On Digital Competitive Tools

It’s frustrating when client-side marketers request robust competitive data on their particular category.  The suite of tools we can access in the digital realm is sorely lacking, and I thought it was important for people to understand why.  In my latest iMedia piece, I cover digital competitive tools and why they fall short, as well as what might be on the horizon to bring digital channels to parity with offline channels.

On Honesty

Recently, iMedia Connection ran my InFocus piece entitled “5 Social Media Campaign Killers.“  In it, I described dishonesty as one of the worst social media campaign killers of all, and I shared something from Underscore Marketing’s social media credo:

You will never use [social media] to:

Obscure the truth

Spread an untruth

Propagate rumors with a reckless disregard for the truth

There’s very good reason to be upfront with this when we provide consulting advice or other services to clients.  If you can’t live up to this, we’re not going to be very keen on working together.  Even if, as a marketer, you don’t believe in the whole ethic of reciprocity thing, there’s a very practical reason for taking the moral high road – If you don’t, you’ll get caught.

Sometimes when we’re giving the social media 101 to potential clients, the notion that someone might subject a marketing program to intense scrutiny raises an eyebrow.  Some marketers simply don’t believe that there are people out there with both the interest and the resources necessary to figure out what’s really going on behind the scenes.  I tell clients that sometimes, there are people out there who seem like they have nothing better to do than to try to uncover a paid shill or the truth behind a misguided social media effort to promote an agenda.

Here’s a great example of this, in action.

A couple weeks ago, the team was checking out this video in the conference room while we were casually surfing viral videos.  Many people in the room had already seen it.  It was cool and funny.  I don’t think many of us in the room had any cause to think something might be suspicious about the video, and it appeared to have been someone’s really cool original idea.

And then I see Augustine Fou’s Twitter post this morning, linking to his investigation of the viral effect behind the video.

I don’t want to even get into whether Chris Brown’s people had any hand in promoting the video to drive song sales.  That’s not really the point.  The point is that yes, Virginia, people really do care about viral efforts and authenticity and will go well out of their way to expose something they consider to be fishy or disingenuous.

The next time I’m running a social media meeting and someone gets skeptical about whether or not dishonesty will be ferreted out, this might be my new example.  I’ve known Dr. Fou since my K2 Design days.  He’s a stand-up guy.  Talk to him for 10 minutes and it will become obvious to you that he’s brilliant.  Here’s a guy who had a PhD from MIT at the age of 23 and whose time is incredibly valuable.  Somehow, he found the time to ferret out some numbers that didn’t add up and publish his results on a blog.  People can and often do spend time looking to expose biases and dishonesty in the social sphere, and marketers who think their programs will somehow escape intense scrutiny are taking a huge risk.

Remember this the next time you’re thinking “What’s the big deal?  No one will ever find out…”

Pharma Marketing More “Social” Than Ever

For some reason this week, my pieces have been generating a lot of comments and discussion.  This week, I responded to an article that ran in AdAge by Jonathan Richman.  At first glance, we appeared to be pretty far apart in our assessments of the future of social media within pharma marketing.  However, I’ve exchanged both public comments and private notes with Richman, and it looks like we might not disagree as much as I initially thought.  (Some of that misconception might have to do with editors who rewrite headlines and teasers…  )

Anyway, check out some of the comments on the iMedia piece and let us know what you think.

Five Social Media Campaign Killers

Today’s InFocus article on iMedia Connection has really amped up the comments and our Twitter following.  It’s the first InFocus I’ve written in a while and I think it gets across what can really kill a social media campaign without talking about it at the 50,000-foot level.  There are some concrete examples of facepalms that have actually happened in the social media sphere, thanks to brands that didn’t look before jumping in.

Have a read and let us know what you think in comments.

Microsoft & Yahoo! Partner

Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced a long awaited merger with the single goal of knocking Google off their mountain. Early reports indicate that this deal will take the sales prowess of Yahoo! and merge it with the technology smarts of Microsoft to create a unified front. Unlike previous conversations and rumors, the companies will not merge, but rather they will form a partnership within search.

From a search marketer’s perspective this is great news. Yahoo! has been a lame duck for a few years now and Microsoft can potentially pump some air back into an otherwise lifeless site. Microsoft has typically delivered such small numbers that measuring performance rarely went beyond educated guesses due to lack of statistical relevance. The big question is, will this merger have what it takes to defeat Goliath? With initial numbers from Bing not as great as expected, the immediate boost will increase their market share significantly however, the problem that lies ahead is conversion. How can this partnership convert the other ~70% of people who religiously use Google to give Yahoo! or Bing another try and, more importantly, to make these users stick. Personally I have not used Bing since the week it launched, but that is only a focus group of 1. I stopped, not because I didn’t like it, but because it is very difficult to change old habits. Microsoft does have experience creatively incorporating search into their homepage, msn.com, and now they have another portal to try and do the same, however that will require these two to learn how to play in the same sandbox.

It seems like just yesterday that Microsoft was coming out from under Yahoo!’s wing and launching their own search platform. My how the tides have turned.