Facebook scrutiny good for everyone

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

The debate about the backlash against Facebook’s moves into contextual advertising with Beacon doesn’t seem to end. That’s a good thing.

It’s good for marketers and communicators to be thinking of these issues beyond the potential for targeting accurately, and being able to measure everything. We take networking so much for granted, especially the ability to befriend a friend of a friend of a friend, that we could easily muddy social interests with commercial goals.

The problem is, when we start, even inadvertently, sending people in our network things they never asked for or don’t need to know. Like ads. Or how about getting “poked?” I never bargained for being “bitten,” but between these and “cause invitations” and “likeness quizzes” (if you don’t know what I am talking about, I ENVY YOU!) people seem to be spending way too much time –mine- on such Facebook bling.

On other social nets do I have to really be updated the second someone changes his/her profile? Plaxo was a major offender in this area some time ago. It earned the term “Plaxo Spam.” Facebook ought to have known it was tinkering with the underpinnings of the ‘social graph’ when they got into Beacon..

Long before online social nets, the practice of friends befriending people in grocery stores and parking lots gave a bad name to companies like Amway. We have to be careful about putting networking and targeting in the same cocktail shaker. I Googled “Amway and Facebook” and came across a brilliant quote from Robert Scoble. “I will not Amway my Facebook friends.”

No one could have put it better.

Sidebar: I posted this to ValleyPRBlog. It was a hilarious YouTube video poke at the stalking, “poking,” and friending phenomenon.

Unexpected Axe effect –on Unilever

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

There’s one side effect about not being entirely sincere about your marketing. You could get called out, ranted about, and exposed. Or you could get body slammed as in having someone create a mashup.

The latest is one guy’s take on the hypocrisy of attacking the ‘beauty industry’ by Dove Soap (if you’ve not seen the brilliant Unilever Dove commercial, stop now, and watch this) and the same company promoting radically sexed-up behavior for Axe.

The creator of the mashup is, um, an ad guy (a strategic planner) who has cleverly replaced the fast cuts depicting the beauty industry in the original commercial, with girls gone wildish cuts from Axe commercials.

Axe has been consistently positioned (as in the example, left) as a fantasy spray for men. See the funny but envelope-pushing long-form video about people with “unchecked libidos” and you’ll know.

Unilever must have factored this in to its marketing, knowing full well what it was entering when it attacked the beauty category defined by liposuction, botox, cosmetic surgery and all manner of dietary fads. They’ve pushed the pedal to the metal for some PR, and they’re getting a bit of consumer-generated whiplash.

Social networking with a humble napkin

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napads.jpgIf you think talking billboards, pop-ups and ads beamed to your cell phone are intrusive, consider what a company called NapAds are doing.

They will create ads on napkins and place it in clubs and lounges where the hard-to-reach 18-34 demo hangs out. They aptly call it a way to be in on “the original social networking.” The company prints the message or artwork directly on napkins, so they still have the touch and feel of napkins.

Intrusive? Maybe (but so are branded coasters.) Functional? Hey, it’s a lot better than wrapping a chilled Molson in a brochure!

For now they can reach this target in New York’s Manhattan district, but NapAds they can get placement in other big cities. The ads will ‘run’ in a location for30 days. US Airways is using 10 million napkins a month! Probably more engaging than the flight safety instructions in front of you.

To be sure, napkin ads will soon make the leap from analog networking into the digital stream. If someone hasn’t already, I could see how a brand could print short codes and links to micro-sites for people to quickly subscribe to place-based content, upload pictures to Flickr, and interact with others via a smart phone. Perfect for outdoor events, consumer promotions, even packaged goods brands doing sampling at an event. It could be narrow targeted, and tightly integrated into other Marcom activity.

Senator Online exposes agenda-free stand

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The senator is neither left nor right, is not for the Greens or the Labor party. He/she has a Facebook group (with 699 members as of Sunday).

The plan is to have a truly democratic party online so that the Australian voter could be more aware of the electoral process.

SOL is quote savvy in its marketing, as you could see here, with supporters stripping down to their underwear in Perth to show how ‘transparent’ (or is it exposed?) this party could be…

In digital age, burning a press backfires

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

The burning of a printing press is a ridiculous act in today’s climate where news and information doesn’t depend on ink and paper.

So when a leading newspaper, Leader Publications was attacked on Wednesday (Nov 21st 2007), the paper went on and published its Nov. 25th edition as usual — online –by early Sunday morning.

Journalists and the Free Media Movement earlier took to the streets and documented the protest on this blog.

As its editorial (appropriately titled “We have risen from the ashes”) stated, “whether books be burnt, presses destroyed, TV and radios smashed up, human thoughts and ideas in the minds of people cannot and will not be destroyed.” It cited Thomas Jefferson‘s famous statement “Were it left to me to decide whether, we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter’.”

The arsonists have been accused of being associated with groups close to the government.

Quotes for the week ending 24 November, 2007

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

“This isn’t a completely new business model; cellphone companies have offered similar deals for a while, but this is the first time I’ve seen this approach applied to mobile broadband.”

CNet review of Amazon’s new service claled “Amazon Whispernet,” to support it’s sleek new eBook reader called Kindle. The cost of wireless browsing books at Amazon is built into the product.

