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Matching entries from B.L. Ochman's blog
Dispelling Four Top Corporate Myths About Social Media
By B.L. Ochman As it becomes clear (at last!) that message control is dead, corporations in every industry are scrambling to learn about social media so they can incorporate it into their marketing mix. Fear and misconception abound. Here are the top four issues companies cite, debunked. 1. Employees will waste time with social media. Many large corporations block their employees from accessing the Internet altogether. Others try to block employees from accessing personal email or social networks like Facebook during work hours. By Christmas 2011, according to Nielsen, one in every two Americans will have a smart phone That's a lot of Internet access available to workers everywhere - and employers can't stop them from accessing the Internet - on breaks, at lunch, in the bathroom, you name it. The value of workers of having Internet access - in terms of research, communication, and speed - is far greater than the threat of lost productivity. Companies like Best Buy, Comcast, Dell and many others have increased not only customer satisfaction, but also sales, by having hundreds, and even thousands, of employees monitoring and resolving complaints and issues in social media. Companies have a right to make policies and rules...
7 reasons social media won't work for your company
By B.L. Ochman This morning, a friend asked me, "are there any companies that shouldn't use social media?" And the answer, without a doubt, is yes. While social media has gone mainstream, and shiny new objects from GPS-based networks to social gaming and social shopping; velvet rope social networks, real-time reviews and augmented reality browsers have gained traction, there are still some situations where none of these tools and tactics will work. Social media is not the answer when: 1- You need to generate a high volume of sales in a short time. Social media can create trust for a brand, but building trust takes time. Over time, social media can help a brand create sales, and those sales can be tracked. Don't count on making next month's quota because you started a Facebook page. If you need sales in a hurry, think about direct mail, sales incentives, and advertising. Hint: all of those will work better if you have spent the time building relationships. 2- You need a quick fix for a tarnished reputation. Social media can sometimes provide quick results for a company that's already a star. When a well-loved company like Zappos, or Google employs social media,...
Reebok's naked workout video: just a bare attempt to create buzz?
Is it fake, like the infamous fake Puma ads simulating oral sex back in 2003? Or is the Reebok video featuring a naked Chuck Liddell and his girlfriend, Heidi Northcutt, working out in nothing but Reeboks an off-color joke produced by the company itself. The goal of this type of advertising is to find a way to get people to talk about your brand in today's mind-bogglingly crowded media landscape. The usual next step in the game (dubbed sub-viral marketing way back in 2002) is for the company to demand that those who spread the word cease and desist. Sub-viral strategy: risky at best It's a risky strategy at best because it can result in millions of dollars worth of free publicity or it can backfire. Frankly, the new Reebok ad, doesn't seem interesting enough to have much, umm, staying power. Brands including Budweiser, Ford, Levi's and Mastercard have been accused of producing their own sub-viral ad campaigns and unleashing their PR firms to spread the word about them. Sometimes, the ads are carefully shot to look like they were done by amateurs, sometimes they are painstakingly made to look like the company's real ads. Engineering a fake Online parody...
Pepsi's Optimism Project Propels Them into a Group of Highly Evolved Brands
Pepsi's Optimism Project (POP) gains the company membership in a club whose members are rare as hen's teeth - brands looking at their long-term cultural impact. Like Tyson, Dell, Starbucks, Best Buy and a handful of other companies, Pepsi wants to be an optimistic catalyst for positive change in the world. Lofty goal for a sugary soft drink, a chicken company, a chain of electronics stores or a computer maker? You bet. And that's why other brands should be paying close attention. "Americans believe optimism is the engine of progress," according to a survey from Pepsi's Optimism Project (POP), an ongoing study tracking the national level of optimism on a quarterly basis, by measuring the national state of optimism via a composite score. It's part of Pepsi's Refresh Project, which is giving away a total of $20 million for ideas that can help advance society in six different categories. In spite of challenging current events, Americans do hold out hope for a better future, with 72% of survey participants still saying they expect the best to happen in uncertain times. Americans also believe that optimism can have a strong impact on moving society forward in a positive direction (92%). "While...
