Got Facebook Places to Be

Is this really a good idea? Okay, I’ll admit it might be fun for a while, but this seems like another Pandora’s box being opened to me. There are plenty of people saying this is not a good idea already, but I’m going to go ahead and add my short two cents.

The only reason Facebook is doing this is so that they can better tailor their advertisements. They are now able to collect more data and therefore deliver better ads. If you think Facebook is doing this for any other reason, you are sadly mistaken.

I have no doubt that Facebook wants to add new features to ensure people continue to enjoy it, but that’s not the driving force here. It was when it first started, and everyone was on Myspace, but five years later, with the majority of the internet now officially switched over to Facebook, they have a captive audience. They can give our information away with impunity.

They won’t of course. Not when they can sell it instead. Which is what they intend to do. Do you realize that all of the photos you upload to Facebook are their property? That they get to use even after you terminate your account? Think long and hard on that one.

I’m not implying that Facebook is evil, they’re a company, most successful companies do this kind of stuff. I am saying that everyone should watch out for the content they put there.

The Best Marketing

"Word of Mouth" is sometimes incorrectly traced back to 1980s, when the term seems to have been coined. The truth of course, is that this phenomenon existed and was probably tapped long before it was named.

It all boils down to a simple set of rules, really. if you maintain high customer satisfaction and high customer retention, they will tell their friends good things. If you have high customer turnover instead, you will likely run out of people who want to buy your product or service because unsatisfied customers, tell their friends before their friends have the chance to purchase.

I'll provide an example: I heard about ISP Teksavvy by word of mouth. Satisfied customers told me they offered a great service at a great price, and that I should try them. I signed up for their internet services and have had relatively good service with them. Rogers and Bell are monolithic companies that spend a great deal of money on fairly average advertising. Some of their commercials have been alright, but they do not inspire the same reactions as the Old Spice commercials do. Teksavvy is a smaller provider without the money, size, or clout that Bell or Rogers have; they are a slightly oversized small fish in a pond with two elephants. They piggyback on Bell's RJ-11 DSL infrastructure and have recently also added support over Roger's last-generation coaxial cable infrastructure.

Cutting Through the Haze of Uncertainty

After some initial difficulty, it looks like the uncertainty that surrounded three important priorities in my life is finally yielding to my persevering efforts. In addition, I've temporarily abandoned some of the home-brew web projects I was working on to focus on content. If content is your selling point, sometimes it is best to focus on that and diversify later.

Companies are similar.  When any company - new or old - is launching a new product. The original blackberries were little more than pagers with an amber-black LCD. RIM got very good at doing one thing before they added more functionality. Netbooks offered greater mobility and lower pricing as the greatest attraction factors, and worried about greater ram, faster CPUs and better wireless range as they became successful.

Yes, you can spend a lot of time working on the perfect version of something. Duke Nukem Forever might be an excellent example of what happens in such a case. It never gets done, or money stops coming in, usually one leading to the other. The reason companies can release imperfect products is thanks to early adopters. To all you disappointed iPhone 4G owners, you can rest easy knowing your money is not wasted; it is a donation to the Church of Mac. Without your donations, they would be unable less able to develop the next slightly-better version, which you will also pay a horrendous amount of money for.

For me, my next tech purchase will probably be a Kindle. It's got battery like nothing else, displays text clearly and yet also connects to the internet. That's a whole lot of awesome for a new product. So it's amber-black, so what? What if that is exactly what the application calls for? Besides, with so much variation between how colour is perceived (and also described, 'midori' is apparently Japanese for green and blue), perhaps amber-black is the best option for a number of mobile devices. You'll never see Apple, the company of colour for everything do that though, right? Right? Oh, except maybe on the original, original iPods.

Kids these days don't even remember THEIR good old days. This is what companies have to do, though, confront the initial uncertainty that their products may be viewed with and defeat it by doing one thing very well. If their product provides utility to individuals or companies in additional ways, it may help, but start by doing something very, very well.

Networking and Association

No recent updates have been posted because of a busy few weeks. In addition to the usual work, there is a competition coming up that I intend to enter into. I’ve also been building a number of thing and recently picked up a new camera and I am still getting used to it.

