Brand development experience in a variety of fields: retail products, e-commerce, hospitality, travel, tourism, environmental messaging, auto racing, outdoor adventure and higher education.
December 02, 2008By: joemagennis Category: Overflow
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The long Thanksgiving weekend provided the opportunity to pick up The Cluetrain Manifesto from the local library. The book was published in 2000, however it continues to get high accolades and buzz within the social media community due to the prescient nature of the chapters contained in the book.
Authored by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger with a forward by Thomas Petzinger, this book articulates the changes taking place in the business landscape today.
The gist of this book, is that there is a new conversation happening online about your brand, company or business and you have two choices to make. You can make the choice to continue to hide behind corporate collateral that contains polished prose, with carefully crafted pronouncements that fall on deaf ears.
Or you can choose to participate in the conversation.
The definition of a conversation is an interchange of thoughts and ideas between people, and you can participate by listening, inviting dialogue, responding to the input whether it is good or bad … and simply coming out from your corporate hiding places.
At Fluid Media, our efforts are intended to help potential clients into this new realm of business by understanding the hesitations, outlining in a precise manner the rationale, strategies and tactics for embarking on this new level of community building and overseeing the process of execution and evaluation. Read the rest of this entry →
The Thanksgiving tradition of Arlo Guthrie’s folk standard Alice’s Restaurant puts us in a jovial mood where the discussion tends more towards the music and family, rather than current internet marketing tactics.
However, we do talk about the issue of iTunes crapping out and losing the purchased songs that were in the library on Cameron’s hard drive. Apple now offers a service where you can make backups of the products that you buy, but if you are not diligent you can end up losing them.
There is a service that I used called iPod Access from Findley Designs which allowed me to transfer the files from my iPod back into iTunes to recover music lost in a PC drive crash earlier this year. It is important to prevent an iTunes sync before proceeding or else the missing files will be lost.
The new iPod 2.2 release came through and the greatest feature discovered so far is the ability to download podcasts through wifi without having to go through the sync process with iTunes. In an all out effort to find great podcasts to listen to, this feature makes it easy to seek and find the content you are looking for.
One missing element on the iPhone version however is that you cannot get any episode recaps or summaries about the program itself, so I am still in the process of promoting and expanding two bookmarking locations and encouraging others to contribute to the lists.
A Friendfeed room called Podcast Place has been set up, along with a Ma.gnolia Group where all are welcome to drop by and to put links to their favorite podcasts and give us a taste of why you like it so much. Please send the group URL’s to others so that they can add to the community as well. Read the rest of this entry →
In the Red Zone with Frank SIngleton is our specialty podcast that addresses Crisis Communications from the perspective of a Senior Vice President at Ogilvy Communications World Wide.
We felt it appropriate to christen this series with a situation that is a very hot topic at the moment, which is the campaign that was launched by McNeil Consumer Health, the parent company of the Motrin pain relief medicine.
We are not here to rehash the entire episode from the initial launch of the campaign to the bloggers who posted, and initiated a Twitter campaign that expanded exponentially until main stream media picked up on the firestorm, which ultimately generated an apology from Kathy Widmer, Vice President of Marketing for McNeil.
As well as an apology on the Motrin.com web site:
This is all background information for the conversation that we had with Frank in which he provides insight into the episode from a Crisis Communications Strategist’s perspective.
Key elements of our conversation include:
Motrin was not prepared at the launch of the campaign to monitor the conversation that was taking place regarding their brand, which was particularly egregious as they launched the campaign over the weekend and the delay in response only fed into the volume of negative reaction. The company could have very easily set up a search group in a Twitter app such as Tweetdeck to see any tweets about their brand, and could have Google Alerts monitoring news and blog posts about them.
A more “human” response should be implemented immediately from the company via setting up a twitter account and preparing a video response to address the situation. The corporate apology is not sufficient enough to quiet the controversy.
Engage the more vocal bloggers to present the approach that they were trying to take with the campaign and solicit feedback.
It appears that the campaign was a quick turnaround tactical approach to reaching a particular demographic, and the typical time and focus group research conducted on major campaigns was lacking. The agency was probably
McNeil now has the opportunity since they have the attention, to become conversational with real human communication detailing their true intentions, and become a good case study for how to respond to crisis situations correctly. There is a learning curve, and they probably won’t make this mistake again.
