The thing is...

Introducing my blog - "The thing is..." to Facebook friends

I've been doing this for a few years now.  Enjoy.

Facebook is bigger than Germany

Facebook has 100 million members. To put the size of the membership in perspective, 

• Only eleven countries on the planet have more citizens (China, India, the US, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia, Japan and Mexico)
• 97.5 million people watched last year’s Super Bowl; 106 million people watched the last episode of MASH.   These are the top two rated TV shows in history. 

The thing is...if that's not a mass medium, I don't know what one is.

The power of listening: Keener on Keen

A couple of months ago I had a very positive customer service experience with Keen, the company that makes the hiking sandals (short version: A pair was falling apart; they replaced them).  I blogged about it here. 

Yesterday I received a note (full text below) from Gillian Kennedy, Web Marketing Manager at Keen, inviting me to participate in the development in a Keen community.  Her note to me is personal—she obviously read my blog and picked up on the fact that I spoke to a particular customer service rep named “Ash.” I’ve agreed to participate to see what the touchpoints are going to be.

From a marketing standpoint, Keen is getting some free market research and feedback from an interested audience.  If any of the bloggers help Keen avoid a major blunder of some kind in building this community, well so much the better for them.  From a cost perspective, doing this kind of thing is pretty cheap. It could not have taken Gillian too long to track me down (I’ve sent a note to her to ask her if they have any contact with their customer service reps) and writing the email took minutes.  Often, simple is effective.

The thing is...I must admit that this offer had an interesting effect on me. I felt flattered by the request and also happy to know that someone besides my wife actually reads my blog (it would help if I updated that damned thing).  The invitation did, I’d say, deepen my regard for Keen as a brand, and one might say the “relationship” I have with them, which began with the product, continued this summer with the sandal exchange, and now with this acknowledgment of my efforts. So what does that “deeper relationship” mean?

• Will I become more of an      advocate for the brand? Maybe. We’ll see. 
• Will I buy another pair of      Keens for myself or others? Probably.   
• Will I remain “loyal” to Keen,      meaning that I’d never buy another brand of sandals?  Again, we’ll see the next time I’m in the      market for a pair.

 But, the fact that I’m now even considering these aspects of my relationship--a word that I would not typically use to describe my interactions with a shoe company--speaks to the power of what Keen has done here and that’s this: Listen.  They listened to what I had to say. They read my post, took the time to learn the details, and responded in a unique and sincere manner. And it was a person, Gillian, who did it.  

Listening, and keeping it simple.  Not bad advice .

Keen on Keen

It's not often that I have a customer service experience that I am thrilled about, so when it happens I will blog it from the rooftops.  So here we go.

I'm 6'6" and have narrow feet, with one foot narrower than the other, and one having a higher arch than the other.  Thus, finding shoes is pretty much a pain; but, when I find a brand of shoes that that I like (read: they fit, are comfortable) I stick with them for life.  For instance, I have a pair of Kenneth Cole shoes--black oxfords--that I've re-soled at least six times over the last ten years.  No other shoe feels as good.  I also have a couple pairs of Timberlands and Nike Equalon is my running shoe of choice.

I also LOVE Keen footwear. The tension cord on their leather sandals snug those puppies right to my dogs, compensating for their odd shapes (my feet, not the sandals).  Keens are comfortable, durable and you can throw them in the washing machine without damaging them.  I bought a pair about a year and a half ago, and it was love at first wear.

The things is...well, the honeymoon is over: My Keen's are falling apart.  The toe is coming off the shoe and the tension cord is broken.  No more snug fit.

So I brought my foot plight to the attention of Keen's customer service, and THEY ARE SENDING ME A NEW PAIR!  Below I have included the correspondence with Keen (two emails from me, two from them).  Note how Keen, or "Ash" in particular, was prompt, clear and courteous.   The entire process took me about twenty minutes, including taking pictures of the shoes, uploading them and sending both messages.  It looks like it took Ash mere seconds to respond to me.

So, once again, I LOVE KEEN.

Conversational Book review, Part II: Join the Conversation

Moving through Joseph Jaffe's book, Join the Conversation (buy it here).

Chapter 1; Talking "At" Versus Talking "With"

A good chapter that describes some of the differences among communications vs. conversation vs. viral vs. word of mouth. There are either vast differences among these terms or minor distinctions without real differences, depending on who you are talking to.  For instance, the guys at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association will tell you there is a BIG difference between regular old communications and "WOM," but use your judgment.  As I've written before, all good marketing is driven by word of mouth or "viral" mechanisms. 

We're at a very high level in this chapter, so far, but I'm looking forward to...

Chapter 2;  The Many-to-Many Model

Another "brief history" chapter, taking us through the phenomena of one-to-many marketing, one-to-one, one-FROM-one, and to many-to-many.  The concept of "one from one" is a re-framing of "pull" or "permission-based" marketing but I think it's a more descriptive metaphor to describe how each of us chooses to get information from INDIVIDUAL people or entities. 

The many-to-many model is an anti-model, truth be told.  It's not a model at all in that it describes how one action taken by one person somewhere--say a relatively unknown blogger--can start a series of events well beyond the original action.  The original post gets linked to by others and passed around, improving organic search results for that particular post, until it become the most relevant result delivered on a Google search, say for "AOL" and "customer service."  (Lots of good examples in this chapter). 

Chapter 3; Can Marketing Be A Conversation?

