Influential Marketing Blog

How Political Advertising Is Killing Marketing (And How To Fight Back)

Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left.
                - David Ogilvy

If marketing were a person, political advertising would be its cancer. I work in marketing and have never worked on a political campaign, so despite my choice to live in Washington DC - my perspective is not one of a political insider. Instead, I am a marketer and voting American who sees with increasing frequency TV spots, radio ads, print advertising and online banners designed to instill fear, spread lies and intentionally confuse people. To some degree, the "Rally to Restore Sanity" this past weekend in DC was inspired by this advertising.

Yet this is not a partisan problem limited to one side or the other. The central problem with political advertising in the US is that it is has become more important to fabricate a list of negative things that your opponent stands for instead of having to stand for something yourself. Instead of electing people based on their ideas and qualifications, this advertising tries to motivate us to vote for someone based on a fear that the other guy (or girl) might win.

Aside from the politics of it, though, as marketers we need to care about this because it is destroying the credibility of our profession. When people see advertising as manipulating them with half-truths, this perception extends far beyond politics. The next time you are trying to promote a product or service, you have to do it to the same cynical public that has become wary of marketing messages due in large part to unethical and misleading forms of marketing such as political advertising.

Though this may seem like a big problem, I believe the solution is actually quite simple. Political advertising should have to follow the same parameters as any other kind of marketing. Coke cannot create and run a marketing campaign solely talking about the 12 ways that Pepsi could kill you, steal your school's funding and pull the plug on your sick grandma. Why is this acceptable in political advertising?

Right now, there are vague rules around "misrepresentation" - but most competent communicators can find a source for just about any statement. The rule needs to be stronger. After the election tomorrow, we need new legislation that makes it illegal for political ads to talk about opponents instead of themselves. These so-called "attack ads" are at the heart of the problem.

If you want to run a marketing message on behalf of a candidate for public office, it should be about what he or she stands for and what they will do if elected. When more of this marketing focuses on positive messages instead of negative, then we all win. As marketers and business people with products and services to promote, we all need to stand up and lead this call - because it is in our best interests as well. Not just as professionals, but as citizens.

How A Portuguese Singer Got 20 Million Views On YouTube

Ana Free is a singer and songwriter from Portugal who started her career with a simple idea. For the past three years she has been recording herself in locations ranging from her bedroom to regional concert stages singing cover versions of popular songs and her own original compositions accompanied by just her guitar and posting those videos on YouTube. Alone, that doesn't seem like anything countless other singers might have tried to do, right?

The difference is that this collection of simple videos on YouTube has gathered more than 20 million views and brought this relatively unknown singer fans from around the world - including more than 20,000 on Facebook. She was recently featured in a music video from the band Hands On Approach and self released her own album last year on CD Baby.

In a world where the music industry seems to face a new struggle almost every month and many in the music industry fear that the next generation of consumers are growing up with a perception that music is something that they should not have to pay for - what could Ana Free teach us about marketing, engagement and the potential future for up and coming musicians around the world? Here are a few lessons:

1. Share your beginnings. One of the most powerful things about Ana's story is that you can see the whole history of it on YouTube. All of her videos (including her first video) are available on her channel and watching them gives you the sense that you are seeing a talented musician mature with each video - and offers a personal connection to her story because you get to see it evolve.
2. Be authentic. A common theme in her videos is the authenticity with which they are recorded. She sings to her cat, shows outtakes from recording sessions and sometimes forgets the words to songs. All of these pieces are captured on video and give the viewer a sense that they are seeing some real and unscripted - a welcome change to all the overly produced and narcissistically perfected music videos available online today.
3. Use a common language. By starting with doing cover songs that people would recognize, Ana uses the common language of popular songs to introduce herself and her style to her audience. While she does have original songs, if she only had those, her views and audience would likely be far smaller. Singing songs from other artists is a simple way to reduce the barriers that may exist for people to engage with her music.
4. Find complimentary partners. At several points, Ana partners with other musicians who themselves have large and active YouTube audiences like Maria Zouroudis. These duets allow her to engage another audience outside of her own and introduce herself to music fans who will likely enjoy her music as well because it is a similar style to the other musicians who she partners with.
5. Ask for help from your community. When Ana finally released her own album, all the videos in her channel used tagging and links to drive viewers of any video to listen to her music and get a copy of it. She also posted a video asking for help in promoting the album and spreading the world. By integrating this promotion with all her existing videos and directly asking for help, she is engaging the community which has supported her over 3 years and asks them to take the next step by talking about her new album and recommending it to others.

