Advertising

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

WOMMA to issue guide to social media marketing disclosure

UPDATE: WOMMA has issued its press release on its new guidelines for social media disclosure.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) is set to issue a guide to disclosure in social media marketing sometime tomorrow, February 17. The guide was prompted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines for disclosure of relationships between companies and people discussing them and their products or services in social media venues.

The document is designed to enhance rather than replace the rules that may already exist in your organization. And it’s WOMMA’s intention to continually update the guide given the ongoing evolution of social media.

The guide covers the most commonly used social media channels, including blogs, Twitter and other microblogging tools, social network status updates, video and photo sharing sites and podcasts.

The microblogging hashtag recommendations could be problematic, given the number of similar proposals that have been introduced over the last year or so. (Here’s one proposal; here’s another, and another.) But if all WOMMA members adopt the tags the guide recommends, we may see some consistency emerge around how disclosure is handled on Twitter. The three tags listed in the guide include…

• #spon—Sponsored
• #paid—Paid
• #samp—Sample

WOMMA advises using the same tags on status updates through social networks should there be a character limit in the status update function.

The best advice in the guide—which applies to all of the channels covered—is to provide a link to a complete disclosure and relationships statement, although recommended language for such a statement isn’t included.

The document does recommend language for disclosure that is

clear and prominent. Language should be easily understood and unambiguous. Placement of the disclosure must be easily viewed and not hidden deep in the text or deep on the page. All disclosures should appear in a reasonable font size and color that is both reasable and noticeable to consumers.

For example, for personal and editorial blogs, WOMMA recommends disclosure like…

• I received ___ (product or sample) ___ from ___ (company name), or
• (Company name) ___ sent me ___ (product or sample) ___

WOMMA went through a deliberate process to develop the guide, including creating a blog, Living Ethics, that served as a forum for comments and questions.

I’ll update this post tomorrow when a link becomes available to the official WOMMA guide.

Oh, and by way of disclosure, I was offered a sneak peek at the guide by WOMMA and was not put under an embargo until tomorrow’s announcement.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Death Watch: Marketing and advertising have an important place in the complex media ecosystem

We have a tendency to assume that a law of physics applies equally to the media world. In physics, according to Newton’s third law of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

This odd assumption crossed my mind to me as I was reading last night. In the he book I was reading, the author argued that, thanks to the Internet, geography doesn’t matter any more. Under Newton’s law, this makes sense:

Action: The Internet has given us access to everybody everywhere all the time.
Reaction: Geography is no longer a factor in our interactions.

In truth, though, our complex and messy world does not abide by such clear-cut rules. Without question, the Net has certainly broken down geographic barriers beyond the extent to which the telephone (and the telegraph before it) did. But on the other hand, the geography has everything to do with the relationships I have established with people who belong to the same synagogue I do. My wife and I are still friends with parents of kids who went to school with our daughter. And I have strong ties to some of the people who work in stores where I shop (notably the local computer repair business).

It’s not likely I ever would have met any of these people online. And if I hear someone breaking into my house at 2 a.m., I expect I’ll get much better results calling the local police than I will jumping into an online law enforcement community.

The exaggerated death of marketing and advertising

The same book also argued that traditional marketing doesn’t work any more now that people are able to engage one another on the scales afforded by Facebook and Twitter. Yet many of the same people who decry the ineffectiveness of traditional marketing can’t wait to see the next “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercial. (Super Bowl Sunday represents the height of the “reverse-TiVo” phoenomenon, when people record the game so they can fast-forward through the football and watch just the commercials.) Denny’s drew 2 million people to its restaurants for their free Grand Slam breakfasts on the strength of its Super Bowl commercial. And who hasn’t heard of Las Vegas’ marketing campaign, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”?

Give it a few minutes and you can probably come up with a dozen advertising or marketing campaigns that captured your imagination—or at least your attention.

