Online is Real Life, Too

Online or virtual life gets a bad rap for being less than real, which is weird as we're essentially labeling social media as antisocial. It keeps us away from our real life social circles and robs us all of face-to-face time the advocates of real life argue. And, while they make a good case, certainly some people are on their computers far too much, I think they also do a disservice to a very important point: real life and virtual life do not need to be mutually exclusive. In fact, they have great potential to augment one another.

Yesterday I spent just about all day inside my apartment working on writing articles, editing others and watching a good amount of TV with my roommate. Under normal circumstances I would have had contact with just one person, but instead I was periodically chatting on twitter, sharing articles to read and posting on a few friend's Facebook walls to touch base. What's so wrong with that? I think my life is considerably better as a result and I see these people much more in real life because of these interactions.

I've put down some of these ideas in a much more cogent form in an article published yesterday on thenextgreatgeneration.com, titled (the same as this) Online Is Real Life, Too -- If your'e interested check it out and leave a comment.

Since when is "social media" just a Facebook fan page?

Ad Age recently named Mother, New York agency of the year. And while the article covers much of their recent work, which is all very interesting stuff, one of their ideas in particular really caught my eye:

"For Target, Mother recaptured the marketer's design-oriented sunniness with a nine-faced Times Square billboard-turned-product. The agency recruited four New York artists to create the 20,000 square foot poster and then, adding a green/design/turn-your-marketing-spend-into-revenue twist, the agency repurposed the vinyl into 1,600 mini works of art, each available for purchase on Target.com, and then re-re-purposed each piece into a handbag designed by Anna Sui. The handbags sold out in a week."

On the same day, other news comes from Ad Age that P&G is planning to invest heavily in making Facebook a big part of its marketing plan.

“‘P&G's explicit goal for 2010 is to assure that each of its brands has a meaningful presence on Facebook, and they are willing to pay dearly for that,’ Mr. Hornik wrote. ‘And while P&G's thought leaders expressed some skepticism about the efficacy of Facebook's “engagement ads,” they certainly view Facebook as a must-have for digital advertising and brand building.’”

What jumped to mind after reading these two articles was that both of these “ideas” could probably benefit greatly from the other.

With a stronger Facebook strategy Target could have facilitates spreading news about their event/ stunt/ product to fans of the brand and a wider audience in general. I really like Target and I would have enjoyed hearing about this, but I didn’t. It’s a great story and there’s no reason they couldn’t have told it on Facebook and other social media platforms. Why limit the exposure of this event to NYC when your customers are all over the world and connected? Even if I don't buy a bag just knowing about them elivates the brand's identity in my mind.

On the other side, P&G might incorporate Facbook into their marketing plan, but unless they have something more to bring to the table other than a fan page, contest or quirky app I just don’t know if anyone is going to care. Why on earth would I friend P&G? Tide or Duracell? The unspoken transaction that advertising trades entertainment for attension is just as true online as off. People want something interesting and fun, and just because they are sitting at their computers all day doesn’t mean they want to feel that way. Social media is a channel or a tactic for disseminating a message, and not much of a message in itself.

I think this all ties back into the discussion of what creativity means in a digitally connected world. I don't think you need to be on social to be social--but, if you want to be successful on the social media channel it seems that we need to think about the conversation and what it means to be conversational.

Scion’s Missed Opportunity

It might not make sense for every brand to jump head first into social media and start conversing with their customers (though for many it does). Yet, with the widespread adoption of this new platform the dynamic of marketing has changed, and campaigns designed without the existence of these conversations and communities in mind will undoubtedly fall short.

Scion's marketing efforts toward hip hop and graffiti groups offers a great example of how misunderstanding the way targets interact online, even when engaging them elsewhere, can lead to negative results and missed opportunities.

What not to do:
A few years ago Scion rolled into Scribble Jam, an annual Hip Hop and graffiti festival, on a mission to promote their message of individuality. With several graffiti painted cars and carefully produced fliers about the 'indie-ness' of their brand, it was by all accounts a text book street-team style operation and a fantastic failure; the ‘graf’ community was underwhelmed, to say the least, at the relevance of Scion's message and its poor understanding their community.