“Copywriters wrote copy. Art Directors directed art … But what’s also needed is the evolution of €”the next iteration. But what does this look like? An Information Architect who completely grasps Human Computer Interaction but can also think fluidly €”can do things like rapidly create prototypes, facilitate user testing, understand visual design and occasionally write copy. This kind of individual possesses a multi-dimensional creative brain that has evolved over time.”

David Armano, VP of Digitas, guest writing for Influential Marketing, a blog by Rohit Bhargava.

“We’ve always joked the holiday is like the running of the bulls … This year it will be the fast-walking of the bulls though because we have implemented a crowd control…”

Matt Maestas, manager of Target in Tempe, Arizona, on how the mad rush of shoppers would be managed on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.

“The wireless industry can’t be an extension of the Internet because wireless bandwidth is finite. It’s a fixed resource, and it is shared bandwidth. The more people who use it in a given area, the less data speed they have.”

Andrew Seybold (on The Lehrer Rerport) commenting on Google‘s plan to enter the wireless industry. Google’s Eric Schmidt countered that this was the same argument made about the Internet years before.

Facebook’s behavioral targeting: good, bad and inevitable

/ Angelo Fernando / 3 Comments

You’ve probably heard the news that Facebook has added what’s almost the equivalent of Google’s Ad words. I say almost, because there are some key differences, since we do not subscribe to Google, among other things.

The program, called Facebook Beacon, is quite interesting –and controversial. That’s why I like it. It pushes the envelope. It sure raises privacy issues, because no one wants to involuntarily share personal information with one’s personal network.

Facebook states that there are safeguards, but its critics (who created a protest group on, you guessed it, Facebook!) won’t buy that. The Facebook group has 5,802 members.

I don’t quite agree with all this weeping and gnashing of teeth. No one forces you to joint a network. As one visitor to the protest group wrote, “I don’t understand. They made the site, they make the rules. If you don’t like it, leave. It’s how they make $ and what drives innovation”

Some of you will recall how people got all in a dither when Amazon began a “recommendation” feature using cookies that tracked purchases and saved that information to recommend products based on what people in a similar demographic had bought.

Back to Beacon, there are ways for subscribers to opt out of it, but it is annoyingly cumbersome. Opting into many services is an inevitable by-product of using social media. We could protest, stay as far away as possible from the network, or … just get over it.

PR ain’t the scourge of the earth

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

If you’re in PR this report published by The Arketi Group is a great affirmation that not all PR is badly done.

It states that:

“Almost all journalists (98 percent) say they prefer to receive news releases via email from companies they know, and 93 percent of business journalists say they prefer to receive news releases via email from companies they don’t know but are in industries they cover.”

  • 90 percent of journalists say they get story ideas from news releases.
  • 79 percent say they get story ideas on newswires

That one point stood out for me: that 93% of journalists like to hear from “people they don’t know.” It turns into spam only when it becomes irrelevant to the journalist’s beat.
89 percent) say they tap into public relations contacts.

Do portfolios matter?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

How do you evaluate a Creative person you are about to hire?

I once told someone that the best way to judge a Creative is not from a portfolio, but to ask the candidate what’s on his/her wall space.

At the risk of being simplistic, I like to say that creative people fall into two categories. Those who put up project lists on their wall (so that they stay on top of things,) and those that have all kinds of stimulating material (so as to stay connected to things.)

Unlike a portfolio, that many of us maintain in analog or digital formats (or both,) a work space cannot be faked. At least not for a long time. The former displays a great sense of order: neatly stacked folders, pencils in place, and zero coffee stains on their desks. Also this: bland work. The moment you see “trophies” dominating the workspace you know there’s something else about the person’s work style. I’m not talking of awards on the filing cabinet, but framed artwork (of aforementioned bland work,) that shout “I’ve made this happen. Respect me. Kneel down before me..”

But there’s another kind of creative. The person who rips out an ad or a quote from Wired and pins it on the wall because it sparks something. Someone who brings back odd bits and bobs from a hike, a picture of funny sign, a made-up word from Seth Godin scrawled on a sticky note, a URL that he/she cannot stop talking about…

This is the kind of person I was reminded of when I came across this brilliant post by David Armano of Digitas about an “Information Architect.”

He cites Tim Brown of Ideo who calls this new kind of creative person a “T-shaped” person. Fits perfectly with my “portfolios are dead –giveaways” theory.

“We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them “T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That’s what you’re after at this point — patterns that yield ideas.”

Empathetic. Universal. Approachable. If only the world had more of these types.

PR needs to do its own PR

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

George Simpson, a columnist for Media Post’s Marketing Daily added this to the PR debate, with some harsh words.

“Show me a child who says “I want to grow up and spend 15 hours a day writing meaningless press releases, begging for placement and swallowing my pride with arrogant writers”–and I will show you a child the school authorities should keep away from m-rated video games, listening to Metallica, or obtaining a gun permit.”

Never mind that Simpson cites stats such as this: 90% of B2B reporters use news releases as sources for their stories.

Chris Anderson’s post has somehow become a polarizing event, with the PR haters on one side of the spectrum taking hugs whacks at much more than clueless practitioners spamming journalists. (Someone commented that Anderson has no right to be offended. WIRED mag has been spamming him for years!)

Amazingly, the PR industry response has been weak. PRSA has published results of a study that very impressively states how journalists largely depend on PR for their stories –the source that Simpson uses. But while it has responded to other issues such as the recent fake news conference held by FEMA, the PRSA has not issued a statement on the Anderson problem. It’s been left to PR practitioners to stand up for what PR is really about.

How long must we wait?