Good marketing and advertising are still good. The fact that they’re not as effective as they once were is not a sign that they don’t matter any more. Rather, the increased number of channels available means consumers have more options. A marketing campaign is no longer the sole source of information about a brand, product, service or company. Because we tend to simplify things, viewing them as black and white, many social media purists fail to see complexities and intricacies of the media landscape in which each piece plays its role and supports the others. In this environment, the role of marketing and advertising has changed more than it has diminished.

Multiple relevancies and the media ecosystem

Communicators and marketers have to come to terms with the fact that we live in a world of multiple relevancies. It’s not a zero-sum game. The rise of the Net doesn’t automatically signal a decline in the value of traditional channels.

This represents more than just an additive situation in which new media get piled onto old media. The media ecosystem that has evolved. In an ecosystem, the organisms within the environment interact with and are dependent on all the other habitat’s occupants. In the business-consumer ecosystem, advertising and marketing often create the awareness that fuels the conversation within the social media space.

That’s not to say organizations shouldn’t engage with customers and other stakeholders at an organic level. Companies need to already have a trusted presence, such as the one Dell has established with its cadre of tweeting communicators or the Comcast customer service team that finds and responds to online complaints. No marketing is required to initiate these conversations. But the organic presence of company representatives engaged in conversation with customers kicks into higher gear when an advertising or marketing campaign creates broad, simultaneous awareness of an issue about which customers want to talk.

Domino’s Pizza provides an excellent example of this ecosystem. The pizza chain’s decision to put its vulnerability on display by discussing consumer criticism in a series of television commercials gained widespread attention. Table Group founder and president Patrick Lencioni discusses the power of these ads in the current issue of BusinessWeek:

...the most fascinating application of volunterability is in marketing and advertising. It’s so rare that it packs a strong punch, as long as companies mean it. Go ahead and try to think of other corporate examples of humility and naked honesty. There aren’t many to choose from.

But advertising and marketing campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum and Domino’s—a company that learned the harsh reality of social media the hard way—was prepared for the conversation that ensued. On its Facebook page and on Twitter, the company engaged in conversation prompted by the advertising and marketing. The company added a four-minute video to YouTube that went into greater detail about its turnaround and invited comments.

Of course, Domino’s could have tackled the issue one customer at a time, but kick-starting the conversation with commercials and other ads makes far more sense. Domino’s—utterly clueless when it came to social media a short time ago—has come to understand the media ecosystem far better than many of the pundits who insist there is no longer room for traditional advertising and marketing.

BestBuy is another useful example. The consumer electronics retailer used traditional marekting and advertising techniques to build awareness of its Twelpforce, the thousands of employee volunteers responding to customer queries via Twitter. It would have been a much longer process to create that awareness at the organic level. (To date, the Twelpforce has sent nearly 23,000 tweets, virtually all of them responding to mostly technical questions about the consumer electronics products it sells.)

John January, senior vice president and executive creative director at Kansas City-based ad agency Sullivan Higdon & Sink (and co-host of the all-too-infrequent podcast, “American Copywriter”), told me a couple years ago that advertising is evolving into a gateway to social media activities. Based on this understanding of multiple relevancies, I would argue that Pepsi made a mistake reallocating every nickel of its Super Bowl ad budget to social media. How many more people would have participated in Pepsi’s social campaigns if they had learned about them on Super Bowl Sunday?

Smart marketers will figure out how to take advantage of the interdpendencies that exist in the media ecosystem. Figuring out how multiple relevancies can improve the outcomes of your social media efforts will take a lot more work than simply shrugging off traditional marketing and advertising as outdated techniques displaced by social media.

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Clear disclosure in 140 characters

The FTC’s freshly-minuted disclosure rules for bloggers and the companies that reach out to them may be sounding alarms among those who aren’t already disclosure-minded, but a lot of bloggers and companies have always been mindful of candor and honesty. Long before the FTC even began looking at governing a practice that PR people, marketers, advertisers and bloggers weren’t policing for themselves, some businesses (SHIFT Communications and Ogilvy PR) were promoting clear policies of disclosure.