It’s been talked about plenty already, but I’d like to talk about the Old Spice Guy. With a number of newer commercials launching during the final games of the world cup, they also went viral in a very effective way, and I’d like to explore why.

The viral aspect of this ad campaign started out small by responding to tweets from users such as 12755JDH with the usual humour and randomness, but quickly moved to the top of the food chain by responding to several celebrity tweets.

This is not simply marketing, though it does a very good job at that as well. This is networking and association. Old Spice is winning association with both internet regulars or ‘the everyday people’ and with the celebrities they fawn after.

In short, this is an excellent example of how a company can do viral marketing correctly.

Pictures of Canada Day

Though backlighting was pretty awful in alot of cases, there were plenty of lovely photos that turned out from the Canada Day celebrations at Columbia Lake Fields.

I was enjoying myself, so I didn't start shooting until around 6-7 pm, missing the first half. The pictures included are low-res jpeg compressions of the high-def RAW photos. If you believe I snapped you or your business, contact me for your free high-def jpeg.

There were two bands that I noticed playing the opening show. Apparently the first band is going to be playing for the Black Eyed Peas shortly. I believe this was Cana Brava, but if the band depicted would like to contact me with corrections or details, please send an email to adamlunde-at-gmail-dot-com so I can add the update as well as your next scheduled gig.

There were a large number of vendors and business including the impressively-styled CHYM FMtrailer. Looks good, takes me right back to the time when people took boom boxes out in the street and danced on slats of cardboard.

 

The next band I got pictures of was full of soul and song. I believe this was the Rhinos. If the band depicted would like to contact me with corrections or details, please send an email to adamlunde-at-gmail-dot-com so I can add the update as well as your next scheduled gig.

The sun went down and with the opening acts done, Neil Beaumont took the stage with the Waterboys, a local male A Capella group operating out of the University of Waterloo. After a brief introduction, the Waterboys then performed "O Canada!" to roaring applause.

Then there were the fireworks! Still going through all the images now, but I picked one that I especially liked as an example. You can still see the glow of the horizonline, the smoke from the last fireworks, people watching thm and two distinct detonations. Lovely.

[UPDATE 20100704, 10:34] Well, it would seem as if the signifigant differences between my live environment at reislunde.com and the test environment here at home have caused the first code failure. As a result, the pictures are currently direct links to a half-resolution version of the image, rather than tiny 512 pixel versions. All photos on the server are copyrighted, but any pictures of people can be freely used by the individuals in the photos.

So go ahead and grab them before I update my code!

[UPDATE 20100704, 22:17] Despite a large number of tweaks that needed to be made, most of the modifications to my online CV have been made and I am in the process of rebuilding the image index. That means only my ultra-low resolution previews are now available for download again. If you do want to have a full resolution version, please contact me and we'll arrange something.

[UPDATE 20100801, 13:30] I am now using my Skydrive as picture storage for these pictures which means you can get copies of the images at a low 400x600 resolution. You can view these at http://cid-747b4a3d9095bca9.skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?page=play&resid=747B4A3D9095BCA9!518&Bpub=SDX.Photos&Bsrc=GetSharingLink or by simply clicking below. Viewing them does require Microsoft Silverlight

Every Day a Networking Day

Happy Canada Day, everyone! I was out there enjoying myself and happily taking picture after picture with my camera when I ran into person after person that I have not seen in a long time.  In addition to many new interesting people , I had the chance to meet ever so briefly with Neil Beaumont of CHYM FM, the local Rogers station.

The short version of the story is that marketing is about people and bringing value to their lives and marketing yourself is no exception. When you have a full-time job like me, you should still be out there meeting as many people as possible and networking with them to expand your list of contacts.

That does mean I can expect more traffic to hit my website at adam.reislunde.com, which is a good thing and a bad thing. The website is HTML 5 and designed to be web standard, so to simplify: it works in browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Opera, browsers that focus on adherance to the W3C web standards.

The flip side of that coin is that Internet Explorer, the browser with one of the biggest market shares, has never been designed with standards as a forefront concern. Mangled box models and other basic CSS 2 display issues were never fixed until Internet Explorer 7, when compliant browsers like Firefox started to draw users away. As of Internet Explorer 8, HTML 5 is still not supported, as it is a draft.