Gilty Secrets: 10 Marketing Techniques From Today's Hottest eCommerce Site

To say that Gilt.com is on fire may be something of a understatement. The site, which features daily special sales of luxury products at discount prices is on track by some estimates to pull in $400 million in sales for the 2010 calendar year. The growth of Gilt.com has coincided with a shift in how many consumers are thinking about luxury products. As a recent USA Today piece noted, "the new world of luxury is less about designer labels and glitz and more about shopping savvy and an I-feel-good-owning-this mentality." Gilt.com has grown to over 2 million members by catering exclusively to this mentality.

What makes the Gilt.com experience so irresistible? A big part of it is the sense that you are getting a great deal on products from brands that are normally much pricier, but smart marketing is just as much of a component in the success of Gilt.com. Taking some time to analyze what makes the marketing so powerful, here are 10 techniques that Gilt.com is using which might help other brands to duplicate some of this success:

1. Featuring amazing imagery.
The experience on Gilt.com starts with amazing imagery. This is clearly not a site selling average products, because everything about the imagery used on the site indicates a premium and desirable experience. More than that, the images are changing every day, which demonstrates that there is fresh content all the time and that the site will be worth visiting again and again.

2. Offering a sense of exclusivity.

Core to the Gilt.com experience is a sense of exclusivity. You need to be invited to join the site by a current member, and only once you become a member can you access all the special deals. The irony of this is that they have plenty of "sneak in" ways to become a member without getting invited through secret links - but the SENSE of exclusivity is what is most important. It doesn't pay for them to actively prevent people from becoming members, but they work hard to make their current members feel as though they are part of an exclusive club.

3. Focusing on the backstory.

Every product sold on Gilt.com has a backstory which is almost as important as the product itself. Why? Because when it comes to many luxury products, there is an inherent need from the customers to have a shareable story that they can tell to others along with the products they purchase. It is not about buying a blender. It is about buying a blender from a Belgian company that has been making them since 1930, and that you cannot find in any retail store near you.

4. Creating an urgency to purchase without excessive pressure.

Every product that you put into your shopping cart expires after 10 minutes. This may seem like a diabolical move to pressure you into purchasing - and to some degree it does work like that. The aim, though, is to limit the amount of time you can hold onto a product that someone else may want to purchase. As a result, the sense of urgency to buy is built into the site, and when coupled with a relatively easy return policy, it means that they can focus more on converting browsers to buyers in a timespan (10 minutes) that most other ecommerce sites would envy.

5. Providing significant rewards for referrals.

Once you become a member, the reward for referring someone else to the site is a whopping $25 in credit - far more than most other sites. This adds to the exclusivity experience, but also makes it likely that people will share their referral link far and wide with others. As you probably noticed, it is working for me also since I used my own referral link in this post as well.

6. Integrating deeply with email marketing.

Every day, members of Gilt.com get an email telling them about the special deals of the day and reminding them to visit the site to purchase those products before they sell out. They have a blog and a Twitter page as well, but for the vast majority of their users, email is likely driving the largest consumption and traffic because much of their target audience are at work where emails often come with pop up notices letting you know a new one has come in.

7. Selling items that are sold out.

As items sell out or are held in member's shopping carts, the site automatically lets you know and gives you a chance to be placed on a wait list for a product. Not only does this add to your emotional sense of wanting a product (after all, if it is "sold out" it must be good, right?), but it creates a secondary sales channel for Gilt.com where you may not have been able to purchase the product you were most interested in, but might come back to purchase it if it were available. The other benefit of this model is that it helps for projections and planning new sales if you have a good sense of the most popular products based on something active such as a consumer being asked to be put on a wait list for an item, versus something more passive such as impressions to a product or brand page.

8. Standing behind products they sell with editorial.

Not only does Gilt.com offer new products every day, they also stand behind the products they do offer. This "seal of approval" concept lets consumers know that the products they are buying are authentic but also tested for quality and will be exactly what they expect. This also allows Gilt.com on the backend to work with more and better companies to feature products because there is an inherent validation that takes place for a brand that does get featured on Gilt.com that may extend to that brand building more of a relationship or awareness among a desirable group of consumers.