But disclosure can be problematic, even among those with honorable intentions. How, exactly, should a blogger disclose a relationship with a company in such a way as to satisfy all possible readers (and, now, the government)?

Twitter makes it an even dicier proposition. With only 140 characters to get across your message—and part of that taken up with your account name—you may think you’ve disclosed your relationship as well as you can, only to find some followers think you’ve been deceptive. And the FTC’s $11,000 fine is nothing to sneeze at.

Digitas Emerging Channels Specialist Jon Burg (who’s also the brother of a non-communications family friend) has taken a stab at creating a protocol for Twitter disclosure. The idea of Jon’s “short-form disclosure” is simple and elegant. It requires only four of your 140 characters. For example, if I worked for Ford Motor Company as a social media representative talking about the Ford Fusion, I would send a tweet like this:

Great customer testimonial about the Ford Fusion. >SPK

>SPK discloses that you’re a spokesperson for the brand or campaign.

Here’s Jon’s complete list of proposed short-form disclosure codes (click it to enlarge it):

I’ve already seen it suggested that widespread adoption of Jon’s short-form disclosure isn’t likely, but I disagree. We’ve seen Twitter’s user community create several conventions that have become standard, including the @ symbol, RT, and the dot before an account name. If the user community decides to embrace short-form disclosure, it’ll spread.

Of course, not everyone on Twitter would have a reason to adopt short-form disclosure, so it would be up to us who do have a legitimate need to disclose to start using them.

At this point, Jon’s not proposing we start running with these, but rather have a conversation about them leading to eventual refinement into something we can all agree on.

I’m hopeful Jon’s first pass at short-form disclosure gains traction, produces discussion, and leads to a standard. It won’t happen if you don’t join the conversation and commit to using the resulting codes. Feel free to comment here, but I’d encourage you to share your thoughts on Jon’s post, too.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Can an ad succeed even if it doesn’t generate sales?

Twitter’s 140-character limit makes it hard to have a thoughtful discussion. Brevity is great, but not for everything.

I was having one of these discussions with Rob Frankel—@brandingexpert—about whether Burger King got any value out of its “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign. This wasn’t a disagreement, just an interesting conversation. Conducting the exchange over Twitter lacked something, though. Hence, this post.

The conversation-starter was Dave Fleet‘s live tweet from something called FacebookCamp, held February 24 in Toronto. Dave reported on a speaker who asserted that pushing the campaign’s message through mainstream media was more effective than tapping into social media, despite the campaign’s focus on a social network. It was the originality of the concept that captured mainstream media’s attention and produced the coverage that made it common knowledge.

Early in the discussion, Rob noted that the campaign may have gotten widespread coverage, but its notoriety never translated into dollars.

I’m not surprised. Although the campaign apparently led some 23,000 people to dump 10 Facebook friends (which, in case you missed it, would earn you a free Whoper), that’s hardly a significant uptake for a national campaign. And while you have to wonder who devalues friendship to the point that they’d dismiss 10 friends for a cheeseburger or if those 23,000 had enough friends-who-really-weren’t-friends that they could easily spare them, that’s beside the point. The point, as Rob notes, is that the campaign didn’t generate sales, which is the goal of advertising (unlike the goal of public relations, which is to build and maintain relationships). I also recall hearing somebody on one podcast or another argue that the idea couldn’t be duplicated; if enough companies adopted a similar approach, you’d eventually end up with no Facebook friends at all.

But I thought the campaign might still have produced some value for Burger King if it helped maintain BK’s reputation as the edgy burger franchise. Before it abruptly changed the tone of its advertising, BK was stuck in the same rut as all the other fast-food chains: competing with McDonald’s image as a wholesome, family-and-community-oriented, all-American icon.

