Welcome to RedLobster.com

Sssssssssssshhhhpopsssssssssssss. It’s the sound of flames licking butter and juices dripping from your lobster tail. You can almost feel the warmth of the wood fired grill and smell the wood-fired lobster tail looking through your monitor into Red Lobster. Can digital be as emotional and drive desire and reappraisal better than a TV spot? See for yourself. In this post I’ll point out some of the guided discoveries Red Lobster is earning through the digital channel.

For nearly 5 years Real Branding has had the privilege of leading Red Lobster’s digital marketing efforts as their digital Agency Of Record. Over this time we’ve delivered a full range of award-winning solutions from a strategic Digital Roadmap to website and microsites to ad campaigns, media and distribution strategies and eCRM. As you can tell, it’s a relationship we’re proud of built on trust and openness. In short, it’s what every agency wants in a relationship and we believe we’ve been what a client wants in a agency partner.

As you can imagine, over the last 5-years the brand has transitioned its positioning to address evolving consumer needs while staying consistent with their core values and heritage for bringing fresh seafood to America. The repositioning has been a thoughtful, planned series of expressions in all areas of consumer touchpoints from restaurant design and logistics to menu innovations to advertising communications and more. Addressing each proof- and experience-point allows us to say, “Come see what’s fresh today” creatively and with great confidence.

As the world’s largest supplier of seafood, Red Lobster brings the highest quality and freshest fish to their customers. You might be asking yourself, are we talking about Red Lobster? There’s a lack of awareness, comprehension and credit they deserve for a great product that we think digital can address better than most media. When you have an emotional and cognitive disconnect, you need a different kind of reappraisal than tonnage through reach and frequency can drive alone. Repeating a dense or disconnected message only furthers the chasm in comprehension. You need the consumer to solve the equation themselves–in this case, Red Lobster+Healthy+Fresh+Quality+Leadership, etc.

Lighthouse Menu Selector

It’s why the homepage sizzles with reverence to their offering. It’s why culinary expertise is showcased in an industry-best interactive kitchen environment that will grow over time. It’s why lighter faire and nutritional information is now presented in an interactive meal planner to show exactly how healthy and fulfilling the menu is.

When a consumer makes their own connection and conclusions based on an interaction around our brand truths, they move to a more powerful place than an introductory or reminder ad. Engagement is the popular word thrown around to describe this phenomenon. We call it putting the “me in media.” We’re telling the story through discovery rather than shouting like a market stall barker. This is Real Branding. It’s driving serious consideration, which is what marketers have traditionally called “Above The Line” advertising and marketing. Below The Line refers to promotional and more tactical, lower-funnel activity.

As a result of this approach, promotions are more than simply an opportunity to remind customers to return, they are new opportunities to re-engage lapsed guests and bring new seafood lovers into the fold. Below The Line is the new Above The Line. And through adding share/embed features, we’re also letting people promote these discoveries to their friends and socialgraphs. In essence, our consumers are telling our story for us through their recommendations.

Facebook comment thread

As an example, I tweeted about launching the new nutritional menus on RedLobster.com.  That tweet went out to my 950+ immediate twitter followers; a potential 3+ million second-order followers of theirs according to Twinfluence.com; and posted to my socialgraph in Facebook and Friendfeed where another, mostly different 900+ friends can see this info. Four people responded in Facebook, several on twitter and some by email. Each interaction was seen by their social graphs, which gave this one post an effective reach of over 5000 people. And that was just one post by one seafood lover. As you can see, the responses were a strong testimony to reconsideration in action. Because a trusted friend made the recommendation they were willing to reappraise their position and Red Lobster will earn at least another chance to delight them and maybe even new loyal customers.

Thanks to the share/embed features, our “non-working” dollars—that which has traditionally been production and agency fees—are acting like working dollars as a million+ people a month have the opportunity to share.

Let me summarize the shifts at work for the marketing industry in these small but dramatic changes in approach:

1. Through elevating each consumer touchpoint to interactions—putting the “me in media”—we drive consideration and reappraisal through discovery rather than trickery or “shouting” with tonnage
2. Turning promotions into story telling and driving reconsideration makes Below The Line the new Above The Line
3. Allowing and even rewarding customers to share/embed content turns production into “working dollars” and gets an added benefit of social-referrals to lower consideration barriers

In the introductory paragraph I set up an unfair foil asking if digital can outperform TV. It can deliver better than TV in many areas, and some, as in efficient scale, it still has a way to go. Each has a different role in “Above The Line” communications. Approaching each initiative with the intent to drive consideration and social interaction will get your non-working dollars working a little harder for you. Here’s a little appetizer to go with that huge craving you may have for seafood.