Seven Reasons Your Company Should Be Blogging
By B.L. Ochman Should your company blog? No if you want to use a blog as a substitute for press releases and corporate BS. Yes, if you want to reap many other benefits. Here are seven good reasons to have a company blog. 1. Humanize your brand. Blogs are an excellent touch point for human interaction with your customers. Nobody really cares what you say on your corporate site these days. We listen to what our friends - the ones we've met and the ones we've made online - say about your brand before we listen to you. A blog offers brands a way to talk to people like a human, instead of in meaningless corporate speak. Blog about things people want to know, and not just what you want to tell them, and you can humanize your brand so people will want to talk to you. Lionel Menchaca at Dell did a great job of humanizing a company that hadn't been listening or acting like humans for years. Read Now is Gone's post about Dell's turnaround 2. Establish Trust If your company blog is conversational, actually helpful, possibly entertaining, open and honest about issues, then, over time, we'll come...
Why Do So Many Companies Hide Their Social Media Involvement?
While thousands of companies have either experimental or well-established presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media sites, those communities remain invisible on all but a tiny fraction of company homepages. Why do companies hide their social media efforts from visitors? My guess is that their reasons include o fear that they'll lose control of their brand if too many people know they can have a say; o lack of cooperation between marketing and IT; o and perhaps pressure from lawyers who are nervous about new-fangled new media. It's hard to find a company website whose homepage easily and clearly allows visitors to see all of the its social media initiatives. You'd have to be Nancy Drew to find the company blog on most websites, or its Facebook page, or all of its YouTube videos. Starbucks new homepage, recently re-designed, stands head and shoulders above the rest for clarity, ease of use and organization. Clean and clear, it has a community heading above the fold, and clearly lists Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, among other links. A few companies try to curate their content effectively, including: o Dell tries, although you have to click into Community to find them on Twitter,...
Three Top Ways to Damage Your Brand With Social Media
By B.L. Ochman While social media can do a lot to humanize a brand; increase the effectiveness of customer service, and create brand evangelists, it also can cause damage. I've said this before, and I'll say it again - brand management is a matter of common sense. People want to be heard, they want a human being to say "I'm sorry that happened, let's see what we can do to make it right." They will let their friends know how they were treated - because they can. Yet common sense is in short supply in corporations, or so it seems. These three social media marketing mistakes are made over and over by companies that just don't want to believe that customers really are in control, and that what matters most about your brand is what comes up in Google. 1- Start a Twitter account then don't use it. Let's use @TimeWarnerCares as an example, although many other brands are equally inept in social media. @TimeWarnerCares opened a Twitter account, which has 563 followers - some of whom might actually be brand evangelists. @TimeWarnerCares didn't bother to follow anyone, so they have no way to know who wants to talk with...
Starbucks Social Media Monitoring & Community Help It Survive Brand Attack
By B.L. Ochman What does it take to damage a brand with a hate campaign? That depends on whether the brand is listening, reacting in real-time, and has a community of its own in social media. While fear of "the haters" damaging the brand is probably the Number One factor keeping many companies out of social media, it's the companies that are involved in social media that are most likely to survive a brand attack. As Starbucks has demonstrated in the past week, the reasonable majority of the online community recognizes brand hijackers and calms, or simply ignores, a brewing storm. Pro-union counterpunch In an effort to stave off competition and re-gain ground lost in the downturn, Starbucks recently touted its coffee and its corporate values in a multi-million dollar, multi-media campaign. The launch, including a Twitter contest, was quickly met with a Stop Starbucks campaign claiming that the coffee giant is anti-union, among other things. While several blogs reported that rebels hijacked Starbucks campaign, that doesn't seem to be the end effect. Stop Starbucks video accusing the company of harassing workers who want to unionize has 59,000 views on YouTube as of today and a Stop Starbucks' petition to...
