A Wider Net

Check out HP’s Twitter Feed to see how they’re handling a scavenger hunt at the “BlogHer” event.

Thanks Pistachio for the tip (also through Twitter - check out how she has designed her Twitter page - very nice lesson in personal branding)

The business books about blogs and conversational marketing are full of stories where companies failed to respond to negative criticism with speed, honesty, and transparency. Most, if not all, paid a hefty price for their slow old-school approach. Circuit City recently proved that they have not read these books or, if they have, they chose not to heed their warnings.

A customer brought in his Hondacar for a navigation system installation. The Circuit City team that did the work botched the job horribly, resulting in $12,119 in damage to the car. Honda, who evaluated the car, refused to give the car back to the owner in it’s current state, declaring it a danger to drive. Circuit City refused to pay for the repairs, offering only to cover the cost of the system for which the customer paid - not the damages inflicted by their installers.

All it took was a forum post about his experience and the story spread like wildfire. It was quickly picked up by the Carsumer Advocacy site and the Consumerist. The Consumerist article received over 3,600 “diggs” and made it to the front page of digg.com. Then, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht opted to share the story in their wildly popular weekly podcast, Diggnation, which goes out to hundreds of thousands of technology fans (the “influencers”). In this episode, Kevin and Alex pointed out that no one in the tech community would EVER use Circuit City for a car installation ever again. The damage had been done.

This past week, Circuit City agreed to cover the cost of the damages and threw in some extra gear. To be more accurate, their insurance company is covering the cost less $2,000. Circuit City was too late. They should have given this man a cool new car and enjoyed the great PR from their quick positive response. Now no one knows for sure if Circuit City did the right thing because they new it was the right thing or because they were getting hammered in the court of public opinion. I bet they would gladly go back in time and spend the $25K on a new Civic with navi.

The new world: Listen. React quickly, honestly, and positively to negative criticism. Get your blog going. Bad customer experiences can ripple through the internet like a tsunami.

Thanks to Sue Pelletier tagging me, I am obligated to share 8 things you may not know about me. When did this meme all start? It’s the blogging equivalent of a chain email but without the promise of ultimate riches or karma. It’s supposed to be a random list, and that rubs my marketing & communications sensibility the wrong way.

Anyhow, here goes:

1. I own a (musical) keyboard, an electric guitar, and a tin whistle. I am as fast-fingered as I am musically untalented, making for a consistently awful listening experience.
2. I seem to be two notches above half-bad at the video game Rock Band. Who needs real instruments, anyway? (My gamertag is “Fool Throttle”)
3. My first record album, that wasn’t a hand-me-down, was “Boston”, my first 8-track was Kiss: “Alive!”, my first cassette was “Blizzard of Ozz” and my first CD was the BSO playing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” on Telarc. I have no idea what my first MP3 was. I’m now a neo-classical progressive metal junkie. Go figure.
4. I was once asked, by one of the biggest event impresarios in the world, to make a laser effect that was so huge that it made the Japanese audience think of Hiroshima. Years later, I was asked to create the illusion of the Firebird hovering over the walls of Jerusalem. Sometimes people take a twisted view of entertainment.
5. I have written several plays, one-acts, and a musical libretto. Half were performed. I miss doing that.
6. I have a t-shirt and a tennis ball autographed by Ivan Lendl, whom I admired when I used to play a ton of tennis. I have, in fact, more autographed Lendl merchandise than I do friends who know who he is.
7. My favorite book is “The Sword of Shannara” by Terry Brooks. It was written and published almost simultaneously with the original theatrical release of Star Wars, and is almost the same story (except with elves and wizards). I am convinced Terry Brooks and George Lucas are the same person. If I ever get to meet George Lucas again, I intend to ask him.
8. I was once part of a team that had to build a house, or at least all the pieces of a house, while riding on the back of a huge flatbed truck in a parade, using only colonial-era hand tools. I was 9. I made shingles out of cedar using a drawknife. I still remember the smell and the odd taste of lemonade in a pewter cup dispensed from an oak barrel.

I tag: Andrew Vande Moere, Rob Larsen, Scott Kiekbusch, Ilya Vedrashko, Steve Paine, Margaret Desjardins, and Bill DeRouchey. Close enough.