Guess where I want to have dinner tonight.

Social Spectrum Visual

Your privacy is in your control. In other words, you can worry a little less about who friends you and if you have “to quit them” or not.

I’ve had quite a few conversations with clients and friends that hail back to a previous post where I proposed a Social Spectrum.  The post was in reaction to technical shortcomings for filtering and creating dynamic privacy–the situational rules you create for “you on display”–on SocialNetworks. Better tools are emerging, but they remain largely hidden and “opt-in” by nature. You have to actively place rules on your media SocialMedia, but it can be done.

The premise behind the original post was that everyone enters SocialMedia from different perspectives and experiences, around a variety of media and interests, with different expectations and comfort-levels about revealing parts of themselves to others and, ultimately, to the search cloud.  There are cultural, gender and age divisions that inform how active and open you might be as you approach and develop SocialMedia competencies.

For the purpose of addressing my closest colleague’s concerns, I divided the range of SocialMedia into an axis for private and public as well as one for personal and professional. This spectrum has remained relevant as I’ve discussed SocialNetworking connections with new clients, partners and vendors at all levels of seniority in their organization. Here’s a recent paraphrased example:

Me: I realized after friending several people in the organization that not everyone’s comfortable with connecting on Facebook. Most prefer LinkedIn for professional connects.

Her: Yeah, you’re still sitting in my pending list. I’m expecting a lecture.

Me: The lecture is mine. I should ask if there’s an interest in connecting in the invitiation message. Go ahead and delete. We’ll find other ways to share that you’re more comfortable with.

Some senior-level newbies to SocialNets are concerned by the appearance of intimacy and access beyond what they would allow in real life (IRL). Some, fresh out of college, are used to friending quickly but think twice when a tagged photo hits their socialgraph from a college friend. They haven’t had to modulate between friends and colleagues before. Some opt-out, ignore or block access to their socialgraph risking professional embarrassment of a lesser nature. Redefining their Social Spectrum becomes an active effort.

For myself, I follow the same rules I would IRL: I have appropriate and clear boundaries. I don’t accept friends or associates that I wouldn’t run into IRL through one of my many interests. I block when someone or something becomes inappropriate as you would expect. 

Unlike IRL, I don’t have to listen to an overly chatty person (which some have accused me of being based on an active twitterstream, btw). The great news is that technology offers you the ability to filter content and even people. Twitter reader/management applications like TweetDeck and DestroyTwitter allow you to group the people you want to hear from most. Facebook has added a “like” link on each item that shows up in your SocialGraph which will eventually optimize people and topics you like to see most from you friends. And, with a little work, you can also tune your Facebook settings to hear the right signal-to-noise for anyone or thing. As Facebook connect becomes more widespread you’ll be able to take these same privacy settings with you out in the wild of the web.

Below is a great tutorial on the subject. Enjoy and let us know what else you use for filtering in the comments.

On January 5^th we asked, “did you feel that?” for a different reason. There was a palpable enthusiasm and optimism that entered the office that day. It was new car smell+first day of school+opening day kick-off+getting the band back together all rolled-up into one. It wasn’t just the reflection from a longer-than usual vacation, although that might have helped. It was the feeling of a team coming back together with good momentum and challenging work ahead that we love doing.

I encourage all of us to hold onto that feeling this year. Connect socially and share stories of your weekends, holidays and families. Laugh. Be excited about the work and the fact that we’re working. Be part of creating great value for our clients and their consumers so that their businesses remain healthy. Don’t suppress your excitement—no one does on the first day back. Don’t let it slip into routine. Be Great. Be the shaker that others feel good about having on the team.

And, yeah, you did feel that. It’s Real. Here’s to a transformational 2009.

Kara also posted as I will below Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. It’s hard not to “connect the dots” as he says and draw comparisons with Randy Pausch’s last lecture (also below) in light of today’s news. In this classic speech Jobs encourages everyone to follow their passion, to live each day as if it were the last and to “stay hungry, stay foolish.” When filtered through the ultimate reality check and final certainty of death, fears fall away, new possibilities emerge and the issue of following your passion and folly is a clear and moral mandate. What fear has hold of you and isn’t it somehow related to that ultimate reality?

