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May 2008 Archive
The following posts were made in May 2008. You may subscribe to the RSS feed for this archive if you would like to take your time reading through our posts.
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Posted on May 27, 2008
Talking Back to Your Customers – The Web 2.0 Way
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
Twitter has been getting a ton of complaints lately that stemmed from them having downtime and not adequately reporting the issues or keeping people posted. The interesting part of this debacle is that most of the complaining wasn't due to the service being down or extremely slow, but rather because the Twitter team was not utilizing the tools to talk back to their users and acknowlede the problems. Eventually Twitter realized its wrongdoing and started to update people on Get Satisfaction, their blog and their site. While they managed to control the damage, it was after negative comments hit mainstream and after everyone at TechCrunch to Scobleizer shared negativity and named a replacement. While most doubt that FriendFeed or anyone else will be able to overtake Twitter anytime soon, negative publicity can have a detrimental effect on your product/service. Here is a quick bullet point list of things you can be doing to avoid bad customer experience:
- Blogging - keep a company blog updated with latest news and status updates
- Get Satisfaction - a place for your customers to express their opinion and help you identify bugs. A Suggestion Box 2.0
- Easy access to contact information - let customers know that they can always call, email or mail in their issues, never hide your number
- Respond to complains quickly - never go silent.
- Never deny the obvious - its much better PR to admit your mistakes than to actively deny they exist.
Read on as I touch on some of the points above.
Posted on May 24, 2008
Weezer Harnesses the Power of The Internets
BY JENNIFER EUBANKS
Yesterday, Weezer posted the official video for "Pork and Beans", the first single from their new self-titled Red Album that gets released early next month. The video is already featured on the front page of Youtube, and as of yesterday at 5pm PDT, it has already garnered over 500,000 views.
The song is catchy and awesome in the way that you'd expect if you're a Weezer fan, and the video also delivers. Put quite simply, it's brilliant. I'm not sure who came up with the idea, but not only is the idea excellent, but it was executed flawlessly. The video incorporates dozens of characters and people that have been popular on Youtube--the Numa Numa guy (over 1 million views), the Star Wars Kid (over 7 million views), Chris Crocker (Leave Britney Alone has garnered more than 22 million hits), Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain (viewed over 22 million times) fame, the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment, Miss Teen South Carolina's confusing answer, the dramatic groundhog, the evolution of dance, girls dancing to a Daft Punk song, and those are just some of the ones that have a prominent feature in the video! There are many many others that appear quickly or in the background such as the Will it Blend series, Charle the Unicorn, and peanut butter jelly time. These videos constitute millions of views, so Pork and Beans appeals to anyone who has seen even a few of these massively popular clips. The way Weezer incorporated the dozens of different popular videos is amazing, and I cant' even tell you how many times I've watched it today, to try and find all the little details I may have missed!
This video was masterfully done, which means that they had to take a lot of time, effort, and money to pull this off. They also had to reach out and contact the many Youtube artists who appear in the video, although I'm guessing that most of them jumped at the chance to appear on something that would gain such wide exposure, and a music video for a well-known band no less! The fact that I've watched this video not once, not twice, but many times is great for the marketers of this video. They've now ensured that I am very familiar with the song--by tapping into the most popular videos on Youtube, they've automatically gained a large target market of people who will love watching this video. Weezer is popular enough that they don't necessarily need to aggressively grow their market, but they are a prime example of how to capture what's popular and make it work for you. The key is to know what's popular and what's next when you see it and to use the right amount of resources to successfully produce a product that will catch on--if this video had been slapped together I don't think I would be nearly as impressed.
Posted on May 23, 2008
Social Media Reminder: Relationships = Community
BY JASON CORMIER
In the midst of Community Managers, new tools and "social media experts" is the reality that most social media marketing boils down to conversations among people. People "buy in" with their time, and that's what ultimately creates community.
A good clergyman friend of mine is always saying, "you can't make community happen." Because it's about relationships, it's an organic growth that requires investment (in time) from all the participants. You can facilitate community with tools that help you to reach out, connect with others, foster conversations and organize people - but you can't grow meaningful relationships with just tools.