Tired of the rut and with a new CMO in place, BK decided to shake things up and concede the motherhood-and-apple-pie ground to McDonald’s. Instead, they embarked on a series of irreverent campaigns, from TV episodes with the King to the Web-based Subservient Chicken. The chicken went viral and attracted millions of visits, but I’m not sure that was ever directly linked to sales of burgers and fries.

My question is, does it have to be? Rob thinks so:

But here’s what I’m wondering: Has BK has been increasing market share gradually over the life of the campaign? Rather than impact sales directly with each ad, each web page, each campaign, has Burger King been gradually attracting customers at a slow and steady clip?

If so, then you can make the argument that the advertising direction as a whole is paying off. The immediate results of each little piece don’t matter; the sum of all the pieces is what counts.

Well, yeah, sounds good. Based on some quick online research, in October 2008, Burger King was was ranked second to McDonald’s with 15% of the market and growth on the books. But nine years ago, BK was reeling from a loss of market share…from 20.2% in 1998 to 18.8% in 2000.

The fact that Burger King’s market share is nearly 4% worst today than in 2000, it would be easy to conclude that the company’s irreverent advertising and marketing efforts haven’t paid off. There’s no evidence to suggest that other factors aren’t at play, from greater competition from more quarters to the quality and originality of the menu to the impact of staying open late. In fact, I couldn’t prove that the King, the chicken, and the rest of the bizarre BK cast haven’t kept the chain’s market share from diving even deeper.

These were the thoughts I was trying to convey in 140 characters. I just couldn’t do it. And I’m left wondering how much companies values the long-term affinity for a brand that attributable to advertising and marketing efforts even if the individual pieces don’t produce immediate sales.

Thoughts?

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

The relevance of relevance

The vast majority of the complaints about PR, marketing, and advertising boil down to a single communication failure: The message is not relevant to the recipient.

The late Ed Robertson, who ran employee communications at FedEx (reporting directly to CEO Fred Smith), developed a model for communication based on Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human needs. According to Maslow’s model, primitive requirements must be met before people are able to pursue more sophisticated needs. The more abstract the need, the higher up the pyramid the need is situated, with self-actualization at the top. Physiological needs represent the first hurdle to overcome. You gotta eat, after all. If you’re starving, you’re not too worried about group acceptance.

Ed’s model takes the same approach to communication, which ultimately is designed to exert influence. (If you’re not trying to reinforce or change opinions, attitudes, or behaviors, why are you communicating?) In business, too many leaders believe you can influence people simply by telling them what you want from them.

Ed believed people applied the same kind of hierarchy to messages, starting with logistics. If the message was in the wrong language or was illegible, logistics failed and people would go no further. If you ever received employee benefits information after the deadline for benefits enrollment, you’ve experienced a logistics failure.

Next, you had to grab attention. Attention is nearly as big a challenge as relevance, since what will grab the attention of a CEO may hold no interest to a front-line employee who spends his days on an assembly line. As slaves to mass communication techniques, we ignore the fact that different people pay attention to different things and crank out one-size-fits-all communications.

But even if you’re able to capture the attention of your target audience, you won’t keep it long if your message is not relevant. There are two distinct dimensions to relevance:

• What does this have to do with me?
• How will paying attention to what you have to say make my life better?

Consider the howls of protest from scores of bloggers sick of the horrible pitches they receive from clueless PR people. The most vitriolic of these bloggers would still be inclined to write a post about information sent by a PR practitioner if (a) the information was consistent with what he wrote about and (b) the information would reduce hassles or improve opportunities for the blogger and/or his readers.

Madison Avenue used to be adept at relevance. In the 1950s and 1960s, a typical TV commercial would begin with a housewife on her hands and knees in the kitchen, scrubbing the floor with a brush and a bucket of soapy water. As she wipes the sweat from her brow, Mr. Clean magically appears and asks, “Are you sick of that waxy yellow buildup?” The housewife replies, “I sure am.” Suddenly, a push-mop appears and the housewife simply and easily glides the push-mop across the floor, revealing the floor’s beautiful, long-hidden surface beneath the layers of muck that hours of scrubbing couldn’t get to.