Some background on the graffiti community:
To say they are rebels is an understatement. Getting caught for painting can easily lead to more jail time than a sexual assault conviction and the lengths to which these artists go to complete pieces in obscure, unreachable places is unreal. They put themselves at great personal risk for their art, their name, and “sticking it to the man.”

They paint, among other things, freight cars. And, most are careful never to paint over tracking numbers so that the cars keep running. As various pieces travel the country other graffiti artists, along with another group of people dedicated to tracking and documenting graf, snap pictures and post them online.

But they’re not posting on Facebook; the graffiti community was online before Frienster, using forums to trade painting tips and pictures. The online component of their community is largely responsible for the shaping and growing the real world community that exists today.


What could have been:
Graffiti artists are anti-establishment, read ad busters and have no love for marketing. And this is how I’d sell them Scion.

Arrive with a fleet of blank, white cars and offer them to the painters as open canvases. No brochures.

Take the best cars from scribble jam along with a few others tagged by well know graf artists and take them off the road. Place them in prominent spots where graffiti is typically found; under bridges, on the roofs of building, on flat bed train cars mixed in with freight. Then do nothing.

Because tracking and sharing found graf online is such an important aspect of the community there’s no need to build flashy micro sites or a fan page on Facebook. When members of the community see the cars word will spread. The unique look of Scions makes the brand unmistakable and the message is a powerful, silent endorsement of the community’s work and culture.

Take away:
I'm sure there are ways to drastically improve my plan, but the core of my argument is about the importance of research, and how online communities aren't just online. The media ecosystem is clearly more complex these days and the value a social agency provides is much more than creating a twitter strategy or improving SEO (though this is essential as well). An agency versed in social understands how social media networks work and how their target interacts with them. This is the type of insight your brand needs today.

Is your agency fluent in social?

A "how to twitter" for my friends

When I started using Twitter I was very confused. Honestly, I still am sometimes--it's a big place. But, with the help of some friends I was able to beat the learning curve, and continue to learn. Recently a few friends of mine decided to give Twitter a try and I wanted to help. Most of the Twitter how-tos I came across were not very good, so the the result was a very long e-mail I wrote with instructions on how to get started from the ground up. In the end I'm not sure if it's really any better than what is already out there, but I figured I'd post it here just in case it might help anyone else.

Please, suggest any clarifications, additions or improvements that come to mind. It would be nice to make this as user friendly and comprehensive for beginners as possible.

Instructions for Jump-Starting Your Twitter

Getting Started:

Upload a picture (because nobody likes friend-ing a question mark), but pick it carefully. with so many twitter users the images/symbols attached to our names become very important for remembering who people are at a glance. That is, as a general rule this is not something you’ll want to change very often, if at all.

Keep other users in mind when your write your profile, you don’t need to give away any information you don't want to (e.g. majors, internships, live in Boston...” But, do think about what you’d want to know if you were looking at your own profile as a stranger. On Twitter the name of the game is being open—so try to give people an idea of what you’re about.

Set up your e-mail and cell phone. Have try having only direct messages e-mailed to you (I have them texted to me as well)—Twitter is real time so I leave all other messages out of my in-box, if I miss it, I miss it. It’s important to set up your cell so that you can update twitter on the go, or direct message people from your phone, more on this below. You'll be able to do all of the above by poking around on twitter.com after you have logged in, start by looking under "settings" located on the top right of the page.

The Basics:

Twitter has its own syntax for sending different types of messages. As you no doubt already know, regular messages can only be 140 characters long.

To send a public message directed to someone specific is called an “at” message/reply. E.g. “@JPotteiger Hey, so you had a bagel today. Awesome. Thanks for not cleaning it up!” Note: that there’s NO space between @ and the twitter handle.

To send a private message, called a “direct” message, type “d JPotteiger” followed by your message “I hate you, clean up your f#&king breakfast mess in the morning!!!” Note: you MUST put a space between the d and the twitter handle.

If you’ve set up your phone on twitter.com, to tweet simply send a text message to 40404. Twitter will recognize who the message is from and posts it to your account. All the syntax for messaging above applies.

Topics often trend on Twitter and these appear on your home page on twitter.com. But, more often than not the conversations you'll care about will not. To follow these topics people organized themselves by adding a # sign, called a “hash tag,” to relevant tweets. Go to search.twitter.com and search for “#pun” for an example. As you become more familiar with TweetDeck and/or HootSuite (more on these below) you’ll learn you can have separate columns for keeping track of different lists of people AND for hash tags.