9. Creating a daily ritual.

Every day at noon EST, an email comes noting that the sales for that day are open. Conveniently scheduled at the time when many office professionals are taking their lunch break, this consistently allows Gilt.com to create a ritual for their customers. Not everyone will buy a product every day, but just knowing that this format will take place every day allows consumers to plan a visit to the site as part of their day and helps to drive a big spike in traffic because you know that as soon as the deals open online there will be a frenzy to buy the most popular items before they sell out.

10. Customizing to platforms.

Soon after the iPad was launched, Gilt.com was ready with an app for iPad users that allowed them to purchase directly from the app. Today, more than 10% of overall sales come from the iPhone and iPad mobile platforms that this number is growing. By offering a customized experience for users on certain platforms, Gilt.com is making it easy to purchase no matter where you happen to be.

Not every brand will have luxury products or find this daily sales method easy to duplicate, but taking some of the marketing lessons that Gilt.com already knows could help a large number of brands who have some ecommerce component of their sites to create more engagement with their customers, and convert more of them to action as well.

Discovery Channel Uses Social Networking To Freak You Out

I have never been a big fan of horror movies. Getting scared on purpose was never something that I quite understood. One of the scariest movies I ever saw, though, was a film back in 1995 called Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman which showed the response that the world would likely have to a global pandemic if one were ever to occur. At the time I was in college at Emory in Atlanta right next door to the CDC and the film's storyline about the Ebola virus escaping felt very close to home. Tonight at 10pm the Discovery Channel is debuting a new show that will explore this idea of a global pandemic in an interesting new way. The show, called The Colony will take 7 volunteers and drop them into a condemned town without food or water. They are told there has been a biological disaster and are challenged to survive.

The show's premise itself is interesting, but what adds to the intrigue of the entire program is that they are pursuing a very smart strategy to let anyone take part in this social experiment by signing up for an online simulation of a global pandemic, that uses your own Facebook friends as characters in the "unfolding drama of the survival of humanity." This technique of using your real friends as the backdrop for a fictional experience created online is something that has been growing in use through efforts such as the popular "Elf Yourself" holiday greeting card campaigns last holiday season.

As this virtual experience around The Colony unfolds, it will be interesting to watch how it adds a real dimension to viewers of the show and (hopefully) synchronizes the experience so what is happening in your virtual version of The Colony mirrors what is happening in the show. The virtual experience so far has a combination of fake updates from your friend networks intermixed custom videos that seem to have been created to support the show from people like Cali Lewis. If this part of the social experiment works to engage viewers, we will likely see more networks and programs in the fall using this fictional virtual experience as a way to engage their most passionate fans. Assuming we all survive, of course.

Why The "Old Spice Guy" Might Be The Perfect Branding Campaign

You might have seen a randomly bare chested and very good looking guy doing a bunch of short videos that look suspiciously like a funny commercial that has been on TV for months for Old Spice. Starting from a series of ads, over the last 48 hours the advertising team for Old Spice has created more than 200 short ads which are essentially video responses from the actor in the ads to comments and questions posted on Twitter. The real time nature of these videos has become huge online, driving millions of views of essentially what are branded ads and spreading the creative of the TV spots to a much wider audience online.

It is a good idea and the creative is funny, but there are several things that make this campaign stand out as a way to refresh the tired and sagging Old Spice brand. They come down to the basics of good marketing - from strategy to creative, but most importantly, the level of integration between television, online and social media in this campaign stands out. Unlike many other consumer goods campaigns that fall short when it comes to everyone collaborating, this is one of those few campaigns that seems like it was actually approached holistically by one team that didn't just chase the trend of the month, but used the platforms of TV, Twitter and YouTube primarily in the ways they were best suited. Here's a short summary with some key marketing lessons I will be taking away from this effort:

