Authenticity v. Control

There is an excellent article available online from the LA Times that details Jack in the Box's recent forays into the arena of social media. The company's Hang In There Jack campaign was launched on mainstream media (a Super Bowl ad of all things) and told the story of the company's fictional CEO (Jack) slipping into a coma after being struck by a bus. In the months since, consumers have been encouraged to discuss Jack's imminent death (or coming miraculous recovery!) on the campaign's microsite, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Basically, the whole gamut of Web 2.0 golden children. A few weeks ago, Jack was revived and helped usher in the company's total branding overhaul (which includes the spiffy new logo below).


The author compares JitB's results to the experiences of Skittles during their recent attempts to bring social media and their brand closer together. In each case, the brand's experienced a surge in traffic and generated content, though not always in a positive manner.

For example:

"Alexut from Utah wrote: 'Jack in the Box killed people. They have poor sanitary habits and spread disease across the nation. Plus it's disgusting food.'

And of course a thousand variations of "Jack sucks!," which is a less than optimum take-away from a marketer's perspective.

What's going on here? Call it the search for authenticity."

Both cases highlight the potential and the pitfalls of allowing your brand to be placed in the hands of the public. Sometimes, a marketer can successfully engage with consumers at a level that is more personal, and arguably more meaningful than ever before. And on the other hand, the brand can find itself the victim of online vandalism. It is an issue of control, and willingness to let go. Do you trust the public enough to take care of your brand, or do you need to censor their ability to interact with it?

The problem is that these sort of brand excursions are still a novelty. They attract the masses, yes, but (in many cases) not out of interest for the brand, rather out of the ability to be heard in a non-traditional space. When the novelty of the situation wears off- much like the growing stability of Wikipedia articles -then the trolls that bark out profanity on a candy website will move along to the next venue. The results, luckily, have drawn large enough numbers to encourage an uknown number of brands to follow the JitB and Skittle lead (right now, unseen by us, dozens of marketing teams are drafting replicant ideas), and this growing familarity brings both good and bad. Good, in that the trolls will either be less focused, or less amused by their own actions once these sorts of campaigns become more commonplace. And bad, when the ideas become dampened by me-toos and thus, less astoundingly effective in generating traffic volume.

A Requisite Twitter Post

I would be remiss if I did not mention Twitter at some point. To be perfectly honest, I am no expert on the tool. I know how it works. I have an account. I have even tweeted (twought?) from time to time. But, perhaps due to some deficiency in myself, I cannot seem to grasp what is so darn essential about the bare little updates this application beams out.

I understand the ease of use. I understand the possibility to reaching a large audience. But, I just cannot see where it is all headed (for the moment). Sure, there is the potential to crowdsource instantaneously (I can see the value in that), but as a colleague explained it to me, the marketing future of Twitter lies ability to tweet "I want chewing gum", and instantly receive a handful of tweets concerning the best places to buy chewing gum within your neighbourhood'. As he explained it, advancements are in development that will allow an advertiser to pick out any number of keywords from the massive pool of tweets in their area, and tweet back a customized message.

'Great', I said. 'That sounds a bit like spam.'

Maybe- coming back to Mr. Shirky's point - the problem lies in our proximity to the application's birth. Like he said, the truly world-shaking advancements are impossible to recognize until we have the benefit of five to ten years of reflection. In hindsight, it is easy to say, 'Yes, the internet changed everything', but that statement was maybe a more dubious gamble in 1992. The important point is not to understand Twitter (can you ever fully understand anything?), but to make a conscious effort- with the help of logic and insight -to model and assess it.

Which is exactly what Denis Hancock, and a few others, have been trying to do recently. In a recent article he attempts to compare the different ways various brands seem to be using Twitter to communicate with their prospective customers. He notes that some brands take a very personality-based approach, ensuring the tweets carry a singular, individual voice (maybe of an Executive, or a PR Rep), while others tweet in an expansive brand-voice. Hancock explores the potential strategies behind these early decisions and weighs the possible pros and cons of each. Definitely worth reading.