Protip: search.twitter.com is a great tool. It’s a real time search engine and your portal for finding things on twitter. Below I’ll give you a list of people to follow on twitter, put their twitter handles into the search (take a quick look at the conversation surrounding their name) and click on their handle itself to go to their profile, and then follow them. Or for each name just type in the url “twitter.com/username”

Boston twitter: Bostontweet, happn_in_boston, bostontips, hiddenboston, ONEin3, bostonmagazine, theimproper, stuffmagazine

Tweeting:

It’s tough to feel comfortable tweeting, knowing what's good and what's bad–separating the wheat from the chaff is tough at the beginning. Thus, I think that broadening your tweet horizons is important so that you'll have more options to consider when tweeting (posting a message to Twitter in case you haven't picked up on that yet).

Enter twitpic.com. Turns out you can tweet small pictures too, and right from your phone. Go to http://twitpic.com/ and log in with your twitter account info. Under "upload photo" get the information you need to send picture updates from your phone and then enter that info as a contact in your phone book under TwitPic so you can easily update with pics from your phone.

As far as tweeting in general, try setting a goal of tweeting at least 3 times throughout the day. You'll need to force yourself to have a quota at first or you’ll just forget. Don't force the tweets themselves though; try to tweet interesting things, not just what you’re eating or doing. It can be a NYT article you read online, a good pun, frustration with the MBTA, something you see downtown (twitpic), a question about something you see downtown, a recommendation (e.g. Gulu Gulu and the Engine House in Salem, MA are Awesome!). AND, there might even be a #salemMA for you to tack on and/or follow for Twitter news about Salem. Or maybe you could start it... Many possibilities.

Advanced Beginners

Download TweetDeck OR sign up for a free online account with HootSuite.com. These are 3rd party programs for managing twitter. Once you start using these you’ll never bother using the twitter.com website again; as these are specially designed programs for managing your twitter friends and followers and are far more useful. As you will find, much of what you’ll use that makes twitter great is 3rd party stuff. Yay capitalism!

Now tweet away you princes of Maine… you kings of New England.

Music (as we knew it) is Dead

John Mayer recently asked people who illegally downloaded his new album to “register” their copy if they liked it. This was a confusing idea for me at first, but I realized that the concept of registering (vs. buying) music is perhaps more accurate these days because music has changed.

Are we physically buying music anymore, or do we simply buy the rights to it? It no longer exists exclusively on a CD or a tape, and since those can be copied and put on all our different media (and because iTunes and Amazon recently got rid of anti sharing restrictions) music is an entirely new thing. It's not a physical commodity anymore, but data that we can copy and move and store wherever, without racks or milk cartons. And with services like Rhapsody, Pandora, Last.fm, blip.fm (my favorite) and many more, we're being loaned the rights to hear it via these channels. As a result, the way we think about, talk about and interact with (and sell) music needs to change too.

It’s nothing mind blowing, but I think it’s an important idea and just one of many such shifts in the way we see the world that’s happening today.

Hulu: No We're (Probably) Not Gonna Buy It

I've been lucky enough to have a second article of mine published on The Next Great Generation. In it I discuss the things that we, Gen Y, love and what we probably won't pay for when it comes to Hulu adopting a pay-for-content scheme. In the piece, Hulu: No We're (Probably) Not Gonna Buy It, I take a look at the reasons we like it: We love Hulu because it’s simple... because it gets us... [and] because it makes TV portable. And, why we're unlikely to follow it to a pay for content scheme: We probably won’t pay for commercials... We probably won’t change our habits... [and] We probably won’t pay for what we’re getting right now.

Young people have adopted Hulu as a place to catch up on TV. It's a way to keep their favorite programs in their lives when the network's Monday night time slot just wont do. This in conjunction with the increasingly flexible definition of ownership among brands, the consumer vs the corporation, causes us to feel we deserve to watch our shows online for free. Sometimes the world demands we work late or maybe we work nights consistantly, and since we're paying for internet and cable already the idea of more charges on our credit card bill to see it on Hulu just isn't that appealing. I'll learn to torrent instead.