A Rock Star Marketer's Journal

Relationships?  Yes, relationships.  And not just any relationship.  Really solid relationships.  If you and your company have solid relations then you have the greatest potential of success within this new business and marketing landscape.  Social media has changed the way we communicate, engage and contribute .  At the very core, if your company “gets this” than you have the basic understanding of social marketing.  People and Relationships.

So put down the spreadsheets, strategy meetings, etc. and take one day to talk to your company about this concept:  Have good relations with every customer.

They say that everything that goes around, comes around.   Today this is true in two cases:

1.  This isn’t a new concept, but one that’s becoming more important.  Relationships work best where one party treats the other party how they would like to be treated.  If you treat others well the favor is returned.

2.   It’s also true in business trends.  Think back to the early days of companies (I’m talking early days, before the internet and big box retailers).  Let’s use the example of the local drugstore  where everyone knows your name, they know what you are going to pick up before you even come to the register and they even make house calls to get your medicine at all hours.   Aren’t we coming back to that?

At the very core of this business and marketing evolution its about people.  Individual people.  It’s not about a company relating to customers.  It’s about a company’s people relating with other people (historically called customers).  What social media has done is open the channels of communications.    Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and various other social mediums has allowed us to expand our relations instantly.  We can now communicate with other people singly through older methods (phone, snail mail) or several through new technologies Twitter, Facebook, email. Companies can now drill down to individuals.  And individual people (easily swelling  through these mediums) can relate back to companies through people.  Look at your personal life.  Are you communicating with more people in different way?

Are you good at relationships?   You always continue to build and build your circle of friends and network? You are a people person, have strong relationships than guess what, you are a natural-born social marketer!  Now just translate that asset company wide.

When it comes right down to it, one of the key elements in building a strategic social media marketing plan is building relationships. And those relations have are built on trust.  It was, in traditional marketing, marketers would send out messages about how good their products were. Blast them out through traditional vehicles such as TV, radio and print.  But now know there’s evidence that consumers/customers have learned to ignore these messages. Not only are we ignoring these messages through new technologies and the internet, we don’t trust them. Customer relationships with traditional brands have diminished.  This is partly why we are seeing new companies emerge and take brand equity and market share away from established competitors.  It’s why we are seeing new brands emerge, like Zappos - who ever thought a shoe store would be so successful online?  Do you think Nordstrom is running scared?

If you take the simplicity of what it takes to build relationships and you build that into a company’s core values, you are definitely strengthening your chances of succeeding in today’s market.

Relationships.  Are they good?  Then that news will be shared.  From one person to the next.  Are they bad relationships?  Well then watch out.

I had an interesting conversation with my eight year old daughter, Marly.  She was helping her dad clean up after dinner on the eve of Mother’s Day.

Marly:  Why don’t they have Daughter’s Day?

Me:  Every day is Daughter’s Day.

Marly:  Mom.  I’m serious.  Why do you get a day to yourself?

Me:  (under my breath,”well, once you become a mother, you’ll understand why you need a day to yourself.”)

Marly:  (in lieu of my silence)  Seriously.   Why do you have a day?

Me:  Hallmark, I think Marly.  I’m not sure where the day originated.

Marly:  Hallmark?  What’s that? (obviously a brand that has yet to infiltrate my daughter’s little brain).

Kids.

I always thought that days like today were part of the card industry’s marketing strategy.  After Marly went to bed I decided to investigate.  There is actually an origin other than Hallmark as I discovered through internet research.

This history of the day brings with it some surprising findings.

Mother’s Day in the United States dates back to 1872. It began with Julia Ward Howe, best known for writing the lyrics to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Howe was not advocating a day for mothers but rather a day for peace. She organized women to hold Mother’s Day peace meetings every year in the city of Boston.

It wasn’t until later that Mother’s Day took on the current meaning we have today. In 1907, Anna Jarvis, a school teacher from Philadelphia, began encouraging people to establish a national Mother’s Day. Jarvis asked her mother’s church to celebrate Mother’s Day on the anniversary of her mother’s death, which was the second Sunday of May. The next year, word went around and Mother’s Day was celebrated all over the city of Philadelphia.

Other nations followed suit. Today, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Australia and Belgium also celebrate Mother’s Day on the same day as America.

