Microsoft Pays $300 Million to Tell the World They’re Cheap?
According to the Wall Street Journal, Miscrosoft’s latest ad campaign is costing them $300 million, of which the lead, Jerry Seinfeld, is getting $10 million. That’s a lot of dough to throw around, but going head-to-head with the “I’m a Mac” commercials can’t be cheap.
So here’s the first installment. A bizarre 90 second spot that definitely draws the viewer in with anticipation of a funny repartee or, at the very least, a great punch line. But does it deliver? The ZDNet post begs the question, “was this ad supposed to be funny?” It points out the following…
For 90 seconds, it’s two middle-aged guys in a discount shoe store at the mall, talking about, well, discount shoes.
Watch it for yourself.
Comments on the ZDnet post point to brand awareness, celebrity appeal, and a myriad of other reasons why the campaign could be successful. As an analytical viewer of most advertisements, however, I find it hard to ignore that the underlying theme of the entire spot is—cheap. Bill Gates appears to be a cheap discount shoe shopper, with a membership card to boot. Jerry Seinfeld’s comedic sensibility leaves us speechless and possibly craving that churro he holds (but doesn’t really eat). And what’s with the churro?
Could Microsoft being trying to tell us that these two huge celebrities are really just regular guys, normal people like us? Are they subtly trying to hint that Apple products are overpriced and only for yuppies? I don’t know about you, but I’m not sold; the whole commercial just feels cheap, well except for the price tag.
What are your thoughts? Am I missing the punch line here? Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
Real Twitter Strategies to Transform Your Brand
As an independent contractor doing social media strategy, I find myself spending a lot of time explaining and training social media strategy, online community building, and web strategy. As an educator of sorts, I dedicate a large part of my professional life trying to find real-world worthy definitions and applications of Twitter, an incredibly intangible tool to wrap a traditional mindset around. If you’re not doing, you’re not getting it, and that makes you completely normal. Here are some ways that I instruct my clients to start thinking about Twitter. Take this information like a template slide in a presentation—transform the content to make it your own.
3 Ways to Twitter
The strategies that I outline below are applied specifically to traditional media as an industry (primarily because I might find myself pitching a local news media outlet and these thoughts have been circulating through my head for months), but any type of business can easily substitute a few words and make the applications transform to apply their own industry. With each strategy simply substitute your business, brand, or industry for “News” and you’ll be thinking in the right direction.
1. Break News
Twitter is the most viral way to break news. In order to break news in a way that the Twitter community will embrace, however, you have step outside the comfort zone of press releases and news articles. Of course you can use sites like Twitterfeed to automatically update your Twitter account with the latest press releases, news articles, and blog posts from your website, but if that’s all you’re doing no one will pay attention to you.
Here are two examples of ways that local new stations getting it WRONG:
CBS 11 News Dallas
What they’re doing wrong:
- All of their Twitter posts are links to their own online articles. This screams that don’t understand Twitter and that they’re trying to push their own agenda.
- They’re following 13 people. Do they care about their audience? Are they trying to engage with them? They’re not demonstrating either.
- Take a closer look at who they are following. The majority are other news outlets. What about the real people in the Dallas community?
CBS 10 News San Diego
What they’re doing wrong:
- They haven’t updated in over 2 months. The message I get is that they tried out a fad to further their own agenda, they didn’t quite get it, and they gave up.
- They’re not following anyone. None! I’m left wondering if they really care about supporting the community they supposedly serve.
- I have no idea who is actually behind the account. How I can possibly relate to 10news as 10news? [That should be a rhetorical question]
So who gets it RIGHT? Check out KPBS News in San Diego:
What they’re doing right:
- They’re following 832 people.
- The people they’re following are actually real people, members of the San Diego community. Check out all those Twitter avatars for proof.
- They’re not just breaking their own news stories, but they’re talking about the big news in general, job openings, and they’re actually engaging with other Twitter users.
To get it right, breaking news on Twitter almost needs to be accidental, and the traditional notions around news need to be broken down (this applies to everyone). Are you stuck in a spontaneous traffic jam? Did someone do something incredibly ridiculous at Pride? Did rain start pouring down from the sky? Did you just feel an earthquake? Did your favorite sports team just pull off an amazing victory? These are all examples of news that you can tweet about. The difference between this man-on-the-street type of news and an official article, however, is that these situations are all experiences that you are having in the moment and other people will be able to relate them, respond to your observations, and possibly reshare your tweets with their friends. The best way to break news in this fashion is to just be yourself and start thinking about broadcasting what your doing as the news (in lieu of what you might really think is news).
