The Beauty of Barbershops

I don’t know how any marketer can see this video and not feel inspired to make something long form about the craft of their products.

Interesting how we can know more about something like Barbering or the history of Johnnie Walker than how our 20-40k cars are made when we buy them.

Shame on any auto-marketer who isn’t crafting long-form to explain how they’re doing it differently.

Boxing Coach Crushes Meatball Sandwich Board Review

I loved the recent Sandwich Billboard with the Meatball Sandwich review but damn this Boxing Coach at a gym in NYC ought to win some kind of award for this performance.

He’s brilliantly cutting of the chumps in the gym that he very publicly derides for their weakness. It’s painfully awkward to watch, having gone through a boxing phase myself, but you’ve got to watch every second of his dissection of their manhood. In a sense though you get why they come in spite of the cruelty. If they can convince him to stop insulting him then they’ve made it.

This makes it a great piece of advertising. Like with the meatball billboard, the brutal honesty is a crisp (and refreshing) position for the gym and gives it great separation from the fakey, “go-go”, Jake Lalanne spirit of all the other trainers out there.

The Web is Dead (Zuck told me so)

Great post from Dan Lyons on The Daily Beast / Newsweek about the Facebook Instagram purchase.

In the piece Lyons makes the rather obvious point that these mobile devices are turning out to be pretty popular.  So much so that Zuckerberg realized his Desktop Internet system will die if it doesn’t get mobile tout de suite.

We may not like Facebook as a company as much anymore but  this was a smart acquisition in the Andy Grove, “Only The Paranoid Survive” kind of way.  He may turn out to be more Jobs-like than the rest of the desktop-CEOs.

Arianna, The New Sex Ed, and her Twitter Profile

Nice analysis from Hephzibah Anderson on how Arianna uses her femininity and Clinton-like appeal to win over new media types (as well as old).

Also an interesting assessment of how well her Twitter profile picture captures both the intelligence and feminine playfulness of Huffington perfectly.

The Social Mouse-Story That Squeaked

The recent news that Facebook hired Burson-Marsteller to smear Google shocked me about  as much as Bin Laden turning up in Pakistan. I mean isn’t this Google deal kind of the same thing that led to the founding of Facebook?

Then:  Zuckerberg got mad at his ex-girlfriend and slammed her online.

Now: Zuckerberg gets mad at Google and decides to slam her online.

I just found it to be kind of a yawn of a story.  I think we’re supposed to be outraged that the leader of social media seems to be violating at least the spirit of the new world order in social marketing but come on.

Zuckerberg isn’t the little brother of Sergey and Larry, the “do no evil” crew.  He’s much more like Gates (pre-Melinda) and Ballmer, or Larry Ellison.  I can understand a variety of reactions to this story but surprised or shocked or outraged just feels naive.

Gluten-Free Social Marketing

My wife came home with $300 bucks worth of Gluten-Free food from Whole Foods last week. All basically identical to the $250 of regularly over-priced food we get from Whole Foods every week. She also bought a cookbook called gluten-free girl and the chef.

I had heard about gluten-free of course but mostly because of a couple friends who have kids with Celiac Disease. Lately though it’s everywhere. I don’t know whether it’s a fad or something sustainable but I love the way it’s been marketed. Both in general and by the woman who wrote the book about gluten-free cooking, Shauna James Ahem. There’s a nice article about how she marketed the book by Dianne Jacob

She seems to have done four things right:

1) She spent her time in the community. Shauna has 42,000 Twitter followers and 15,000 Facebook fans. She talks to them every day. Pros and cons, recipes, Q & A’s, curation, it’s all there. And she did this community engagement first.

2) She writes a blog, called of course, gluten-free girl. Producing longer form content is critical in the social space for becoming an influencer and leader on a topic. It can’t all be curation. Even if your long form is point of view. Ahem’s is recipes and the stories, all of which then flow through other bloggers through Twitter, and to her community through Facebook. It’s perfect.

3) She wrote a book. This is wonderful not just because she sells a book, but because for the social community the book is now big news. Bloggers are dying for news, and content, and interviews etc. Ahem has just created a trifecta of new content for the entire social system. From big foodie bloggers to the regular joes and janes like us trying to figure out how we’re going to eat healthier.

4) She went out to the community and engaged in an interesting and newsworthy way. Instead of a traditional book tour Ahem went to NYC and had a picnic in Central Park with her social community. Ditto in San Francisco at Dolores Park. Guess what, this isn’t just engagement with her fans, it’s also NEWS for the blogging community to report on.

