Punchy example of the power of facebook connect. Check it out
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Game on
Launching Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 in Leicester Square was a terrific PR move. Games are the new movies and this was great example of thinking big
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Hey you, get off of my cloud
A friend of mine who works at a respectable FMCG company was recently trying to find a solution for collaborative working on an international project. He’d heard that Basecamp was perfect for the job – web based, secure, trackable, low cost and fast to get up and running.
His IT department declined and offered their preferred large-scale business apps solution – which would be ready in 15 months. He patiently stated that the project was due by Xmas and he’d like to try Basecamp.
The IT guy played his joker: “we don’t support it”.
It seems that line can be pulled out by IT departments anytime. It’s the desktop guy’s Get Out of Jail Free card. Along with “It introduces risk”, it’s a no-comebacks special designed to end the conversation.
But not being supported by IT departments is the very point of cloud applications. The hosting, maintenance and developments are handled remotely and cost-effectively.
The opportunities created by web apps is too great to pass up. Certainly start-up competitors will have no issue using newer, low-cost alternatives to organise themselves. But it’s no surprise there is fear and protective behaviour at work – IT departments are getting disrupted too.
As Nicholas Carr explains in the excellent Big Switch, continuing to deploy and support big desktop systems feels like running your own generators rather than plugging into the national grid.
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How about a cloud apps pack?
Microsoft often comes across as unlovable, but back in the early 90s they were a much more likeable company. In particular, Office bundled together a suite of applications that actually worked well together. This was a big deal, as before then you might have used Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheeting, Wordperfect for writing documents and Harvard for graphics – none of which were easily compatible.
Flash-forward to 2009 and there’s a new bundling need – this time in the Cloud. I’m a big fan of web-based services and have become a heavy user of:
- Evernote for miscellaneous note-taking
- Remember the Milk for tasks
- Jungle Disk for backups
- Dropbox for file sharing/syncing
- Google for docs, contacts, mail and calendar
- Xmarks bookmarks sync
I love these services. Recently, my five year old Powerbook appeared to die (it came back eventually) but restoring my data life was a hassle-free experience involving setting up a new profile on my wife’s machine and simply logging in to each of those services. Hey presto, everything’s there.
I like these services so much I feel I ought to pay (and I’d like the extra functionality). $10 a month or whatever is a good price, but $10 per month per service starts to add up. I wonder if there’s an opportunity for these services to get together and offer a Cloud Pack?
Far better to ask – will they pay for my brand?
Are you thinking hard enough about what you really provide to them – rationally and emotionally?
Is it really only news you sell, or is it reassurance? Or a signal for other people of your status? Is your magazine selling entertainment – or is it a way to pass the time? Or feel connected? Or feel good about yourself?
How can you take these underlying values and translate them into other product forms (guide books, insurance services etc)
I’ve previously written about my view that people will pay for content if you make it easy. But if they won’t pay for your brand, you really are in trouble
Quite rightly, forward-thinking brands are connecting with their audiences via facebook fan pages. It’s a readymade network of peer groups and allows saliency and reputation to be built. It’s a social database that can be accessed for commercial means – to announce a promotion, drive traffic to a site or augment another brand experience.
ITV’s X-Factor are doing this especially well. By crafting provocative, open-ended questions and posting them while the programme is on air, they are tapping into increasingly popular TV+laptop behaviour and creating real-time water cooler moments. I saw one thread about the twins have over 10,000 comments in it. That sort of engagement has never been possible until now.
Unlike email newsletters, publishing content onto fan pages can and should be done quite regularly – certainly at least once a day.
And this is where brands need to spot the danger. All new media bring new communication opportunities. You can speak to your fan base whenever you like. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Just as no-one wants to receive too many (any?) emails from you, over-communicating on facebook risks flipping the consumer’s mindset from “I love your brand!” to “hmmm… stop talking all the time. You are so needy.”
Clinginess is the new spam
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Is best practice good enough?
This provocative Tweet from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh made me stop and think. Should we aim instead to communicate minimum standards of practice within our businesses?
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Capturing attention
Googling for information on the (apparently fabulous) Bold Tendencies III exhibition in Peckham, I stumbled on the Londonist’s website.
All routine stuff, but note the polite, likeable way they sniffed that I’d arrived from search and tailored a friendly message inviting me to subscribe to or bookmark their site.
Nicely done with exactly the right balance of call-to-action v pushiness.
The task when launching media products is clear: get noticed, generate trial.
In True Blood, the FX channel have got an awesome property. Now in its second season on HBO, the vampire series is dark, sexy, supernatural and sophisticated.
Sadly, I fear this poster does not convey any of that; it’s aiming too low and simply lacks, umm, bite.
Do watch the programme though – it’s excellent.
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Timely marketing
The 2012 motif will be much used in London over the next few years. This is a nice, noticeable flip on the idea
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Tetris ad – beautifully done
via ads of the world
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How to do a website takeover
Nice post by Jason Calacanis on how to get impact without interruption
I heartily agree with his view:
The future of advertising is making and featuring compelling content with modest, and integrated, calls to action
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PR as fireworks
It’s easier than ever to get a PR announcement out there. And easier than ever to cock it up.
A year or two ago, I had a chunky piece of product news to announce, but no budget. No problem I thought, I’ve got all these modern comms assets to play with.
So announce it I did – big bang style – sending the news simultaneously to the website, news wires, the forum, facebook, the press office blog, Twitter etc.
I thought I’d been terribly modern and efficient, but the story got nowhere. It was summed up when the blogger relations guy called me, pretty out of sorts.
I just called up one of our key targets saying ‘I’ve got something for you’ and he told me ‘yeah, I know, I just saw it in my facebook inbox’. It’s old news isn’t it?’
Big lesson. Just because you have multiple comms routes to market doesn’t mean you should use them all at once.
Sequence matters. Think of PR as a fireworks display. You don’t set them all off at once. The impact is much greater if you build up to a crescendo.
Start with this release order and adapt from there:
- Inform internal stakeholders
Key staff and shareholders should know first – especially customer service people - Leak to bloggers
Bloggers won’t write positive stuff if they don’t get to break it, so leak news to them and give them exclusive details/pictures. - Tell passionate customers first
Anyone following your brand on Twitter, contributing to your forum, being a fan on facebook or subscribing to your email should be the first to officially know. These people care about your brand. Critically, you should give them material they can share – eg, embeddable videos, pictures they can link to or exclusive offers. - Mass anounce to journalists, visitors and previous customers
This is when it’s actually public. Such is the pace of the web that this phase can follow just hours later. - Post-launch management
Reputation/news management in the days following the announcement is an intrinsic part of the launch task. Use social tools to monitor the conversation and respond to as many positive/negative comments as you can. In the first 24 hours, the prevailing opinion on your announcement will coalesce and you want it to settle down in your favour.
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Connected thinking
It’s smart of Pret to offer free wi-fi, but it’s smarter still to puncture the dryness of the message with witty, on-brand support copy
Too often mission statements are glib, interchangeable and soaked with avarice. Businesses might as well use a website to generate one.
Great ones are simple, positive and rally everyone behind an idea. Twitter appears to have one of those. Techcrunch reports, as part of the controversial leaked documents haul, that internally they are shooting:
to be the pulse of the planet
I think that’s great – memorable, audacious and benevolent.
This is what can happen when companies take the heavy option in dealing with PR situations on the web.
Reputation management in the internet era requires a more subtle approach. As Techcrunch says:
rather than just simply fixing the issue, apologizing, and moving on, Guinness has decided to dig a nice, big hole for itself