2. Make News
Innovation and creative social media strategy make news. When what you’re doing on Twitter makes the news, you make the news. Here are just a few pretty amazing examples:
Comcast - Comcast is trying to reshape public opinion about their brand, and they’re using the ComcastCares Twitter account to do just that. Their Twitter behavior is being talked about everywhere, including the New York Times. A recent USAToday article chronicled their efforts by saying…
Frank Eliason, a customer service manager for Comcast, spends his day communicating with Twitterers about the company — hoping to resolve issues. Comcast isn’t on Twitter to turn around the firm’s customer service perception issues but simply to “build better relationships with our customers,” he says.
Zappos.com - Zappos is simply the most recognizable brand on Twitter. They are revolutionary, forward-thinking, responsive, and genuinely interested in interacting with their customer community. Their efforts are rewarded by a plethora of mainstream media attention, including the USAToday and NYTimes pieces mentioned above. Zappos has positioned themselves as the case study for how a business should use Twitter.
Me (Jennifer Van Grove) - I made the front page of the San Diego Union Tribune because of my efforts to use Twitter to connect the local community. It’s a passion of mine to connect like-minded and intelligent people. That passion inspired me to try and make the San Diego Tweetups great events for everyone in San Diego to come together and connect face-to-face.
3. Change News
The idea is simple and obvious; make transformation through change and do it openly and publicly. For traditional media it’s embracing two simple and complex notions: 1. people want to consume their news in a myriad of ways and helping them get the news they want where they want it is tantamount, and 2. people also want to talk to, hear from, and engage with other real people, which means a rehearsed, scripted, and coached on air personality only works on air, not online or in person. Social media, and Twitter especially, provide a recognizable personality (or brand) the opportunity to lose the script, be human, reply to questions, and ultimately create community. If you can act on the following steps, you can increase your chances of breaking news and making news as well.
- Step 1 - get on Twitter, talk about being on Twitter, and use Twitter everyday to merge the personal and professional. What your eating for lunch matters just as much as the next big story your about to break because it shows depth, makes you human, dynamic, and easy to relate to.
- Step 2: recognizable personalities, such as radio DJs, reporters, and anchors, should make an effort to create less than polished online content. This includes blogging, micro-blogging (Twitter), vlogging (video blogging), and mo-blogging (mobile blogging). Someone with a recognizable personal brand is missing a huge opportunity if they’re not using their brand as a means to create and build community. Don’t just be a face, be a person (with flaws), a trusted resource, and an acquittance.
- Step 3: take whatever cool experiences you may have in the course of your daily work activities and broadcast them using all those mediums I mentioned in step 2. Are you interviewing someone really high profile? Are you taking a road trip to a interesting locale? Twitter what your doing (via SMS shortcode 40404), take pictures with your phone (try Twitpic for sending images to Twitter), create short videos with your camera phone or laptop cam (try Qik, 12seconds.tv or Seesmic), and do it all in a digitally savvy way so that anyone following you on Twitter can be there with you, in the moment, sharing the experience with you.
- Step 4: engage, engage, engage. If someone follows you, follow them back (as long as they’re a real person). If someone replies (via the @), reply back. If someone direct messages you (DM), direct message them back.
- Step 5: Take everything that you’re doing in steps 1 - 4 and use your traditional marketing and PR efforts to talk about what you’re doing. You’ve got a website, a newsletter, press releases etc, take advantage of those mainstream means of communicating all this change.
I used two CBS local news outlets as what-not-to-do examples above, but CBS is doing a few things right on a national level. Check out Katie Couric’s YouTube video on Digg and the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions,. It’s a pretty powerful, real-world example of each step I just outlined.
Now What?
Hopefully I’ve inspired you to rethink how you can use Twitter for your business or personal brand, but if you need help getting started you can always follow me on twitter, email me at info [at] jennifervangrove [dot] come, or leave a comment below. Of course, any and all comments on the subject matter of this post are more than encouraged.
Strands Offers Lifestreaming and Moral Dilemmas
In with the new…
I read Louis Gray’s post on Strands this morning and was intrigued enough to create an account and start testing out what I find to be the completely unique features that differentiate it from FriendFeed, my current favorite lifestreaming social addiction. Gray does an amazing job at describing the site and the feature set, which includes pretty robost filtering options and the ability to easily add new friends to groups - 2 features that FriendFeed ostentatiously lacks, with it’s most active members usually resorting to complaining on FriendFeed or installing the Greasemonkey hacks that bring a few bugs with the quick fixes.
Already I’m finding myself really liking the user interface, the desktop tracker, the filters, the groups, the ability to save items, and some of the more obscure services that you can plug into your feed. Of course the community is nonexistent, and that’s really what makes these aggregation sites shine, but the community could come if they haven’t already burned themselves out with FriendFeed, SocialThing, or Profilactic.