Courtesy once again of BoingBoing.net, here is a short video for all the confused people out there who doubt the hype. It doesn't offer any insights, but its sort of cute. And cute can be good:

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

Clay Shirky has written, with much more erudition and clarity than myself, a piece on the familiar topic of the dying newspaper. Rather than suggesting industry-saving answers, or speculating on what will replace the medium were it to ever die off completely, Shirky concedes that he does not know where things are headed. He argues that no one does:

"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem [...]

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen."

Please, take some time to read the whole thing. It's witty. Engaging. And surprisingly direct. I had never heard of Mr. Shirky until today, but I will be sure to check out his other (and there appear to be many) articles scattered about the web and housed on his site. Here's another little bite of his philosophy, taken from a speech delivered at SuperNova 2007:

A Tip of the Hat

Last November my girlfriend and I went online looking for plane tickets home to Winnipeg for the winter break. For the last four or five years I have almost exclusively flown with WestJet and so they were my first stop towards booking. Lucky me; they had a cheap, direct flight roughly around the time we wanted to leave, so, I went to buy two. The total came to fives times the price on the tickets. Whoah...back up. We noticed when we tried to buy a single ticket, this problem did not occur (and here was our error), so we went ahead and bought one ticket with the intention of turning around and buying a second immediatly.

The price listed for that second ticket was now ~$400 as opposed to $150 dollars. Oh, crap. I get it, yield management.... awesome.

To buy two tickets with WestJet would now cost us a total of ~$700, which we were completely unwilling to pay with Air Canada selling a similar pair for sub $500. Brand loyalty is a fickle thing. I called WestJet, told them I needed a refund. They asked, why, and I told them their website had not provided with me a enough information to make the correct economic decision. It had hinted towards it, but I hadn't caught on right away. 'You should probably tell people how many tickets are remaining at each price bracket so this confusion doesn't happen again'.

A lot of people must have given them similar advice.



Because, they have added this handy little indicator to their online purchase menu.

It is nice to see a company that listens. People call in about a problem, or report it online, the company reviews the comments and addresses the problem within a relatively short time period. Kudos! to you WestJet. What impresses me more about this situation is that I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that like my case, the majority of these complaints were made offline, with consumers calling in and demanding answers/refunds. It is nice to know that there are links between the customer service staff in the call centre and the user experience staff that work on the website. This un-siloed approach says very positive things about WestJet's flexibility.

You Have My Attention

Sometimes, they just write themselves:

"Print newspapers are declaring bankruptcy nationwide. High-profile blogs are proliferating. Media companies are exploring new production techniques and business models in a landscape that is increasingly dominated by the Internet. In the midst of this upheaval, it is difficult to know what is actually happening to the shape of our news. Beyond one-off anecdotes or painstaking manual content analysis, there are few ways to examine the emerging news ecosystem."

The above quote comes courtesy of Media Cloud, a new system that will allow a single user to sift through the vast seas of information being generated online around the world, and (hopefully) distill meaning from it all. The tools offered will allow you to see what topics are popping up the most in blog, t, who is talking about them and where the chatter is coming from. This is maybe the first big step towards the effective data mining of the new internet that I alluded to earlier.



While this system is still in the very early stages of its development, they do have a small trial worth taking a look at. It is going to be interesting to see how this story/device evolves over the coming year.

Reconsider

Maybe I am moving a little off topic, but this post has been building in me over the last week and I just had to let it out. I previously wrote about the publishing industry's resistance to their changing marketplace- traditional newspapers and other publishing entities railing against lost advertising dollars and emerging troublesome internet journalism -but, I perhaps should have noted that they are far from alone in their fight. Traditionalists in the film, television and software industries are all struggling to come to terms with the horrifying openness of their new world.

And then there is music.

The big music labels and the RIAA were among the first to show their unwillingness to adapt when they started dropping lawsuits on twelve year olds in Wisconsin and old grannies for downloading a handful of mp3s. I don't intend to comment on their litigiousness, however. Rather, I am taking issue with their product launch model.