Are any of these good reasons to write bad markup? Or poor code to deliever and modify the markup? Or hacked-up CSS files that exploit the differences in web rendering? All of these are practices of a past when that was the only option. However javascript can be used to modify the markup to HTML 4, then commented to be sent only to browsers based on IE.  A similar method can be used to send a secondary CSS file that fixes the IE incompatibilities.  These cause longer loading times in IE, and there is an additional hitch. They take additional time.

Frankly, the website works everywhere on every browser, but its not ready for prime time. There are several minor IE glitches that still need looking after, and there is a great deal of content that still needs to be uploaded. Other, older content needs to be updated for a new version of PHP. In short, the website is not perfect.

So if my life depended on perfection, I'd be in a bit of a pickle, but I understand that perfection comes from working towards an ideal, a goal, and that the last 20% of what is seen is often 80% of the work. Adapting, updating, always changing, that is what drives towards perfection. Even if it's never touched.

In other words, the site does everything it has to. Even if it doesn't do everything I'd like to. That will come with time and effort. What is important is that even on Canada Day, when I was out and enjoying fireworks, I remembered to do what every person should be doing each day: networking. Getting to know someone new and setting up a reason for contact in the future.

The Way Social Networking Should Be

People seem to think that I'm against social networking, which is a ludicrous idea. I'm against many of the poorly implemented features the current incarnations. Facebook does a few things right, but its original focus, business networking, has been overshadowing by drama llama and school cliques.

I know a number of people who use Facebook professionally, for a number of professional means, but even their ratios of business-related content to personal content are still somewhat startling.

Now I recently joined LinkedIn and Meetup, and I'm measurably impressed. They have their flaws as well, but not in the same number as Facebook and Myspace. LinkedIn focuses on business events, informing people and networking people in similar areas. Meetup is focused around setting up in-person events between people who have joined local groups.

Since LinkedIn is well covered on a number of other blogs, I will discuss Meetup. I have gotten involved in a local photographic group and though I did not RSVP to the first events, I have finally gotten the chance to go out and get involved in one of these events. After a casual introduction to strangers I'd never met in the field, we went on our way, taking photographs and speaking about the industry.

I suddenly realized that this is what I always wanted Social Networking to be about. Using technology to set up real, live, human interactions more easily. After all, business networks are built from the people we know, and if my first experience is any sign, Meetup is a very fast way to branch out and expand your network.

Social Networks & Google Stalking

Companies are known to Google Stalk prospective employees to learn more about them prior to even contacting them. When someone is in the marketing business, Google is important due to Pageranks for clients. However, it is also important to think about the pageranks for oneself.

Nearly everything you have put online stays online in one form or another whether you delete it or not. Even if it is removed from every server, including the internet archives, there is no telling how many times that information has been duplicated, and if it is stored on personal hard drives. This is one of the most important differences between information, a still grossly misunderstood phenomenon.

Information is not like products, which are purchased pristine and deprecate over time. A physical chair is finite, limited, and easily counted. You generally don't have a half a chair, and although two people can 'share a chair' by sitting on it, that chair cannot be in two different houses at two different times. Information is also not like services. Services generally have a duration or an expiration date of some sort, and usually involve tickets. Public transportation, air plane tickets, concerts, but can also simply involve personnel. A massage is a service, and usually lasts a given period of time. A rollercoaster is a service, as are the whack-a-mole games and similar competitive games where one can win a product. Though there are often also products for sale in a rollercoaster park, and one may receive physical articles such as a map and a guide that reminds them of the park, we can all agree that you would not consider that to be what you're paying for. You're paying for an experience, and you'd be pretty upset if you paid to get into Disneyland and were handed some brochures and were told that at the end of the day, you would just be walking away with that anyways.

So products and services are very different and although the marketing for both may be similar from time to time, there is also something else that we buy and sell regularly, and this one is the trickiest. Information does not only refer to knowledge anymore, knowledge that we hold in our brain. It refers to anything that can be duplicated without loss of fidelity to the original. Information is in a book, but it is the book that you pay for. Though books lose their quality as they are read (dog-eared Tolkein books as evidence), the information inside the book is transferred to the person (analog) or to media (analog or digital) without loss in the original. The same goes for records and tapes, but this media was very expensive, as was the equipment necessary to copy it.