Jaffe picks up on his early conceit in Chapter 1 that ALL markets are conversations (thus, I think I know the answer to the question in the chapter title).  He gives lots of good examples of how BRANDS, more than markets, can BE conversations, such as Dove, HSBC, and Delta in it's post chapter 11 days. 

He also posits an interesting metric that I'm going to delve into more in my marketing practice:  Voluntary Time Spent (VTS). 

Chapter 4; The Birth of Generation i

OK, so now Joseph is cooking with gas:  He debunks the marketing buzz phrase that the "consumer is in control."  I never quite bought that line of crap either.  About a year or so ago, I worked on a presentation with Tim Stock, one of the founders of the Gen Y think tank, Scenario DNA.  Tim is an absolute genius, one of those guys whose bullshit detector is so finely tuned and whose intuition is so fucking wired into his material that he sizes up massive amounts of information in seconds.  If you have not yet seen Tim's work, please go NOW to his site.

Anyway, we were working on this deck that addressed  new marketing frontiers and we said (paraphrasing here), "I don't understand the phrase 'the consumer is in control.'  In control of WHAT exactly," we asked.  After much deliberation and hard work, we concluded that the essential controlling factor behind the new marketing frontier wasn't that the consumer was in control, but that the consumer has expectations about marketing and experiences that are beyond anything  we have ever seen. We called it "The Era of Astronomical Expectations."  Here's a portion of the presentation.

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In the rest of this short chapter,  Jaffe also brings up the notion of the "prosumer," which we will focus on moving forward in the next chapter.

The thing is...I don't buy Joseph's conclusion that "no one is in control," either.  People, brands, agencies, marketers are absolutely in control, at least of their own actions and investments.  Someone is writing the checks, typing the blogs, posting the videos (or ignoring the blog posts and videos).  So there is some amount of control (sort of a "no-one-is-the-boss-of-me" kind of control).

But what we have now is in addition to the "The Era of Astronomical Expectations," we have what we might call "The Era of Unintended Consequences."  We light the spark, hoping, HOPING that certain things happen, but what seems to happen more and more are things that we didn't WANT to have happen, HAPPEN, or could never have imagined happening start to happen (can I write "happen" more please?).  Dell ignores a blog post and a few months later its stock takes a hit.  Wal Mart makes a ham-handed attempt to be more youthful and it blows up in its face.  A consultant posts a chapter of his book on a blog and it winds up getting downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.  An investment banker creates a narcissistic  video that's meant to be a video CV and you become fodder for the New York Times.

Our policy makers have been dealing with unintended consequences forever.  It doesn't mean a lack of control; it means a lack of planning, imagination and insight.

Larry Lessing is the Man

A year ago I blogged about the destruction of the music industry as we know it, based largely on the idea that technologies were returning the music to the people.  In this video from the recent TED conference, Larry Lessig discuss the same issue from a legal point of view.   It's quite a presentation.  Funny as hell mash-ups at the end.

The thing is...the music industry is the canary in a coal mine for ALL content driven industries, where a corporate infrastructure has inserted itself between the creators and the consumers of content.  God bless the writers...I hope they get what they can from the studios, but in the end they are all on the wrong side of history here.  When I can access funny and entertaining content produced directly by the artist, like Will Ferrel or Jon Lajoie, who needs unionized writers or studios.

Back to the book review soon. 

Conversational Book review, Part I: Join the Conversation

I put the down the Clapton biography--got a little tired of reading about his various adulteries and addictions and relapses...wanted to read more about how he and George Harrison wrote "Here Comes the Sun" together...there's like ONE paragraph about that---and I'm getting into Joseph Jaffe's book (see my blog entry about it here: Join the Conversation).

The thing is...This review is going to be a little different.  Instead of reading the entire book and then writing a review, I'm going to share my (near) real-time thoughts as I finish reading sections.  It will be my contributions to the "conversation."  If you have anything to say in return, please add comments or email me. 

Social media experiment: Say it IS so, Joe

Fellow new and social media traveler Joseph Jaffe's new book, Join the Conversation, is out.  The book is about, in large part, social media and the impact of readily available publishing platforms in the hands of consumers on the worlds of marketing and advertising.   Don Tapscott in his book Wikinomics:  How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything covers similar territory.  Both authors used social media platforms--the "wiki"--to create their books (Here's Joseph's, here's Don's).

Joseph is conducting an interesting "experiment":  In exchange for a free copy of the book, he's asking bloggers like me to read it and post a review.  No strings attached, no promises for a good review.  Instead, Joseph is "using new media to prove new media," or the clunkier UNM2PNM (dude, you need a catchier acronym) in order to market the book.   Here's the blog post about the experiment.

The thing is...I am happy to participate in this experiment (I contributed to the book on the wiki) but I don't think it's really an experiment anymore.  The new worlds of "new" and "social" media are here.  They already transformed the way books, particularly business books, are being sold and marketed.  Take a look at the way Seth Godin has marketed his latest book, Meatball Sundae.  Seth essentially gave away much of the content in a once-a-week blog post called "Meatball Monday," and since the book has launched, he has conducted a number of web-hosted presentations and Q&A sessions to drum up interest.

Once I finish the Clapton biography that's on my nightstand, I'll get to your book Joseph and gladly write the review.  Keep up the good work.

Rhapsody...the good, the bad and the video

I am a huge fan of Rhapsody and of my SONOS system; together they give you access to MILLIONS of songs.  I haven't listened to a CD in 6 months.

The thing is...the combination is great for parties.   But it can result in these kinds of incidents.  The inevitable karaoke session.

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