Grizzly Bear are a relatively 'big' band, by most standards: they opened for Radiohead on their last stadium tour and are capable of headlining large shows on their own, they make the standard talk-show television appearances on a regular basis, and each new album is met with a swarm of hype on and offline. They are a very good band with a substantial popular and critical following. Cool, right? They also have a new album due out on May 26th.

Want to hear it? No problem! Just google it. Veckatimest leaked two weeks ago.
... Three months before its drop date.

The current method of release is ridiculous. The band probably finished work on this album early in the year, handed it in to the label and were told to sit on their hands for awhile. The label then sent out a few copies out for review purposes and let one or two mp3s hit the Hype Machine, through bloggers or official downloads. Those lead singles sounded great and the fan got excited. Anticipation was high. The first reviews were glowing. Did the label honestly believe this album would stay under wraps until May?

This leak, like the other hundreds of leaks in the last five years, highlights the inadequacy of the music industry's business model. The Radiohead experiment proved that online downloads will not necessarily cannibalize later in-store sales, so long as the band has strong brand equity and the released product is high quality. So why not stagger the releases? Lead with online, hit the brick and mortar stores at the scheduled date. Even if the label is not comfortable with that idea, now that their consumers are downloading a poorly ripped, unofficial version of the album from torrents, why not provide them with a legitimate alternative? In my opinion, Veckatimest should have been up on iTunes, or the band's website or anywhere(!) as soon as the leak occured.

You can either rail against the internet, or you can learn how to make it work for your business. The music industry cannot expect its old models to work the way they did fifteen years ago.

Just as a bonus, here is Grizzle Bear performing 'Deep Blue Sea' during a show with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Check it:

Obtrusion

The always enlightening BoingBoing.com ran a quick little piece on some recent advertising featured on Slate Magazine's homepage, and the annoyed response it drew from readers looking to just, you know, read the darn articles. Such people, would be greeted thusly:




Yikes.

The offending ads belong to VW, and though it appears they have either run their course or cannot be seen by incoming Canadian IP's, they raise an interesting question concerning taste and obrtusivness in online advertising: of course, you can make the ads as big and 'engaging' as you like, but is this really effective marketing?

Slate is a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company, and a quick check of a few of its sister-sites reveal a similar tale. Right now, they all sport animated Apple ads that cover the middle half of the browser window upon launch; forcing the viewer's eye to intake how green the new laptops are. So, well, you cannot read anything on the site without scrolling away.

This may seem like a small complaint, but I find it annoying when a site's immediate focal point is an ad. I appreciate the effort to get infront of the reader and win a little mindspace, but I didn't come to Slate to learn about how green the new Apple notebooks will be. How should a marketer balance the need to be seen, and the equally important need to not annoy the audience? There is a narrow border between acceptable presence (which does not necessarily mean peripheral) and overbearing obtrusion. The Washington Post Co. and its advertisers seem to have steered towards the latter in this case.

Look Down The Nose

I think most people would admit that we don't really know what to do with social networking, just yet. I mean, people have figured out how to use the devices personally, but using the business models behind them and their advertising potential is still in the learning stage. One ex-hacker seems recently suggested some fun ideas to stir up the conversation.

His name is Virgil Griffith, and he's a PhD student at Caltech. Griffith is really into data-mining on a a massive scale. He's devised a project where he compares the books listed as 'Favourites' on a user's Facebook page with the average SAT entrance score to the University they are currently attending (so, obviously, this is limited to the US). Based on which books score the most hits in schools with lower/higher standards he has created a graph entitled, Books That Make You Dumb.

Not a great endorsement for Alice Walker's The Color Purple or S.E. Hinton's The Oustiders. They are both pretty standard reading for middle school/early high school English classrooms, but I suppose if you're tastes stopped developing then...... well, its hard to prescribe much value to the graph. There are the issues of correlation does not mean causation and the fact that book taste may not indicate intelligence per se. But, of course, that is not the point. It is meant to be a conversation starter. This is Griffith's way of getting people to think about the different ways researchers/marketers/whoever can use the massive amounts of data being created by social networking users.

So what do you think? With Amazon releasing a terabyte of public data this week, where is data mining headed? And what are we going to be learning about ourselves?