With computers, we have entered an age where information in a strange market. It is highly sought after, but due to easy duplication, it is easily available. An astounding supply outweighs an enormous demand because people can share at very little cost to themselves. Industries that believed themselves to sell products or services have now discovered that they are actually information industries, whether they produced video games, movies, music, novels, applications, or textbooks. Entertainment, education, self-help and experiential markets are all heavily affected by piracy and have developed solutions. Some solutions are inspired and work well with the occasional hitch while others are broken, horrible ideas, such as music DRM.

Even without computers, you can tell one person something and they can tell another person. Your persona, your profile, the information on who you are, all that is information that anyone can copy very easily. If you want to be marketable, much less a marketer, you have to be able to have some effect on the flow of information about you. In other words, don't post stupid wild nights on Facebook and Myspace. Avoid doing stupid things you think others might post about. There's a big difference between enjoying a drink and making an idiot out of yourself. If you do the second, you can't live it down like you used to, and that idiot is going to be the person businesses see.

Now for me this is particularly annoying since I performed a google search on my own name and regularly and search in Canada and come up with a number of tragedies and comedies, none of which I want to be associated with. What is a person to do in this situation? Hope you have a middle name you don't mind so much, or at least, a middle initial. Use it to differentiate yourself from others and should that fail, provide a direct link to your website which can show off your curriculum vitae and link them to the correct sites.

Subliminal Messages

I noticed something while I was watching the coverage of the World Cup the other day. The FIFA marketing people had done a little wordsmithing to insert a subliminal command into their sponsor recognition. It is in the open, but disguised because of the keyword is a homonym. I'm going to compare a regular sponsor recognition ad with FIFA's.

Regular:
This program was sponsored by...
Lentils, "Taste the Brown"
...and...
Transmogrifiers 3: Revenge of the SuperHobbes


FIFA:
Sponsorship for FIFA was paid for...
by Budweiser, "The King of Beers"
...and...
by Adidas, "Impossible is Nothing"
...and...
by Coke "Open Happiness"

Now I'll have to watch the game again tonight, but the important part is the 'by' or 'buy' that comes right as they tell you the name of the product. Instead of being an itemized list of sponsors, the portion is now a list of commands that tells people to go out and buy the products of the sponsors.

The question is do they work any better than normal ones? Proponants of NLP would probably say yes, and I myself would guess that a scientific study would reveal that the effectiveness does increase. Now, the person equates the celebration of a good football game with not just the sponsors, but the phrase "buy Coke". Now all they have to do is detect which game you were rooting for and put the highest paying sponsors on your screen when they win.

I see what you did there FIFA. Very clever, and probably not the last we'll see of similar tactics. Of course, I'm sure their use will decline when an old man will tell them that this only influences the weakminded.

Marketing Brew Gone Bad

I just finished reading about a group of individuals that FIFA detained for 'ambush marketing'. In the original article, it describes a number of individuals wearing a nondescript orange dress. Apparently, this orange dress could either be worn by the Dutch women in question to honour the Queen or to market Bavaria beer.

FIFA, is not sponsored by Bavaria beer, and they don't want to create the appearance of 'watering down' their image by allowing another company free marketing at the event.  Peer Swinkels of Bavaria beer is doing a very good job at spinning this his way. I don't believe a word coming out of his mouth, but he is taking every chance to leverage the current situation to his advantage. He says that there is no link between the 36-odd women that simply chose to wear Bavaria's new dress, and instead says that it is very fashionable and appeals to our sense of freedom, saying that fans should able to wear what they want, and that corporate entities like FIFA don't have monopolies on colours.

Personally, I don't buy it, but FIFA should have been able to prepare a response for the press. Almost every headline on the subject suggests that FIFA asked innocents to leave, or that these women were wrongfully ejected. A number of articles, including a particular favourite, includes FIFA's response that it is "a clear ambush marketing action by a Dutch brewery company". The article writer reminds us that something very similar happened in 2006, except with branded uniforms. Occasionally, this is paraphrased in the article and attributed to FIFA as an association.