Steve Jobs’ 2008 Macworld keynote came and went the other day, as did my carefully written post about it. So upset was I, at accidentally overwriting half of it, that I shelved it until today. Ever been there?

Anyhow, I felt that having just written a retrospective comment about last year’s big Macworld revelation, the iPhone, it would seem logical to follow it up with something about this year’s keynote. This year’s keynote had it’s share of major announcements, although none of them quite as significant as the iPhone and none of them were strong enough to keep the stock market from plummeting that day on bad retail news.

Here were the major points from the keynote:

- iPhone and iTouch will get new software. The iPhone gets a free firmware update including a Google-driven mapping system that creates GPS-like functionality without actual GPS hardware in the phone. It works by triangulating the position of the phone from three nearby cell towers. Run out of nearby cell towers, and you run out of functionality for this service. Presumably you will also run out of roads to choose from anyway. The iTouch gets a suite of applications that should have been on the device to begin with including mail. The early adopters get to pay $20 for the update while new buyers get it for free. That’s two slaps in the face to early adopters in a year. Goodness, this brand is teflon.

- Apple TV Take 2 - A new, cheaper version of Apple’s set top movie and TV download-and-player is now able to operate without a Mac. So the price drop from $299 to $229 is actually a price drop from $2299 to $229 - if you count the previously necessary Mac. It also can download podcasts, designed for a 2″ screen, and feed them to your HDTV, maybe a 40-60″ screen. That will be a bit like looking at dust mites under an electron microscope - really nasty when magnified. Kudos to Apple, however - this service has a chance for success with every major studio already on board.

The significance of this product is amplified by the fact that Apple also announced a new laptop (See below) and neither the laptop nor the Apple TV box contain any support for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Apple has quietly yet profoundly declared the high definition optical disc format war, recently claimed over and won by the Blu-Ray camp, totally irrelevant. Downloads are the future. Microsoft was thinking the same thing, as their XBOX movie and TV download service had managed to grow to twice the size of their nearest competitor. This will certainly impact our video production and media authoring plans in the near future. I am very interested to know what the cable TV industry has to say about this product. I suspect they have something cooking.

I am also a little surprised that Apple TV has no user-rating functionality (at least, I don’t think it does). This is a big part of YouTube, and even Blockbuster and Netflix allow users to rate their content. The lack of community and peer recommendation within Apple TV and, for the most part, iTunes continues to disappoint. In fact, it doesn’t even appear to have preference-based recommendation engine like Blockbuster or Amazon. They seem to be completely blind to the process of media discovery by users.

- New Laptop. Easily the biggest news from Steve Jobs was the unveiling of the MacBook Air. An impossibly thin yet technically superior machine, the MacBook Air is as beautiful as it is respectable. It is a green machine (mostly biodegradable or biorenewable), and it is a pricey machine ($1,800-$3,200 ish). While the trend in notebooks has been toward the cheap, Apple and, to a certain extent Sony, have opted to maintain premium models to keep up their brand image.

You can check all this stuff out, and more, at Apple.

The keynote seemed to drain the life out of the whole internet. Everything ran slower. It worried me that all these new iTunes movie rentals are coming through Akamai, the same delivery network we were using to produce a live webcast at the same time as the keynote.

Footnote: The coverage of the keynote was extraordinary. Apple refuses to webcast the event, which is beyond belief. Instead, a legion of live bloggers, twitterers, and phonecam streamers delivered us the news guerilla-style. And it looked bad. Apple should really control the way it looks, and if they can’t keep a lid on it, they may as well broadcast it or allow it to be done right. This blog even listed all the top coverage and updated it in real time with the status, since many went down under pressure. QIK - a beta live phone webcasting system had a few brave souls trying to webcast it live, with very poor results. I still think they’re onto something BIG.

Inspired by this post at Golden Practices, which was inspired by this post at Daily Blog Tips, I finally got around to pruning the categories on this blog. Believe it or not, in about a year we had just under 200 posts in 69 categories - clearly too many categories. While the advice helped, I found it difficult to reduce the number of categories below 30 but I will continue to look for ways to simplify. I hope the effort makes the blog easier to use. The search is always there if you need to find something more specific. I didn’t follow all the tips: most posts are filed under multiple categories (something I wish I could do with my printed materials, too).