Mars Candy Sends Women Seeking New 'Fling' to Porn Site. Ooops!
This is where you land if you read about Mars Candy's new 85-calorie Fling chocolate bar, which is aimed at women, and you - logically, were to type in www.fling.com.Ooops! This is where Mars - whose agency and marketing people apparently didn't check to see who else might own a URL related to their product name - means to send you. Ooops! Mars is not the first to make this mistake, and they won't be the last. When Dell launched its Direct2Dell blog, they called it One2One. But they failed to check the URL and to learn that one2one was actually a scuzzy porn site. The Internet is not for practice guys! It's for all the marbles. Use your head, or lose the game. Bonus link: When Edelman PR set up the much-maligned Working Families for Wal-Mart they didn't register the domain name. They registered www.forwalmart.com. The most logical domain, www.workingfamiliesforwalmart.com, was kidnapped by an anti-Wal-Mart group that launched a pretty good parody site. All the smiling faces in the original are replaced by sad ones in the parody. Posted by B.L. Ochman...
Debunking Six Social Media Myths
By B.L. Ochman For companies, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social Web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn't putting itself out there, it ought to be. But before you take the plunge, bear in mind the many myths that surround social media. Myth 1. Social media is cheap, if not free. Yes, many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. These include Google's (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube, Yahoo's (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr, the social-network building tool Ning, and content aggregators such as Digg and eBay's (EBAY) StumbleUpon. Free blogging tools abound too; among them are WordPress, Twitter, and FriendFeed. However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. The budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months. I'm sure companies have spent less, and I know they've spent more. Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content, and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn't come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing. Even taking free software...
Dear Jeff Bezos - Here's How Amazon Lost Me as a Customer - Forever
Dear Mr Bezos: Let me tell you how, earlier today, you lost me as a customer – forever. A month or so ago, on Amazon's website, I pre-ordered the second and third book in the 10-book series, The 39 Clues for my nephew. Book two, One False Note, was published on December 2, 2008. It was my nephew's much-anticipated Chanukah gift. He didn't receive it. The third book, The Sword Thief, is scheduled to be released on March 3, 2009. I also pre-ordered the card set that goes with the second book to help him play the online 39 Clues game. I chose the shipping option “Group my items into as few shipments as possible.” Would you think that meant do not ship the book that comes out in December until March 2009? I didn't. Nobody likes to wait But as the customer service person for whom I waited for on hold for seven minutes said – that means all items in the order will be shipped when the last one is ready. To whom does it mean that? I wonder. What would be the next thing the customer service person might have said: “We’re sorry your nephew didn’t get...
WowOWow Finds Out That Girls Do Want to Have Fun
WowOWow.com, the women's site launched in March 2008 by luminaries including Lesley Stahl, Whoopi Goldberg, Candice Bergen, Mary Wells, and Lily Tomlin, is a conversational community for accomplished women over 40 who feel patronized by glossy women's magazines. WowOWow had the buy their name from a porn site, but hey, they weren't the first site that didn't check to see who owned their name. Like many established sites aiming at this fast-growing mature woman demographic, WowOWow has to fight for readers and advertisers. AdAge reports tha the audience is definitely out there: Women’s community sites experienced the largest growth last year (35%) along with political sites, according to a comScore Media Metrix study of 100 major U.S. Internet destinations. And women users outnumbered men on the Web for the first time in 2007. WowOWow has plenty of serious conversation, along with polls, blogs, interviews, and questions of the day, and a great personalized frizz forecaster, the Hair Day Weather Forecast. And they've just started a Refer-a-Friend Sweepstakes with the chance to win a personal horoscope by "world renowned psychic Peggy Rometo" for those who refer the most friends. While WowOWow already has advertising from Sony and Tiffany, the semi-desperate sounding...