So Bavaria launches a new line of dresses that is still available on their website and 36 people all show up to the game wearing the dress. I don't see how anyone cannot see this as a Bavaria marketing attempt. However, unlike the Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED bombs, this was not done accidentally and without knowledge of consequences. Something similar was done in 2006, but with branded outfits. One wonders if they even had this particular instance in mind as a long-term plan when they developed the unbranded DutchDress. Whether that factored into Bavaria's design or not, Bavaria is playing their cards better than FIFA right now, and almost every article I read reflects a bias against FIFA implied in language choice and grammar.

I know journalistic integrity is, well, mythical. That's why I identify my biases, then represent both sides. That said, I think that there is a detail most people writing on this topic completely skipped. This is not a jersey at a sport game, this is a dress. What usually happens when two women are wearing the same dress to prom night? Alright, now take that and multiply that by 36, at a soccer game, where tensions are already high. How come there is no video of that? The answer is quite simple: these women were being paid to wear these dresses and have fun. If they weren't being paid, it be like 90210 all over again.

Is Social Media the Ultimate Massage?

So should we just throw away old media and marketing rules? That's the question posed by Marketing Magazine today and it's a question that deserves an answer.  New social media such as blogs and tweets show a great focus on brands, but Marketing Magazine asks if this really creates a relationship with the customer, if the customer wants a relationship with a brand.

Well if we read up on what the Globe and Mail says, experience is a key part to marketing to women. Since a number of companies, especially video game producers and car manufacturers, marginalize their focus on the female demograph, maybe this is a moot point. However, to all the industries that still want to sell their product to more than half the population, now may not be the time to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

There are a number of ways people can both embrace the new while continuing to create the 'experience' that the female demograph seems to prefer. In fact, there are websites specifically dedicated to marketing specifically to women. There is even a website dedicated to Marketing to Women Online, and it is a perfect demonstration of merging old with the new.

The new forms of media may change the methods, but the rules of the game remain the same, in most cases. However, one notes that recent events do demonstrate that use of these new online tools could have enhanced marketability. Social media spread BP oil's crisis and there was no viral response, no antibody. BP oil used the old methods of responding to a two-prong crisis. The first and most important crisis was of course the spill and the second was their responsibility to stakeholders to remain profitable. BP oil stocks were already going to suffer due to the spill. Had they responded to it with new social techniques, they could have stopped hemorrhaging value.

Imagine if they had admitted the mistake and raised a call to arms to have this handled as quickly as possible. In addition to hiring the usual people to do cleaning, asked for environmental volunteers to step forward. BP oil pays for transportation from a single rally point and uses them to assist with the easier parts of the cleanup, manual labour, et cetra. It involves BP in the local community, creates interaction between them and a loosely-tied demograph, and creates the experience that BP oil is looking for the planet. So it does everything their marketing campaign does, but for a little less money.

So Marketing Magazine is right, new social techniques are important and even vital. However, they cannot function by themselves. These techniques must be integrated into existing marketing. Using only social media, or refraining from it completely are both ways that one risks becoming impersonal and distant from their demographs.

Crazy Canadian Marketing

So, Canada is inviting the 'world' to visit and is spending $2 million on a fake lake as a 'marketing pavilion'. Many people are angry since they see this as an unfair use of their taxpayer money.

The truth is, businesses spend much more on marketing all the time, so a cool $2 million is not such a large figure. Most of the difficulty that Canadians such as myself have is that we feel the government is spending 'our money'.

The truth is, in a business scenario, businesses can spend the shareholders money in whatever way they please, so long as profits are realized. Generally before this would be approved, business managers and marketing executives would all get together and review the suggestion. Risk and expected ROI would be inspected and there would be the chance for input. Shareholders would also have the chance to withdraw their support.

So, since the government has gone ahead and made this without consulting the general populace, who are essentially stakeholders in Canada, I would like to know the governments' expectations for ROI are, as well as their entire marketing plan. If this is a marketing pavilion to get other countries interested in Canada, sell it to me first. If you can't do that, what makes you think you can sell Canada to other people?

Well, Canada sells itself, that we know. Softwood lumber and freshwater. These things are in demand. I would argue that Canada is underselling itself, and that is not a tactic that should be combined with overspending on marketing. If you are increasing marketing expenditure, please increase the price of exports, since successful marketing should increase product desire. If you are uncertain the marketing pavilion will affect exports or desire to work with Canada, why did you just waste $2 million dollars?