• Smart Strategy - The marketing strategy behind this campaign is simple - show a great looking guy and tell women that he is "the man their man could smell like." Everyone knows that when it comes to bath products for guys, a huge purchaser is likely women - so instead of turning women into sex objects as Axe does to reach the single guys, Old Spice set their target as including and even speaking directly to women.
• Creative Execution - The creative execution of the "Old Spice Man" using actor Isaiah Mustafa has been a hit, from his funny rapid paced TV spots and offered an instantly memorable pitch for Old Spice that people remembered and even mimicked. The campaign started with a strong creative execution that spoke directly to mostly women and while many men didn't quite "get" the commercial initially, it was all many women could talk about.
• Cross Media Integration - Moving from a TV spot, the team at W&K behind this integrated social media in a way that is often lacking. Even with brands that have significant followings through one type of social media (such as Champion with over 100,000 Facebook fans and a great current campaign all around sportsmanship) are falling flat when it comes to translating that audience to a different platform and type of conversation (their Twitter page has only 45 members). For Old Spice, they are responding to tweets directly through videos, letting people create their own versions of the ad, engaging on Facebook and it is all paying off. As of the time of writing this post, their YouTube channel has nearly 7 million views, nearly 600,000 fans on Facebook and more than 70,000 followers on Twitter.
• Personal Investment - This is a relatively intangible piece, but the advertising agency team behind this is clearly personally invested in the campaign. They love it, and are actively sharing their excitement about it. On the Interactive Creative Director Ian Tait's blog are photos of the line of employees waiting to meet the Old Spice Man and also a personal response to a negative tweet someone shared and more details about the team behind the campaign. While most consumers won't see this dialogue or probably even care, I happen to know as a fellow agency guy that when the team working on a project loves it - it comes through in the campaign.

How To Salvage Your Brand On Facebook: Lessons For Nestle

If you haven't seen it by now, the Nestle brand* has run into a bit of a brand crisis on Facebook thanks to a combination of a coordinated attack from Greenpeace and missteps from the brand in communicating with consumers through the social media environment (for a good recap of the situation and analysis, read Jeremiah's post here). The negativity is piling on at the moment and the brand is likely getting advice from many different places about what to do next and how to react. Along with this, their following on Facebook is exploding and is now close to 100,000 fans. In my mind, this is another great example of the type of crisis that we have seen in many companies that ultimately helps to awaken their entire teams to the power of social media and how it may require a different type of thinking.

Dell reinvented their social media efforts after a negative experience with a blogger. Comcast did something similar after a negative video. Nestle's current situation may also provide a similar incentive for the brand to start using social media more actively as well. It is easy to pile on to the negativity because no one is yet answering the deluge of comments on behalf of the brand, but from a marketing point of view the approach they should take seems relatively straightforward. If I were trying to help them turn their Facebook fortunes around, here are some initial efforts I would suggest to focus on:

1. Apologize and change their tone. Interestingly, much of the negativity in this case came not from any business practice or specific thing Nestle said, but rather HOW they said it through their Facebook account. Just as emails are open to misinterpretation, many consumers interpreted the written status updates on the Nestle page as rude and confrontational. Thus the uproar about the brand page ensued. To correct this, the brand needs to apologize and change the tone of the page (presumably by putting a different team member in charge of it). In my last post I talked about the importance of the Community Manager. This is the missing link that Nestle needs to find someone to fill.
2. Use employees for more than just HR. There are some great stories from real employees of Nestle about why they work at the brand and how much they love it. The problem is, these stories are currently buried on an HR and recruiting focused tab on the Nestle USA page. This content goes a long way to humanizing the brand of Nestle as a real company with real people working there and is underutilized. One thing they could consider is turning this into a more vocal group of employees and perhaps even having them contribute to the Facebook conversation. Nothing helps to change perception as much as putting a real face behind a faceless corporation.
3. Share positive stories more transparently. You may be surprised to hear this, but Nestle has many great programs they do to help people in need, save the environment and move the overall industry they are part of toward the future. These are great stories that are not being told in a way that people can find or know about. Social media is a great way to tell these stories more powerfully, and using it across the board to become better storytellers could help to counter some of the negativity and (more importantly) give their advocates something positive to talk about.
4. Consolidate branded Facebook efforts. There are multiple Facebook pages for the brand resulting in some confusion from consumers about which is which - particularly when it comes to the brand voice in the USA versus that in Europe. They don't necessarily need to combine all the accounts, but the conversation strategy across the accounts needs to be more coordinated so they can build off one another and send people to the most relevant place for information and to engage.
5. Find and encourage more advocates. Ironically, this dialogue on Facebook has also brought out previously silent brand advocates for Nestle. There are dozens of people commenting about how they like Nestle products, how Nestle is being unfairly blasted, and even that Nestle is better than other companies who are staying under the radar and therefore not seeing as much negative publicity. Whether or not you agree with these people, the point is that there ARE advocates out there and Nestle will need to find a way to identify them and thank them for their support. Long term, it is connecting with these people that will truly help Nestle to turn their reputation around on Facebook and beyond in social media.