This commercial—shown during soap operas in the middle of the day in order to reach the target audience—answered both questions:

• What does it have to do with me? You spend too much time on your hands and knees in puddles of soapy water.
• What’s in it for me to pay attention to you? I’ll get you off your hands and knees and get you through this chore in a fraction of the time you’re spending now and a fraction of the effort.

Madison Avenue has strayed far from this concept, sadly, as have far too many communicators.

When an executive ignores a direct question and instead blurts out the rehearsed sound bite that reinforces a key message, the problem isn’t that messaging doesn’t work. It’s that irrelevant messaging doesn’t work. If what you have to say—in an elevator, a newsletter, an email, a press release, a speech, over Twitter or on the phone—has something to do with my circumstances and paying attention will make my life better, I’m all ears. If it’s relevant enough, I might even start a conversation with my peers about your one-way, top-down message.

There will always be a market for relevant messages.

Is there a market for your message?

A few years back, James Carville told a group of communicators during a conference keynote that Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1992 presidential campaign rested largely on staying on message. The Democratic party strategist noted that candidate Clinton always returned the focus of conversations to the fact that “it’s the economy, stupid.”

In 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore had no such focus, and few voters could tell you what the Gore campaign was all about. In 2008, on the other hand, Barack Obama embraced Carville’s approach; if you lived in the U.S. during the campaign, you had to be working hard at ignoring politics to not know that Obama promoted “Change you can believe in.”

Clearly, Obama had a message. Equally clearly, there was a market for that message. And the Obama team employed messaging techniques to make sure that message got across and resonated.

All of which flies in the face of conventional wisdom that asserts “there is no market for your message,” that messages and messaging are dead. In fact, if your message is irrelevant, self-serving, disingenuous or insulting, then there was never a market for your message. On the other hand, if your message is relevant, meaningful, helpful, accurate and/or interesting, then the market for that message is as vibrant today as it ever was. Getting that message into the heads of the people who make up that market requires messaging strategies.

I’ve long been troubled by the enthusiastic agreement to the notion that “there is no market for your message.” But the always-interesting Phil Gomes returned the issue to top of mind with a blog post titled, “Having a ‘message’ is fine, it’s the ‘messaging’ that sucks.” In his post, Phil draws a distinction between messages (it’s important to have them) and messaging, which Phil defines thusly:

The development and cloying repetition of corporatespeak statements devoid of meaning, rendered in a language that no one uses, delivered without the benefit of listening first, and presented in venues and contexts where they are clearly inappropriate.

Phil’s absolutely right if, indeed, that were the definition of messaging. It’s not, though. It’s the definition of bad messaging. It logically follows, then, the only bad messaging is bad. Good messaging is simply the strategic use of appropriate channels to make sure the right people—the market for your message—is able to find it and hear it.

“Messaging,” by the way, is a word. A recent podcast discussion suggested it was the inappropriate verbing of a noun, but the word appears in the Random House dictionary, among others, defined as “a system or process of transmitting messages, especially electronically.” There is nothing in this definition that requires corporatespeak, lack of listening, or inappropriate venues and contexts.

Executives and politicians who dodge media or customer questions, opting instead to parrot carefully rehearsed statements, engage in bad messaging. Good messaging is based primarily on an alignment between what you have to offer and the interests and concerns of the market. That is, good messaging begins with listening. You then develop the fundamental concepts you want your market to know.

A good current example of effective messaging is Microsoft’s pitch on Windows 7. At every opportunity, through every appropriate channel (that is, the channels that reach the influencers in the technology marketplace), Microsoft execs tout the fact that Windows 7 is easier to use, less intrusive, runs on older hardware and is compatible with just about everything. In fact, by offering an early beta of the OS to millions of people for free download, Microsoft has effectively boiled the message down to this: “It’s everything Vista should have been; try it yourself and you’ll see.”