Let’s hope that the Motrin experience can be used as a bellwether for brands awareness and understanding of the impact of social media, and can be looked back upon as an episode that instigated an acceptance of progressive marketing strategies that incorporate listening and communicating tools.
What do you think? What are your reactions to the whole episode from a Social media standpoint?
Current TV has been a significant talking point at Fluid Media since the network launched back in late 2005. We would use the Current business model to demonstrate to clients and in lectures, the convergence of web and television with an added topping of user generated content (UGC). We would constantly tell clients to find the network on their cable systems, watch the programming and check out the web site. Then figure out how it should be incorporated into their web strategies.
Today in the Overflow podcast we revisit these aspects of the business model plus the exciting addition of “twitterfied” content produced during the recent election cycle and planned for the future.
The basis of the programming is user produced “pods” that are submitted via the web site and voted on by the registered users of the site, with top vote getters making it to broadcast. Pod content can consist of everything from News, Politics, Music, Comedy etc.. plus the network producers will constantly develop assignments for a specific topic that they would like to run on TV.
Concurrently, advertisers provide users with the bare minimum of material to work with such as a logo bug, tag line, headline, video or billboard and allow them to produce their own commercials called VCAMs. It costs very little to the advertiser since they don’t have production costs .. but if the ad is successful for them, they can choose to pay the producer and run it on other media outlets. So they’ve witnessed the production cost savings & have had their own mini focus group to see how effective the ads are prior using the creative on other channels.
Here is an example produced by 21 year old Andrew David Watson (no relation) of Philadelphia.
During the election coverage this fall, Current rolled out the integration of a live Twitter feed on the screen as the debates were taking place called Hack the Debate. So as you were viewing what the candidates were saying, you could also see what the great community of the electorate was saying simultaneously. It has to have been a double check for the statements and claims of each of the candidates, in the long run it will continue to ensure the the campaigns of the future remain more factual.
Information that has been disseminated recently indicates that Current TV is going to continue this type of integrated content with Twitter in the future, and plans to launch another programming channel focusing on movie content.
Let us know …. Do you watch Current TV? What do you think about the quality of the content, the format of the programming and especially the VCAM user produced advertising?
This week our topic is about the iPhone apps that we are using and how the device has changed our lives. The instigation of our discussion was a tweet on Sunday evening from Cameron:
“I think I need an intervention. The iPhone App Store is my dealer and the apps are my crack. 9:22 PM Nov 9thfrom web”
These are the applications that we discuss:
ITalk - This application turns the iPhone into a recorder. With one touch you can record at three different quality levels Good/Better/Best. There is a free version that contains advertisements or for .99 cents you’ve got the ad free version. The companion iTalk Sync allows you to drag and drop the recordings through Wifi to the desktop for archiving. The Mac Sync is available now, and the PC version is now in public beta.
Say Who Application, which is brought to you by the same people as Say Where, is a voice dialer where speaking into the phone will search your contact list and bring up the name that you are trying to call. It’s not entirely hands free because you still need to click to dial, but it’s better than scrolling through a list of contacts.
Twitterific - Currently the best way to communicate via Twitter on your iPhone. Easy to read and respond to your tweets, and includes the user’s avatar so it’s easy to see who is making a post. It’s free and includes advertising every 50 posts.
LaTwit - is an app that you pay for. It’s $2.99 but provides you with the ability to post to Laconica based applications like Identi.ca and Twit Army. For the smaller Laconica communities I generally view the public stream. Since they are not a voluminous as Twitter’s public stream they can give you a better sense of the conversation taking place. This app lets you set whether you want to open in the public or friends timeline, which is think is a nice option. Coming soon will be the ability to send private DM messages.
Flickup - is an application developed by Martin Gordon this is an easy way to get pictures from your iPhone to your Flickr account - Joe’s Flickr Stream & Cameron’s Flickr Stream. Of course, the limitation is that the camera on the iPhone is terrible, so we’re hoping for an upgrade in the future (video too?) .. But with a few easy steps you can upload the picture to Flickr as well as send a tweet with a link to the photo. This is a great way to let your twitter friends know and see what you are up to! Read the rest of this entry →