On a cross-country Virgin America flight I was fortunate to catch Benjamin Zander delivering his TED presentation where he takes the mandate one step further. He believes once you’ve realized your passion, there’s a responsibility to evangelize it. He had a realization at 45-years old while standing in front of his orchestra that the conductor doesn’t make a sound. He draws his power by making other people powerful. And that changed everything for him, he said. “My job was to awaken possibility in other people. And you know when you’re doing it? The eyes. When the eyes are lit, it’s working.” Benjamin was referring to live speaking, but you can find equivalent “lit eyes” in the comments and re-tweets/forwarded messages you create that are true. Zander challenges: “If the eyes are not shiny, ask question: who am I being?” His “Return On Investment” (ROI) is in reality R-O-Eye.

So whether we live another year or another hundred years, we each have jobs to be done. And we’ve got some amazing sources of inspiration to draw from. All three videos posted below. Enjoy and, if it moves you, pls post a reaction with what you believe to be your mandate.

Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Speech:

Randy Pausch Last Lecture

Benjamin Zander TED presentation

"Something came whizzing down the kitchen chimney as he spoke and caught him sharply on the back of the head. Next moment, thirty or forty letters came pelting out of the fireplace like bullets. The Dursleys ducked, but Harry leapt into the air trying to catch one."

There’s a b-plan in your inboxes, or specifically in their consolidation and management, and the key may be SocialMedia.

I’m reading the first Harry Potter book to my kids at bedtime. Remember the scene where the letters wanted so badly to get to Harry that they came shooting through every open space in the house? It’s a good visual for the flood of information we have coming into our inbox, the contempt many have for it and the joy someone can experience getting just the right message created expressly for them.

Your home mailbox–the one that’s got your Netflix red envelope in it–is rarely bringing you anything personal except during special events/holidays. Your office inbox rarely empties of those declining rags still distributed in print in spite of  the economic realites. If your Outlook email inbox is like mine, it’s full of disappointments for lower-priority senders (sorry) whose bold-faced salutations remind me they have not been read. My phone buzzes to let me know a direct message arrived from Twitter. And the SMS/Message app has a lengthy inbox–at least these have been read. My Facebook mailbox, once an uncluttered, pure environment of friendly connections and smiles, now buries threaded conversations pages deep as the volume grows.

Sometimes I forget which inbox I received a message and it takes time to cycle through the services–email, txt, twitter, fb and a growing number of small, function or topic-specific socialnets–to discover and recover the interaction.

David Armano has content coming through the context of our crowds, not just an editor's selection process.

If email applications were transportation, we’d be driving off the road with intent. It’s a bad user experience made only slightly better by search. Not as dangerous as driving a poorly designed automobile, but hazardous to our health all the same. I’ve been reproached about my email management, as though it were my fault the tool didn’t work better.  ”If I just put more effort and commitment,” the logic goes, “I could get my inbox to zero.”

To illustrate my point further, did someone have to show you how to use Google? The iPod album flipper? Even this blog platform from which we’re engaging is intuitive enough to execute frequent saves as I write the post so I don’t lose my content/flow if the browser decides to crash (which it did).

The first time I saw a Mac in 1984 I smiled–it got me out of command-line navigation and green type for something that looked intuitively like the real world. Same with the browser in 1993, iPhone and any number of other innovations that recognized me as a human with better things to do than to serve it. Each of these got us further from code and more into interaction. They blurred the lines between real world type, content and now physics.

I’m convinced a better solution is near. As Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody,” says, “there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” I believe in the stronger filters. Already more robust algorythmic filters have gotten rid of much of my SPAM email. But there are also human filters to content: I follow hundreds of people on Twitter and friend even more in Facebook. In my twitterstream and socialgraph they’ve broken news more quickly than any other medium. My “crowd” also has better taste in selecting rore relevant articles in greater quantities for me than any issue of newspaper or trade can offer. This doesn’t completely solve the issues from “too many inboxes,” but it starts to prune the activity in my main channels.