Interestingly enough, Jarvis became soured by the commercialism of the flourishing new holiday and fought vehemently her whole life to dissolve it. She and her sister, Ellsinore, spent their entire family inheritance campaigning against the day she had so fervently advocated before.

Well, according to statistics, Mother’s Day is now one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions. According to the National Restaurant Association, Mother’s Day is the most popular day of the year to dine out in America. IBIS World, a publisher for business research, reports that for Mother’s Day, Americans spend $2.6 billion on flowers, $1.53 billion on pampering gifts (manicure and spa treatments, for example) and another $68 million on greeting cards. And let’s not forget the trinkets women love to wear. In 2008, Mother’s Day generated 7.8 percent of the U.S. jewelry industry’s annual revenue.

So, I guess the day was not the brain child of Hallmark, although they and other companies certainly benefit from the holiday as we see in those stats.

Enjoy your day, Moms! I hope you are showered with gifts.  You deserve it.

I just got this video from @mashable on Twitter.  It’s an updated version of a previous post – and has VERY current data.

To summarize:

• Over half the world’s population is under 30 years old
• 96% of  Millennials have joined a social network
• Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the US
• 1 out of 8 couples in the US met via social media
• 80% of companies use social media for recruitment (and 95% of that percentage useLinkedIn)
• Ashton Kutcher and  Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama combined – 4.8 million each
• 50% of mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook
• 78% of Wikipedia content is in languages other than English
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
• 90% of people skips ads via  TiVo/ DVR

A little more then a fad is my guess.

I recently came across this term. Dunbar’s number. I could pretend I knew what it was. But I’d be lying. Intrigued by the term in the context of a conversation with MIT students at Sloan’s Business in Games Conference, I decided to check it out. First stop: Wikipedia.

Here’s the explanation I found.

“Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150. On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again.^“

Wow. Rinse. Repeat. Let me summarize. The ” limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships” is guesstimated to be 150. Is that possible? Is it low? Still questioning the basis of this theory I went on to find further information. Next stop. Google Advanced Search.

In a nutshell this theory was introduced by Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar “a British anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, specialising in primate behavior. The term became most popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, where it plays a central role in Gladwell’s arguments about the dynamics of social groups.” This popular book was released in 2006.

In 4 years opportunities to connect with others have multiplied through social networks including Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn among all the others. I know for myself that I have with high school and college friends, colleagues from my previous professional lives, etc. I have a lot more “connections”. We may not talk to each other every day, we may not see each other every day, but for those that I’m connected with I stay connected to their lives based on how much they publicize.

Does this impact Dunbar’s number? I guess we’ll have to wait to see how this all plays out. I think at the end of the day our definition of “friend” is going to change.

I did an earlier blog post about Nike’s ad with Tiger Woods. Many readers had comments and it sparked some interesting conversation. Here’s a video of the CEO speaking about “why” they did it. And not just because Nike’s tag is “Just Do It”.

I love this commercial.  Not sure if it actually sells their services, but certainly makes you laugh….

Thoughts?  Does it make you want to fly AirTran?  Or does it make you laugh?

I was getting itchy to upgrade my phone. I knew I was close to the end of my contract. Maybe I should go with the Iphone?

But Verizon has been my mobile carrier for several years now. As much as I wanted an Iphone, I refused to move services over to AT & T. I had AT & T once for a contract. I said I’d never go back. I lost more calls than I kept, I couldn’t even pick up service in several locations and the customer service was below par.

So I brought my Blackberry Curve into the Verizon store to see if I was eligible. Walah (pronounced wa-la). I was. Next decision was which phone. I liked my Blackberry but craved for a touch screen. The Blackberry Storm was getting terrible reviews. The salesperson convinced me to go with the Droid.

So far, after a month of use, these are my observations:

1. It’s not well made: Ok, I dropped it once while walking. But still. The slide keyboard is loose.

2. It’s heavy: It’s much fatter than the Iphone, and heavier. This is in compromise for the large screen and full keyboard.
But if you are on long conference calls, which I am often, it’s best used with Bluetooth, speaker phone or headset. It’s just cumbersome to hold for any length of time.