Here's a Thing

Words fail me. Occasionally, I come across a website that speaks with such sweet directness to my aesthetic that I just swoon. I fall in love with the web all over again. I've recently acquired one such 'web crush'. It's called BigThink, and the good Lord will forgive you if you spend the rest of the day in its arms.

BigThink presents simple videos of intelligent people discussing subjects they know quite well. Authors talk about the act of writing and the life of someone who dedicates themselves to the craft. Physicists talk about the universe. Economists talk Game Theory. It's really great stuff. My favourites thus far have been novelist Tom Perrotta, who is personable and direct, and author Michael Lewis, of Moneyball fame.

Since neither of my favourites are available to embed, check out Princeton Emeritus Professor Michael Walzer, talking about the same topic as Lewis, The Free Market + Morality:

Collecting the Reins

So what is 'hype'? When a band has it, every blog that covers music seems to be talking about them. When a band doesn't, well, they receive only cursory lip service. At times, the concept of 'hype' has felt completely binary. On or off. 1 or 0. Hype or no hype. Pitchfork would tell their readers what was cool. Metacritic would tell their readers what the critics thought was cool. And the blogs would froth and bark their own opinions. It has been a gloriously functional mess for at least the last five years.

But for a band trying to make decisions about their future (read: do I quit teaching kindergarten in order to tour, or similar), hype was frustratingly hard to quantify. 'Do we even have fans in Raleigh? Will anyone come out to the show?' It is this doubt that Band Metrics aims to remove.

Read Write & Web's recent piece on the new application caught my attention with the sheer simplicity of the idea. For some bands, their entire existence amounts to a MySpace or Last.fm page. They can see the download counter going up, up, up, on their mp3's, but have no way of knowing just who is doing the downloading. Or what those people are saying about them on the blog/message boards. Or where those people live, what else they like, etc. It is analytics for the grassroots music business. And its a very cool idea.













The questions that remain, however: How many bands will be comfortable enough with the practicality of the service to buy in? Once the information is collected, how are bands going to leverage that information? How does one mobilize a following that exists purely on the web?

A Dying Medium(?)

In the fall of 2008, Judy Wolff, Chairman of the Board of Trustees that oversees the publication of The Christian Science Monitor, announced that the paper would be ending its daily print production and moving all output online. She explains:

"We plan to take advantage of the Internet in order to deliver the Monitor's journalism more quickly, to improve the Monitor's timeliness and relevance, and to increase revenue and reduce costs. We can do this by changing the way the Monitor reaches its readers."

The Monitor has been succesfully printing for over a century, so what has changed to force them online? The answer may lie in eMarketer's recent report on the ailing health of the newspaper industry.

eMarketer paints a grim picture for newspapers across North America; with classified advertising sales leeched by craigslist, the growing popularity of online journalism stealing readerships and the handicap of large overhead and distribution costs these new competitors operate without.

Outlets unwilling to take a bold step into the unknown, as the Monitor has done, are feeling the pain. In addition to the litany of job cuts described in the eMarketer report, last week saw the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut nearly 200 jobs, and Paper Cuts (a new blog that intends to track industry job losses in 2009) is reporting similar losses at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Tulsa World.

Compounding the challenges described in the eMarketer document, figures within the industry have been aiming inflexible (and at times, antagonistic) rhetoric in the direction of their new online competition, deriding the internet as a bastion of journalistic dishonesty. Case in point, H.G. Bissinger's verbal ambush (language NSFW) of Deadspin editor Will Leitch on an episode of HBO's Costas Now from 2008.

The writing on the wall (and the message plainly laid out by eMarketer) should be clear. The audience newspapers have depended on for so long has changed, and as such, the industry must change with them. There will be a market for print journalism for many years to come, but likely not in the form it has previously held. Flexibility (as exercised by Ms. Wolff and the Monitor) will be necessary in order to see other journalistic institutions through the transition. The resistance Mr. Bissinger has shown online sports writers exemplifies the closed mindest that could serve as print journalism's death knell. Rather than attacking the new competition, it may be wiser to learn from their growing success; adopting the applicable methods of value addition that have helped them gain readership.