* Full Disclaimer: For the record, I am not a Nestle hater and have had the chance to meet several members of Nestle's marketing team in the past year. Though I do not currently work with them [nor have I ever in the past], I do have a more personal experience as I know some of their communications team members personally. I'm not receiving any compensation for this post and no one has asked me to share this opinion - this is my personal take on Nestle's current situation and what a solution to it may be.

6 Lessons From the Best Marketing Campaign Ever

Last month an unlikely underdog stunned the marketing world at the International Cannes Advertising Festival. At the show, a single marketing campaign took home a Grand Prix award in three categories simultaneously--direct, cyber and PR-- something that had never happened before in the 50+ year history of the show. Contrary to what you might expect, the unanimous winner of this unprecedented victory was not a Fortune50 brand with an advertising budget of millions, but a small Tourism board promoting a little known island off the Great Barrier Reef.

The winning campaign was called the "Best Job in the World" and was essentially a big online job search conducted through social media for a new "caretaker" for Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia. Done on a comparatively paltry marketing budget of just $1.7 million dollars and reliant on fortuitous PR and word of mouth, the campaign achieved stunning results, including over 34,000 video entries from applicants in 200 countries, and more than 7 million visitors to the site who generated nearly 500,000 votes.

Just two weeks ago on July 1, the winner of the competition--a 34-year-old British man named Ben Southall started blogging and touring around Queensland, finally bringing the competition to a close. For the next six months, he will be touring around Queensland, sharing his adventures through a video blog, writing, Twitter account and Flickr photos-- generating even more interest in Hamilton Island and all of Queensland in the process. The tangible results for the island are rolling in as well: Amway Australia chose it as the site of their upcoming annual conference, and domestic Aussie airline Virgin Blue just started flying a direct flight between Sydney and Hamilton Island, due to the rise in demand from travelers wanting to get to the island.

I realize that tourism and the travel industry may seem far removed from your business. Unfortunately, we don't all have the natural beauty of Hamilton Island to fall back on when starting our marketing campaigns. Still, a big part of the reason for the amazing success of this campaign was not what they were marketing, but how they used social media to do it. In that, there are some lessons anyone trying to promote a product or service could use:

1. Make it believable. Many marketing groups would never make a claim if they can't provide substantial evidence. How might Tourism Queensland prove that their job is the best in the world? They can't. But it is believable because it is a beautiful place and fits what many people's definition of a dream job might be.
2. It's not about how much you spend. One of the major benefits of smart public relations and social media is that it scales in a way that advertising typically doesn't. In other words, you don't have to pay more to get more. The real trick is to have something worthwhile to say that people can't help talking about. You need a good story.
3. Focus on content, not traffic. The typical marketing campaign focuses on traffic to some kind of site. For Tourism Queensland, the biggest payoff of this campaign was having over 34,000 videos on YouTube from people around the world talking about how much they love Queensland. Aggregate the views of all those videos, and multiply them over the long term and you'll start to understand the true impact of their campaign.
4. Create an inherent reason for people to share. Another element of this campaign that worked extremely well was the fact that there was voting enabled on the videos. What this meant was that after someone submitted their video, they had an incentive to share it with everyone in their social network online to try and get more votes.
5. Don't underestimate the power of content creators Most recent statistics point to some number between 1% and 10% of the user base of any social network are the active content creators. Though these percentages may seem small, the potential impact of some of these individuals are vast online. It could easily become the secret weapon for your next marketing campaign.
6. Give your promotion a shelf life. The best thing about this campaign may just be the content yet to come. Ben, the winner, just started blogging and sharing videos and photos, but the content is already engaging, high quality and inspires you to dream of making it to Queensland yourself. Over the next six months, his itinerary will take him across the state of Queensland and unlock many other unique opportunities. Best of all, this content will live on far beyond the time span of the campaign.

NOTE: This entry is republished from my guest blog post on FastCompany.com today.

Why Google & Virgin America's Online Scavenger Hunt Campaign Rocked

Early this morning Google Apps partnered with Virgin America to launch a unique campaign where they invited people taking Virgin America flights all day, as well as those sitting on computers at home or work to participate in an online scavenger hunt for clues to answer questions they would pose at you on a website called "Day In The Clouds." The scavenger hunt offered questions requiring you to use many different Google apps and online tools to find the answers, and integrated with Virgin America both for some questions as well as by offering free WiFi to any passenger on one of their flights today.