Where’s the moral dilemma?
Strands provides me with a feature that so many, including myself, have asked for from FriendFeed - the ability to dislike items. Not only does Strands let me dislike something, but it also easily lets me filter just the items that my friends have disliked. The problem is that now that I have what I want, the implications of actually disliking something are making me too uncomfortable to actually use the feature. Dislike is a word with pretty significant and negative implications - it certainly means something entirely different than “Hide,” especially since it’s a very public activity.
Of course my own discomfort drove me to actually “dislike” something (via the thumbs down button which turns bright red when clicked) and poke around to see if anyone else is “disliking.”
I looked to an expert, and my suspicions were correct; Louis Gray has not disliked anything yet.
Are we ready to dislike each other?
This one feature begs so many questions and creates moral conundrums. If I actually take the action to dislike something, what will the consequences be? Will the poster of the disliked item have a reaction to my dislike? Will he/she choose to dislike something I posted as a way to even the scorecard? What are the implications of doing versus saying (we all can voice our dislike in comments, but the thumbs down icon adds a new variable to the situation)? Of course I’m probably over sensitive, and over thinking the entire feature, but I do think it’s a subject matter worth discussing and tracking over time. How many other social networks will offer us options to assign negative attributes to content?
As always, your thoughts on this post and/or the subject matter are encouraged.
If you’d like to join Strands, currently in beta, you can try using the invite code “louisgray2.” I can’t confirm that it still works, but it worked for me.
Building Community Around Your Personal Brand is the Key to Staying Relevant
I’ve been thinking alot about personal branding, and I felt I needed a little bit more than 12 seconds to communicate my thoughts this time around.
As a web worker in 2008, now more than ever, my personal brand has become essential to proving my relevancy, generating business, developing solid connections, and creating a digital footprint that highlights my passions. The passion to become an active member of the San Diego web and technology community has lead to a myriad of opportunities for me to carve out a niche market for myself. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned over the past few years is that your personal brand is only as strong as the community who supports your mission - reciprocity and genuine interest in doing something for the sake of the community are the primary pieces in the personal brand puzzle.
HelloTxt and Ping.fm Create More Problems than They Solve
Too Much Attention
There is nothing inherently wrong with either HelloTxt and Ping.fm, as both provide a service that many a social media early adopter needs - the ability to update your status across the myriad of social sites that you use. HelloTxt is slightly different from Ping.fm because they also offer a bit of lifestreaming functionality, giving the user the ability to also check the status updates of their social circle. But at the core of each application is the ability to send a single message out through various channels. When comparing these services to traditional media, one could say that they provide a similar service to the Associated Press, which broadcasts a message or story that is picked up by hundreds of media outlets.
The problem with broadcasting the exact same message across multiple social networks, however, is that the meaning of the message is lost in its vast distribution. The nature of the social web is such that most early adopters belong to the exact same social networks. Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, Facebook, Pownce, Jaiku, MySpace, Brightkite, Tumblr, Identi.ca, and all the other sites that Ping.fm and HelloTxt support, are all sites with incestuous user bases. A smaller percentage of my Twitter network is following me on Plurk, but at least 80% of the people I follow on Plurk are people I also follow on Twitter. The same ratios exist across a majority of the other social networks I use. I’ve even started to find that when someone I follow broadcasts their message using a site like Ping.fm, not only do I see the message multiple times on FriendFeed and each individual site, but I also never hear a response if I reply using one distinct social network (eg. Twitter). The message makes it to me, but it’s not really one that I feel comfortable interacting with or engaging with. This is a problem.
Too Much Saturation Destroys Trust
Whether you’re using social media for fun, to build your personal brand, or to enhance your business, at the very core of your endeavors is the desire to build a network, or community, of people who care about what you’re doing and when you’re doing it. The more you broadcast the same message to the same group of people, however, the more you destroy the trust you have with your audience, friends, or fans, and the more your message loses any real value. It’s exactly the same effect as a news story that gets too much airtime, or a press release on a startup that gets picked up by too many blogs - the more you hear the same message, the less interesting it becomes.
I’m not saying that sites like HelloTxt and Ping.fm don’t have their place or their value. They certainly do, when used wisely. I would, however, argue that if you plan to use a myriad of social networks that you should pay attention to the particular dynamic of that site and interact with those members in a unique way. I would also assert that if your goal is to build an interactive community, which is completely different than message pushing, that your audience is going to be much receptive if they notice that you’re participatory as well. So even if you choose to use a service like Ping.fm, make sure to take the additional effort to check each individual social network for responses, and, if appropriate, reply to them in a distinct and unique manner. Ultimately, building community means establishing trust and supporting the expectation that members of that community are being heard.