3. Not intuitive: The setup and menu screens are difficult to navigate. And Verizon/Motorola has done a horrible job in using YouTube and other video social mediums to get the directions circulated.

4. Touchy: This is a positive or a negative. For me it’s a negative. I find it impossible to use the touch keyboard while holding the Android vertical. The horizontal touch keyboard is a little easier. However it than uses too much of the screen. The slide keyboard is the best but I find that challenging as the keys are not raised at all. I may have to get rid of my finger nails. I think the phone is designed for men.

5. Notification System is Annoying: This is a problem only because I haven’t found a solution. I’m SURE that Droid/Google/Motorola COULD not have possibly made this without customization. But I have yet to figure it out. I have notifications going off for calendar reminders, email notifications, Twitter, Facebook and phone. Which has caused me to turn it off the phone completely. Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of having a phone?

Now, onto the positives.

1. The screen is beautiful: So crisp. And larger than the Iphone. I do warn that it is impossible to see in the sun, but I don’t know a smart phone that is.

2. Camera is awesome: Enough said. Much better than the Blackberry.

3. Microphone works: The Droid has a voice activation search feature. It’s so helpful and functional. It helps me work around the keyboard issues I have from above.

4. Google Maps is Fantastic: I work in Boston. Google maps help me navigate through the streets while walking or visiting another city. This feature helps me feel safe wherever I am, particularly while I’m in another city.

And saving the best for last……..(drum roll)

5. Gadget Master: This phone, added with apps and apps, becomes the best gadget in the world. I can link to all my social network accounts, Twitter, can keep track of shopping lists, emails, music (my favorite is Shazam. It’s come in handy during those times that song is playing somewhere and I need to have it), my calorie intake, coupons, news, dictionary…..blah, blah, blah. Finally in one place, I can store everything.

All in all it’s been a good experience.  For the most part, other than the input challenges, most of it’s been “user error”.  Trial and error.

However………Verizon and Apple just announced the Iphone for Verizon service.  Doesn’t it just figure?  Grrrrrr.  Technology is becoming a lot like purchasing cars.  As soon as you take it off the lot, it decreases in value because something newer and better becomes available.

I have worked in the video game business most of my career.  Recently, I’ve moved my attention to the social gaming space for obvious reasons.

One of my “gigs” was at Hasbro Interactive, the digital arm of Hasbro the toy company.  As business unit director I was responsible for taking Hasbro owned IP and bring them digital.  Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, etc.  I had to pick the right platform, right developer and the right product concept.

Part of my training prior to running the business unit was to participate in “Hasbro University”.  It was here that I learned about Hasbro’s brands but most importantly the play patterns associated with particular products.

It was fascinating to watch through a two way mirror the way people played with the traditional products and drill down to the actual play pattern being used.  For instance, a simple example, is children playing with blocks.  Build play pattern.  Children playing with Perfection, time based play pattern.  Or adults playing Trivial Pursuit – knowledge play pattern.  Whatever the play pattern was, it was fundamental to the success of the product, the marketing of the product and the audience.  Girls/Woman, in general love dress up, nurturing, decorating, etc.  Boys/Men are more attracted to destruction, competitiveness and shoot them up.   These are gross exaggerations to get a point across.

As I’ve looked at the social games available on FB, the first thing I look at are the play patterns associated with the products and who must be playing those games based on that information.  Lo and behold, it works.  Take Zynga’s Farmville for example – a game largely played by girls/woman.

I put this type of game into the genre of “sandbox” games.  If you think of an open sandbox, put a variety of children in it, and see how they play.  They all play a little differently.  Girls may bring their dolls in, decorate the area for them and use the sand to cook and make a setting for their precious babies.  Boys on the other hand may bring in their trucks, dig, destruct….you get the picture.

Whether Zynga did this on purpose or not is probably something only Mark Pincus knows.   But by building a “sandbox” game, they opened up their product to the largest possible audience.  Farmville can be played by different audiences in different ways, appealing to both males and females and satisfying the basic play patterns of both audiences.

Of course the other factor that is driving the success of these products is the collaboration – and sorry folks, woman are much more apt to collaborate and help each other than men.

So thank you Hasbro, for the wonderful education in play patterns and understanding the fundamentals to making a product for a particular audience.

Enough Said.