Apple Silence on iPhone Issues Likely to Bite Its Ass
Analysts predict nearly 5 million iPhone sales this quarter, and the Wall St Journal reports that the iPhone Apps Store averages a million dollars a day in sales. But the damn things don't seem to be working for a lot of people, droves of whom as reporting iPhone 3G connectivity problems, dropped calls, and blue screens of death (hey, i thought that was a WIndows thing?) For example: Twitter Google Trends Google News Chris Pirillo and others on YouTube And what has Apple said to its customers? Nothing. Nada. Silence is deafening. That's long been Apple's way of responding to information requests, and this time, I think it's going to bite them. Steve Jobs doesn't do interviews, neither do his lieutenants, much to the consternation of just about every tech writer on the planet. Apple products are generally great, but silence when a product isn't great has cost other companies dearly in the past and Apple is not exempt. Ask Dell. Ask Kryptonite. Even giants of American industry have been humbled by the power of customer-driven media. Yet Apple has always gotten a pass. It's always been because the products are great. But teaming up with AT&T may have been...
Does Your Company Have a Social Media Participation Policy? IBM & Sun Do
Many Fortune 1000 companies are still treating social media like the Coney Island Polar Bear Club treats the ocean on New Year’s Day - dipping a toe and running out of the water. A lot of companies that allow employees to blog still have legal vet every blog comment, block Facebook on corporate servers, forbid employees to talk about their work in forums. Some companies simply don’t trust their employees, and others fear lost productivity. But the social media train has left the station, and the smartest companies are developing social media policies or updating their blogging policies to include social media. Protecting intellectual property is key, of course, but social media, like Twitter, is used by smart companies like Zappos, Dell, Southwest, and H&R Block for networking, PR, customer service, raising the company’s profile with key influencers, attracting employees, research, learning, broadcasting company news, driving traffic to the company website, and increasing search rankings. IBM & Sun were among the first Fortune 500 companies to publish their employee-created corporate blogging policies, and now both have updated those policies to include social media participation, which both companies encourage. The introduction to IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines, created by IBMers, says “...it...
Carnival Cruises Planning Sitcom: Get Real!
Carnival Cruise Lines is in early talks with "a major TV producer" about doing a TV sitcom, which would likely feature a cruise director in a central role, according to John Heald, [left] senior cruise director and author of an "unofficial" Carnival Blog that reportedly gets millions of hits. Heald hosted a special "bloggers cruise" in January, leading some 700 hard-core fans on a seven-day cruise through the western Caribbean on the Carnival Freedom. And visitors to his blog are invited to make suggestions for the 2009 bloggers cruise. Carnival needs a little levity, after deaths and illnesses aboard its cruises. But a search of Heald's blog turns up no news about passengers who were sick or any other incidents. It's a god news blog. The problem is, there's an elephant in the room....
Twitter Downtime Response Demonstrates How Companies Need to Respond Now
Depending on who you talk to, Twitter is either a revolutionary new communication utility, a waste of time, or both. Personally, Like many bloggers, corporate CEOs, journalists, and organizations from the Red Cross to Dell, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, and H&R Block, I love Twitter, and use it daily as a source of news, resources, advice, events, fun, and trends. Nonetheless, Twitter's almost daily outages and frustrating burps lead to much grumbling among the digerati. In fact, it's reminiscent of the days when we sat in front of our computers for protracted periods of time waiting for our dial-up connections to open a website or our email. It's annoying, to say the least, but what new platform isn't? Why stick around? Many of us have a great deal of time invested in Twitter's revolutionary new platform. And, after all, it's free, so we put up with Twitter's ups and frequent downs: so far. Yesterday, that came close to changing. Twitter, which has been mysterious and unresponsive about its frequent technical issues, finally realized that a tipping point had been reached. The choice: respond, or risk mutiny....