The campaign generated lots of positive word of mouth for the brands and though it is just coming to a close a few hours from now so the numbers haven't been reported yet, it will likely boost both brands and work strategically to promote what each of them wanted to: Google Apps and the cloud architecture from Google's side, and the ready availability of WiFi on all flights for Virgin America. Going beyond, here are ten quick lessons that you can take from this engaging campaign on what they know about marketing that is fun and engaging that many brands forget.

1. Built on their core products/services. The level of integration so that users had to use many of Google's tools to find the answer to questions and learn about Virgin America's planes, technology and flight schedules as well as how to use the Internet on flights was brilliant. It was done in a way that no other competing brand could have done.
2. Designed for simplicity without compromising. The site was easy to use and great looking at the same time. For every marketing person who has sat in a meeting and listened to a designer argue that it is impossible to do both, just send them the URL for this site.
3. Forged the right partnership. The choice of these two brands together worked perfectly to add to the popularity of the scavenger hunt. Both have high goodwill among their fans and drew a tech-savvy audience to participate.
4. Integrated the brand without being overbearing. The brands were definitely integrated in the questions without making every question about something boring and branded. The light hearted approach worked in this case, because people know clearly that they are on a branded site, and we should realize value of that - but don't necessarily need to shove it into a user's face at every turn.
5. Engaged through fun and competition while educating. The engagement on this campaign was high because the content was great. The format was fun and competition as built into this in a way that made people want to engage and do even better. There were even tweets from flights encouraging plane-mates to do better to beat a competing plane.
6. Created a sense of urgency. The timer counting down to zero as well as the choice to make this only a one day long promotion all added to the sense of urgency for this campaign. It also meant that even on an LA to SF flight (like the one Virgin America took media on in the morning) the time would be enough to complete the quiz.
7. Offered a real challenge. Like most puzzle and game related marketing that Google has done (including their smart Da Vinci Code promotion), they don't tend to dumb the solutions down or make it easy. As a result, they keep people engaged and have them try harder.
8. Involved the right ambassadors. In the morning, there was a media flight that several high-influence tech bloggers including Ben Par from Mashable and Beth Blecherman from Techmamas were on where they played the game and participated in the start of the campaign. These early ambassadors posted about it and drove more interest and traffic to the site throughout the day.
9. Made it shareable. Once you complete the hunt, you get your score and you have the opportunity to share it immediately (which I did) through Twitter and Facebook. It might have been smart for them to have prefilled text that didn't share a score too (in case someone was embarrased by their score and didn't want to broadcast it), but either way this final step meant that people could share via Twitter or Facebook, and also follow the campaign's Twitter account for updates.
10. Had real and tangible prizes. The last smart move the team putting this promotion together did was going beyond recognition and bragging rights. Those are nice, but the winners with the highest scores will get tangible prizes and that is a big motivator to continue to participate even if you may be in it and not want to finish.

Disclaimer: Virgin America is a current client of Ogilvy PR (my employer) and I have consulted on social media efforts for them in the past. I personally did not work on this campaign, however, and am not being compensated or incentivized in any way to write this post. It is my personal opinion of their campaign and nothing more.

Got Controversy? Why Your Brand Needs One Today

A recently released book that I contributed to asked the question with it's subtitle, "why don't they get it?" It's a fitting question today, as brands are often divided into those that understand the power of conversation and those that don't. Slowly, however, brands are adding their names to the ranks of those that get it. Dell and Comcast are often being praised as two shining examples due to their willingness to have a conversation with customers and actively use of social media tools.

There is one fact, however, that is often forgot. Both of those brands first entered into using social media out of necessity. More importantly, they started after major brand controversies. Dell had to reinvent their reputation after Dell Hell, and Comcast had to combat the incredibly damaging Technician Sleeping On The Couch video. Similar to the natural phenomenon of some forests needing fire so they can properly burn and new seeds can be released, evolving brand communications seems sometimes to adhere to a similar pattern.

