Syrup,” “Milk,” etc.) have been changed to romantic terms such as “Working. With you,” “Alone. Together,” “Table for Two,” but that’s not it either. And instead of just stamping the Starbucks trademark on the bottom of the ad the logo has been cleverly inserted by including it on a product shot, in this case a Starbucks cup with a frothy cappuccino in it. But that’s not it either.

What’s unique to this ad are the models, specifically the models’ sex. The model in the front is almost certainly male but the model in the back, in the red plaid shirt, could be a man or a woman. And all the details, from the watch to the bag, add to the ambiguity.

This is the first ad that I’ve seen from a major advertiser where the couple could be heterosexual or homosexual, depending on the viewer’s point of view. Do you want to see a man and a woman? Then there they are. Do you better identify with a gay couple? Then that’s who’s in the ad.

Most big companies only show gay couples in ads specifically aimed at gay audiences. The obvious thinking is that while the companies want to take advantage of the vast economy of gay consumers, they don’t want to risk offending other, less tolerant customers. But I’ve seen this ad in both Rolling Stone and The New York Times and while both have substantial gay readership, neither caters exclusively to that specific market.

Starbucks’ ad is really an amazing bit of sleight of hand – an ad chameleon that changes its orientation based on who is looking at it. I’m really looking forward to seeing the rest of Starbucks’ campaign – I’m curious to see if this piece is a one-off anomaly or the first shot quietly fired across the bow of the sexual orientation of traditional advertising.

I’ve read that Starbucks is also running this campaign on TV. I truly hope they’ve figured out a way to maintain their now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t androgynous approach. If they don’t, Gil Scott-Heron will be right after all. The revolution will not be televised.

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