Crowdsourcing: Like Dell, Starbucks Wants to Know How They Can Improve
A year ago, Starbucks asked " How Would you change the world?" Now they're asking, how should we change Starbucks? Like Dell's Idea Storm, which has generated nearly 9,000 suggestions, My Starbucks Idea allows readers to suggest ideas, vote on the best ones, and see how they are being instituted. Dell promises: "Our commitment is to listen to your input and ideas to improve our products and services, and the way we do business. We will do our best to keep you posted on how Dell brings customer ideas to life." Says the Starbucks blog: "We are completely thrilled at the number of ideas (thousands!). We are stunned by the level of conversation (half of the top 20 ideas have 50 or more comments each -- 50!). We are stoked by the amount of participation (tens of thousands of votes)." Why did these companies decide to get on the Cluetrain and embrace crowdsourcing customer input through honest conversation? Dell got on the train after nearly losing its life because of lousy customer service which bloggers and then mainstream media dubbed Dell Hell. Starbucks has seen its own economic problems, and says it knows its problems were "self-induced." Crowdsourcing is a...
Noteworthy New Blogs: Beyond Blah Blah Blogging
By B.L. Ochman I've been delighted to see some interesting new blogs popping up lately, from both corporations and consultants. Not the usual blah blah blog, but blogs with a purpose and a point of view, with fresh content, community features, and great writing. Despite the vast numbers of blogs tracked by Technorati and others, less than 50,000 probably have any real audience. But these new blogs look like they could have staying power. Take a look. And please let me know about any great new blogs you've discovered so I can put together compilation posts like this on a regular basis. AngryJournalist.com, by Kiyoshi Martinez is "for the underpaid, overworked, frustrated, pissed off and ignored media professionals to publicly and anonymously vent their anger. Share your story. With any luck, you’ll feel better." Like Twitter, angryjournalist has a simple prompt for visitors: "Why are you angry today?" Rachel Happe is blogging about how social media is changing organizations and media at The Social Organization Stuff White People Like, a blog devoted to stuff white people like. Hilarious idea, and spot on. Variety, the stalwart show business trade, has launched The Biz, a social network for the entertainment community. Kenneth...
B.L. Ochman's 2008 Online Marketing Predictions: Mobile, Subscriptions, Collaboration Rule
By B.L. Ochman Intrepidly, I offer my predictions for online marketing in 2008, in no particular order. I think the words of the year will be subscriptions, mobile, and collaboration. 2008 is going to be an exciting year, and I wish all of you joy, health, prosperity and love every day in 2008. Peas on earth. 1. Subscriptions will become the revenue models for social networks. The fees will be small, but they will replace conventional advertising as a revenue model. Whaddya think? Feedback is what makes this fun. What trends do you foresee? Twitter and Skype will add subscription charges for enhanced features like groups and the two will compete for top social network status as the useless applications, intrusive advertising and annoying emails from Facebook et al increasingly turn off users. 2. Social networks will be the key driver of brand success as consumers increasingly trust each other’s opinions and distrust advertising and corporate crap. Dear CMOs and CFOs, The Cluetrain is not science fiction. 3. 2008 will be the year of collaboration and intellectual partnership, internally and externally. I predicted this too soon last year, but I still think it’s coming on strong over the next 12...
Forbes: 10 Markets Totally Transformed by the Internet
The Net has turned nearly every business into a global business and every customer into a global consumer, Michael Maiello writes in Forbes. The markets that have changed: Accounting and Taxes Collectibles Fine Arts Media Political Donations Real Estate Retail Software Stocks Travel I'd add: o Telecom to that list, because VOIP is certainly giving Verizon et al a run for the money o the automobile industry, where bricks and mortar car dealers now but low-paid order takers o the music industry, which simply refuses to believe that consumers have choices "Everything is easier to sell online. Everyone is easier to sell online." Maiello says. He's right that the Internet provides the opportunity to turn every click into a commercial transaction. But many companies large and small are still missing that opportunity. They're the ones who want to have total message control -- something that was always an illusion. But these days, ignoring the consumers' point of view can cost a business its life - just ask Dell....
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