All four of these components put together is the perfect model for every marketer. Engage with the community, create and curate content, do things that are newsworthy and cycle it all back through the system over and over again.

Twitter: From Stupid to Brilliant in 12 Easy Months

In the last year or so we’ve seen Twitter go from feeling like the silliest, most irrational element of our social marketing efforts to being the most thoughtful and rational.

To a large degree this is due to the way in which the blogging and journalist community at large is using the system as a content feed. But it’s not just the pros using it more rationally it’s also the truly socially active and influential who are using the “What’s Happening Now” effect to help them stay on top of things in the world they care about. Very different than the origins of Twitter usage.

Simon Dumenco from adage covers this transition nicely in

It could always suck more

The September 20^th issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting piece on James Dyson, inventor of vacuums by the same name. Definitely worth a read, for a bunch of reasons.*

What jumped out at me initially was the description of how he brought his first model to market. At the time the marketplace was full-up with brands hovering right around the $99 mark. So when Dyson decided to enter the fray with a model costing three times that amount how did he do it?

Not with flashy graphics or even a list of product attributes and advantages. He did it with a story. A story about cleaning his house and becoming frustrated with the ways in which his vacuum was underperforming. And how he rolled up his shirtsleeves and invented something better.

This approach is interesting, and seems to make sense in other categories as well. If a spirits brand decides to go after a higher-end niche you don’t see a bunch of ads with dudes exchanging high-fives in a parking lot. What you’re more likely to see is a story about quality, about how the product is aged, where the ingredients are sourced from, etc.

The New Yorker article also talks about Mr. Dyson’s belief in engineering, and how it should fit hand-in-glove with design. “All our engineers are designers and all our designers are engineers”, and “the engineering leads the design”. Hey that’s neat.

But my question is this: does all of this have to automatically lead to a high price tag? Mr. Dyson talks at length about the need to shift back toward manufacturing, which is all well and good. But so far all we have seen Dyson hang his hat on is The World’s Most Expensive (and therefore Best) Hatrack.

Encouraging folks to get their hands dirty (to MANUFACTURE, to INVENT) is dandy but where does utility come in? How does this angle apply to the pedestrian goods we need and use everyday? Inventing and building a better mousetrap is an admirable goal but is it a business model if the shelf price is three times that of the competition?

Maybe Dyson would say “Why yes. Yes it is.” Create some sort of fancy Brand Mythology around your Mousetrap 2.0 and customers and mice alike will come running. Hell I think the marketing would actually be kinda fun to work on.

But what I’d like to ask Mr. Dyson about is using these powers for good. I’d like to see some of this same shirtsleeves go-get-‘em attitude combined with a more “for the people” product or product line.

The article makes passing mention of the automobile industry, pointing out the steel-clad division between engineers and designers. But what would happen if you mashed all these notions together and got a bunch of designer/engineer hybrids working on, say, an affordable hybrid? Get these brainiac Designgineers™ to work on every part of the process, from design to materials to manufacturing. Thus making it both better AND more affordable.

Plus I’ll bet someone could gin up a really good story to bathe it in.

(*Article by John Seabrook. Abstract here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_seabrook )

Twitter’s Growing Up?

We managed a campaign recently for a very fun and active social marketing effort in which Twitter played a big role. It played a significantly more powerful and specific role than we imagined possible.

The client we were doing work for has a very large and passionate fan base and we thought Twitter would be a place those fans could keep an eye on what our client was up to during the content distribution phase, participate in the effort as they saw fit, and basically keep a pulse on the community. And that happened for sure.

What really took us by surprise is how quickly and efficiently the professional channels became a part of the Twitter base. With only a little bit of outreach Twitter became the most efficient social press relations and retailer relations tool we used. Particularly for consistent story and content distribution throughout the effort.

Now it is possible that Twitter has been this efficient for awhile but it was hard to tell during much of the frenzy over the last year or two. As some of that consumer frenzy and volume has disappeared we’ve discovered a whole new Twitter emerge. And she’s all grown up.

Can Marketing Walk On Water?

If you haven’t seen the video from Hi-Tec on Youtube I would highly recommend taking a look:

It’s brilliant for about a dozen different reasons. It’s really funny. It’s really inspiring. It made me like Hi-Tec.

Like the Johnny Walker video we referenced in an earlier post this has got to be a part of where we’re headed.

Great content distributed by a passionate community.