Any social media effort with a community that doesn't have invested time from people who are committed will eventually implode or fragment into nothing. With that in mind, keeping community practical becomes an important endeavor. And one of the most practical things you can do within a community is offer people something to do.
Posted on May 20, 2008
Crowdsourcing Your Design and Video Needs
BY JAMES CLARK
Just recently I've come across two extremely cool crowdsourcing services.
crowdSPRING for design, and moviebakery for video production.
What is Crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee, or contractor and outsourcing it to an undefined generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.
crowdSPRING
Anyone seeking logo designs, marketing materials, websites or other creative can post their project into crowdSPRING, state when you need it and how much you'll pay for it.
The cool thing about this process is that it requires the buyer to put the full project cost into an escrow account until the a designer is selected.
Designers, illustrators, writers or photographers from anywhere in the world can submit their work for selection.
NO BID MANAGEMENT AND NEGOTIATIONS
So with the crowdSPRING model the buyer can actually review the final work presentations, not portfolio or bids. This is a huge barrier for buyers. Skipping the entire portfolio and bid negotiation is huge.
The seller, knows for fact that the money for the project is available and if selected will be delivered in a timely fashion.
moviebakery
Gotta say, this process is brilliant. If anyone has ventured into video production they can tell you how complex the process is, from script writing, to story boarding, etc. If the process is not scope and managed properly the costs and frustration go up on the buyer and seller sides.
moviebakery takes a professionally managed crowdsourcing approach. That is the moviebakery team acts as the executive producer and campaign manager of the video, and then leverages the crowdsourcing model of top video professionals to generate 10 concepts to bring back to you.
As you can see from the image, moviebakery takes the positive benefits of the agency model, and the positive benefits of the crowdsourcing model and efficiently drives production.
Two Things I Like Best About moviebakery
1. From a buyers perspective, what I like best about moviebakery's process is the clear 10-Step Process. So there are no hidden mysteries or confusion about the process moves forward, when payments need to be made, etc.
2. Simple pricing. $10K and you're all in. Again, like crowdSPRING, the pricing is set, no negotiations and bid management. Just pure project focus.
Posted on May 19, 2008
Fun or Corporate? Is it Possible for the Two to Mix?
BY JENNIFER EUBANKS
Last week, David Vogelpohl over at Marketing Pilgrim wrote a light-hearted post that touches on the differences between corporate and non-corporate. It seems that the staff from CollegeHumor challenged the staff from Facebook to a game of beer pong--a game popular with college students, techies, and any group that likes to have fun and drink beer at the same time.
The challenge seems like a fun way to instill a sense of camaraderie among coworkers, as they face a rival team to secure honor and bragging rights. However, the fun came to an end when the legal and PR reps from Facebook refused to allow their employees to participate. I suppose it's understandable that having all of your employees get drunk while playing a frat game can evoke may horrific visions of PR backlash or DUIs, but at what cost? I've seen numerous articles appear recently that suggest that Generation Y, the younger generation on the brink of joining the workforce, values fun in a workplace. This is a generation that refuses to believe that work should define you, and should instead be a fun environment to earn enough money to do fun activities in their time off. To be a company based on a website that was initially only open to young people still in school, it would seem that refusing to allow a fun group activity is not the way to gain points with a large part of your target market.
Companies now more than ever must evaluate their image and decide if they want to market the "fun environment" or the "traditional environment". Time will tell if the word corporate will change to encompass a more laid-back atmosphere, but I can tell you that I personally prefer the former. I'm admittedly not much of a beer drinker, but it's great when you can create a team environment where your employees truly enjoy coming to work and collaborating with their coworkers. These types of bonds can often be strengthened by activities such as the forbidden beer pong. The answer doesn't have to be drinking based, but if the employees are excited at the prospect of battling another company (not unlike the company sponsored softball teams of yore), then perhaps the PR reps should more carefully weigh the risk vs. benefits. Your employees might not be driving while intoxicated now (which is of course always a good thing!), but the news that your company frowns on fun is now making the rounds all over the internet, and might be taken into consideration by people who might want to use your product or apply for a job in your company.