If I removed any of your favorite categories, like Advergaming or 3D, let me know with a comment or email and I will consider adding it back. If you have any new categories under which you would like us to write then also, please let me know.

A coworker sent me this Ad Age article about blogger and blog reader demographics. While it’s not loaded with scientific data, it does have some interesting reference points in it. For example:

“In a February poll from We Media and Zogby Interactive, 72% of adults said they were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today. Another 55% said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism, and 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role, according to the poll.”

Some of the data was a little mixed - 15 million blogs read by 57 million readers certainly speaks to a shortage of readers relative to writers, but RSS feed readers make it easy for readers to digest many blogs at a time. For example, I track around 100 blogs, off and on, using Google Reader.  Also, the reach of the internet and makes blogging to small audiences of highly targetted individuals a reasonable and desirable practice.
Also, in data from the PDF attached to the article, they indicate that 57% of teens have created content for the internet - further testimony that companies increasingly need to consider how to allow their site users to participate.

I’ll leave you with one of the strangest factoids from the PDF:

The Bloggies are in - congratulations to all the nominees and winners!

Among my favorites who won this year:

Cute Overload won Best American Weblog.

YouTube won Best eb Application for Weblogs

Gizmodo won Best Computers or Technology Weblog (why Engadget wasn’t even nominated is beyond me)
Lifehacker won Best Group Weblog

And my awards for the winners with the most non-P.C. titles goes to My Boyfriend is a Twat and Tokyo Girl Down Under.

Every blogger has his leftovers. And for leftovers comes Tumblr. At least that’s what I see it for - all the little stuff that you want to post but can’t/shouldn’t/won’t post on your main blog. It creates a Tumblog - a running log of thoughts, snippets, posts, scraps, and ends.
I played with it for a few minutes - and in those few minutes I had my own Tumblog created. You can make simple posts, quote text, insert conversation snippet, upload videos and images, integrate multiple RSS feeds, and even moblog to it. For a better example try Leo Laporte’s tumblog or the project.ioni.st . (I’m not sure if the last one is a Tumblr tumblog but it’s a tumblog either way.)

They also have an alpha version of “radar” - a display of recent tumblr posts - which is designed to help people discover other tumblogs.

I’m not sure at the moment how I would prescribe this to a typical marketing person. You may find them easy and fun enough to want one for each new campaign as a sort of progress journal. If you find a great marketing application let me know. At the very least, you can use this as a creative outlet - something many people in our business need from time to time.

According to Hill & Knowlton, the current issue of PR Magazine has a cover story people who pose as consumers to blog for clients.  Apparently this practice will likely be illegal soon in the EU.
Seems like there are loads of similar testimonial fraud territory that the US could tackle, from user reviews to client case studies to radio testimonials.  Blog posers are certainly among the most insidious, since it undermines a media form built on trust.

Here’s a relevant article that asked the question about the legality of Splogs over a year ago. Since then there have been a lot of high profile fraud examples but I found no reference of any real progress on dealing with the issue.

Note: The PR Mag article isn’t on their web site - it’s apparently behind the subscriber login.

Robert Scoble observed that Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk regularly (and publicly) posts his personal photos on his competitor’s website, Flickr. The question is - is it better to acknowledge that you like and use your competitors products, or to stay loyal to your own products, at least in view of the public?

I remember when Saturn launched - they were forced to drive their competitors cars, but I don’t think they had a forum available to them where they could say that they actually liked them. But the fact that they were openly trying out the competition instead of having to drive their own vehicles was refreshing and made us believe that they may actually learn how to beat the foreign car makers. When Saturn initially launched, they featured the most progressive American car design in years.
These days our patience for corporate dishonesty and forced product loyalty is pretty much worn out. I certainly appreciate an executive who can openly recognize the strengths of their competitor, even to the point of using their products.

But one comment on Robert’s post brought up an interesting point - if the product isn’t meeting the executive’s needs, why doesn’t he improve his product? And does that send a message that their product is inferior? I used to know a guy who worked at Burger King who refused to eat there, dragging me to other joints - and for years that made me wary of eating at Burger King. Reverse brand loyalty is obviously a bad thing, too.
The thing I like about this Zooomr story is that Thomas uses both products personally, and by admitting it we learn he is personally engaged in the industry, aware of his competition and his own products strengths and weaknesses, and big enough to say so.