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?