Here are a few reasons why having a brand controversy may be your company's best hope to reinvent itself and start to embrace social media tools that initially seem new and scary:

1. Forces you to listen fast. Relying on daily or weekly media clips is no longer fast enough in a crisis. This means your team will need to start adopting social media tools to listen faster out of necessity. This skill will remain in the team, causing them to more actively monitor social media in the future.
2. Understand the real power of individual voices. Before seeing a crisis start from a single blogger or an errant tweet, it is difficult to describe the real power that a seemingly small time content creator can have. After a crisis breaks, it becomes easy to explain this point.
3. Demonstrate to managers why social media matters. This may be one of the biggest struggles marketers face, namely convincing their bosses that social media matters enough to dedicate time and budget to it. Having a crisis and using as well as showing the power of the tools offers a tangible example of why it is worth resourcing and budgeting.
4. Identify key influencers. Often in a crisis, the key influencers in a particular category that have the power to influence thousands if not hundreds of thousands will emerge. If marketers are paying attention, they can start to understand where the pockets of influence really are, and how to influence them.

As I write this post, there is another brand that is rapidly confronting its own brand crisis. Motrin released an ad that was immediately denounced by mom bloggers and social media types as offensive. The controversy really started through public reaction on social media and is now growing beyond those confines. I believe that this may well be the greatest opportunity ever to face the marketing team for Motrin. They now have the ear of everyone in their organization and the chance to do what few Over-the-Counter medications would ever have dared to do otherwise ... embrace using social media. The #motrinmoms controversy is a huge chance for the brand to reinvent its communications. The only question is whether they will take advantage of it or not.

4 Ways Social Media Could Save The Arts

Last week I had the fortune to be part of an event that we should all care about. It was a meeting of the National Arts Marketing Project, a conference sponsored by the Americans for the Arts and designed to help art based organizations around the country use marketing to drive more engagement, subscriptions, and attendance with patrons (a much better word than consumer, by the way). To understand the vibe of the event you need to look no further than a colllection of titles from some of the sessions put on during the three day conference:

• Are You An Urbanite? Attracting Young Ticket Buyers and Donors
• Hacking Copyright: Making "Free" Work In The Arts
• She Says Pithy, I Say Prissy. Let's Call The Whole Thing Off: How Marketing And Development Can Sing In Harmony
• I Can't Do That! How To Make The Big Ask For A Major Gift
• Release Your Organization's Inner Blogger
• Strategies For Countering The Reasons Patrons Resist Subscribing

My own session was called "Embracing Your Accidental Spokespeople: How Obama Let His Best Supporters Speak For Him, And Why You Should Too" and in the roundtable format, we talked about how to find the voices that are passionate about what you do, and unlocking them to share their experiences more widely online and through social media. Over the course of two round table discussions, I learned a lot about the unique challenges that many arts based organizations are facing, as well as discussed several engaging ideas for solutions. Here are a few of the creative solutions that we all came together and discussed as a group about how social media and interactive marketing techniques might help arts based organizations to better promote themselves:

1. Create a sonic brand. Though more specific to groups that create or promote music, one idea that we collectively talked about was what it might be like if every venue or group had a sonic brand. So, for example, like you might hear the Intel jingle at the end of an ad, you would hear a signature piece of music to signal the end of intermission. Something that offers a recognizable brand for a music based organization, while offering an apt extension of a brand based on something that is inherently a part of it.
2. Offer creative material openly for mashups. As more and more people create content online, they will need material like music, still images, and video clips to incorporate. One of the marketing tactics I am fond of at istockphoto.com (a site I use all the time to purchase images to use in my posts and presentations) is having an image for free download each day. What if an arts organization created their own collection of content and offered it for free reuse, dependent on giving credit back to the organization? It could be a great way to spread some brand awareness, as well as offer something viral and useful to content creators.
3. Invite social capital donations. Many people using social media tools are supporters of the arts, but not necessarily donors or people to go to art events. Though it may be difficult to convince them to open their wallets, it may be much more acceptable to have them donate their influence. One brilliant example was a campaign run across both parties during the recent election where you could "donate your Facebook status" to remind people to vote for your guy on election day. It's an example of letting people donate their social capital instead of real money.
4. Allow patrons to share their experience. This topic raised some concerns among the group for a variety of reasons. The two most vocal were that sometimes performers have union contracts that prevent any recording, and that sometimes the artists are afraid of negative criticism that may come with letting their work be freely shared. Still, there are other ways to let people share their experiences - perhaps through live Twittering, or making a cast available after a performance for flipcam interviews with video bloggers. The point is that every arts group needs to find a way of helping word of mouth about what they are doing to travel.