So far, it has been an effective message, and one for which there is a well-defined market, evident in the volumes of content that has been created by bloggers, journalists, and others. The channels through which these messages were delivered include live conferences, interviews, briefings, and outreach to influencers. The result has been near-unanimous praise for Windows 7.

So don’t succumb to the popular notion that messaging is dead or that there is no market for your message. There’s no market for your bad message and bad messaging is dead. Good messages are based on…

• Knowing how your message will attract the attention of each appropriate market
• Ensuring the message is relevant to that market (that is, it has something to do with the lives and interests of the marketplace and it offers a way to make life better or easier)
• Clarifying your call to action (what do you want those who have heard your message to do?)

Getting that message into the heads of the intended recipients (i.e., “messaging”) requires the organization to consider all of its various communication opportunities and identify where the message fits—and ensuring anyone who speaks on behalf of the organization knows what the message is so they can adapt it for all appropriate conversations and communications.

It’s amusing when the same people who declare messages and messaging dead ask to hear your elevator pitch. If an elevator pitch isn’t a perfect example of messaging, what is?

Monday, June 30, 2008

Should Microsoft fight back?

Note: This post is about Microsoft’s marketing shortcomings, not whether a Mac is better than a PC. Please, please, please…no pro-Mac/anti-Windows screeds; they’re beside the point.

A discussion on a recent episode of “This Week in Tech” struck a chord with me; I’ve been wondering the same thing myself for some time. the TWiT guys didn’t couch it in these terms, but this sums it up:

Why is Microsoft letting Apple define Windows Vista?

Since 2006, Apple has been inundating the airwaves with its Mac vs. PC ads. The ads themselves are amusing, but sometimes completely inaccurate. For example, I had to roll my eyes when I saw the installment featuring PC with a camera bandaged to the top of his head. The point: Macs have cameras built in.

So do many PCs, of course, including my tiny Sony VAIO TZ, an ultraportable that beats the crap out of the MacBook Air (in terms of both features and benchmark tests). What’s more, not everybody wants to be limited to a camera that only points at the user. Even though the camera in my VAIO works great, I’ve bought a USB camera that sits on a tripod so I can aim it elsewhere (at a speaker, for instance, so I can transmit a talk to a uStream account). Apple no longer makes a standalone iSight camera; I’ve read a few threads kicked off by people trying to find standalone cameras that will work on their Macs.

Isn’t all this fodder for a comeback from Microsoft? Microsoft’s potential response to this ad is simple enough: If you want the Mac OS, you have to buy a Mac. Want it with a customized set of features? Tough; take the hardware the way Apple boxes it or go away. Since dozens of manufacturers produce PCs—and you can even have one built to your precise specifications at any local computer shop—with a Windows box, you can have it your way. HP doesn’t offer your perfect machine? Check Dell. Or Fujitsu. Or Acer. Or Sony. The list goes on.

Lately, the ads have been playing into anti-Vista hype. I’ve been running Vista on two machines since shortly after its debut. One machine was an upgrade, the other came with Vista installed. I have had no problems on either machine. No crashes. No freezes. I have not once seen the blue screen of death, which was an occasional experience on XP. And I find a number of Vista’s features significant improvements over XP.

What’s more, I’ve spoken to a lot of others who share my experience.

(Did I mention that I had a Mac for over a year and finally gave up on it, returning to Windows, and that I’m damn glad I did?)

There’s also the gaming issue. My son is a hardcore gamer, a fixation he can only satisfy on a PC.

Despite all these potential retorts to Apple’s advertising, Microsoft remains silent, which means Apple is actually defining the PC experience in general and the Vista experience in particular.

The TWiT team speculated why Microsoft isn’t talking: No sense of humor? A policy against responding to competitive attacks?

Who knows? But it’s dangerous in today’s world to let someone else define your company, your products, or your services. Microsoft is making a serious tactical mistake by letting the misinformation in these ads stand uncontested.

In case you’re interested, here’s the TWiT segment covering the issue (permitted through TWiT’s Creative Commons license):