The key may lie in initiatives we’ve heard announced and seen coming out of Yahoo! and Facebook lately, allowing SocialNets into their email platform and other “inboxes” to bring in SocialNets through their “Connect” program respectively. Built into their social platforms are features around what they call “Dynamic Privacy.” That means the system is aware or can become more aware about who you value more in your connections and how. With whom do you share or tag photos? To whom do you forward interesting content and do the click or pass it along? Is that a professional, university or family contact? Do you share common interests? These can become powerful enablers and filters in the context of the in-box.

Facebook, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and others have all announced and are rolling out some version of their “Connect” programs. Many in the Valley have talked about this as a “single-user login” benefit for the consumer and owning the login or attention currency equivalent of “wallet.” It’s like not having to get carded everywhere you go, nor populate more accounts. I believe the single-user login benefit is huge, and I think that it may also be secondary in the long run to helping clear inbox proliferation.

Note: quick word of caution navigating the waters of people-filtered inboxes. The other day I pinged a professional associate who quickly informed me that they weren’t available in Facebook for connecting professionally. You have to respect the boundaries of how people want to use their inboxes, when and with whom.

Will close with this letter for my most bloated inbox: 

Dear email inbox, I’m not trying to be difficult, but you really don’t get me. And I think it’s time we take a little break. We’ve tried it your way for many years with pretty much the same result, now it’s time we try it my way. As of today, I’m taking a break from you. I need some space to redefine our relationship. I’m packing up my closest peeps and taking them with me over to the socialnets; that’s where you can find me if you need something. I’m going to throw away all the news articles, press clippings and stuff you’ve got stashed everywhere, so round-up what you need quickly and store it somewhere safe. 

It’s been a blast. I mean literraly. Most marketers still call you their “email blast.” They carpet bomb inboxes on time with an interesting item at best or with the randomness and relevance of an unwanted advance at worse. You’ve been loyally shielding me from the worst offenders, but my crowd gets me better.

If it makes you feel better, it’s not about you. It’s all me. I mean, you haven’t changed a bit. But I have. I found better, more interesting and related things from my crowd. I’ve grown to trust them and they helped me realize how far we’ve grown apart. I hope we can stay friends or at least professional. We still have all the business affairs we need to deal with. I think with time you’ll find this was really the right decision for both of us. Maybe with time you’ll slim down some, get active and grow in new directions. That would be really interesting for both of us. Here’s looking at you, kid.

From the Twitterstream this week: “Filing a cease and desist… against my inbox.” Chris Sacca.

The Good Cause

Tonight at 9:12pm David created a blog post for a friend in need. Daniela, with her three youngsters, made the courageous decision to exit a physically abusive marriage. Now homeless and far from home and support, her friends came to her aid. David posted a picture, an entreaty for donations and included a widget from ChipIn–a PayPal enabled payment system–to raise money that would provide Daniela the means to rent a small apartment for her family. His target was $5,000 and within two hours it easily passed $7,000 in donations.

To be fair, David is just any guy. He’s David Armano,  or @Armano on Twitter where you may already be one of his 8000+ followers. I am. You should. He puts great thinking and creativity into the SocialSphere everyday through his Logic+Emotion blog, twitterstream, twitpics, flickr visualizations, slideshare decks, bookmarks and more.  David populates and prolifically fills his SocialMap with an abundance of original thought, discoveries and insights. So, when he finally asked for something in return, the community answered his call. When he posted to his blog, he also asked in addition to giving that people help him spread the word by “retweeting” his link. They did and the response was immediate.

The widget allows you to track progress and it’s clear by the decimal point movement that people were making payments of all sizes, including very small, but meaningful ones. Because with The Long Tail and micropayments, a little can add up to a lot. In this case, a families dreams of a better life. Currently 218 donors have raised $7,099.31 or $32.56 per person on average.

To bluntly and awkwardly bring this back to the business of digital marketing and Real Branding, here are some lessons David delivered tonight:

• Brands that create value have the right to make the ask on occasion and their fans will respond
• Micro is the new black. Sure widgets have been around for at least three years when RockYou put its code up on MySpace and started tearing at the walled gardens creating a distribution and value-creating revolution. But now they’re getting people elected, or into their new home
• Blog post alone isn’t the solution as Forrester’s Jermiah Owyang has recently discovered; need to add viral and urgency through twitter. Add a twitter url and hashtag for your followers to use, making it easier to promote, track, aggregate through search and measure
• We digital folks never fail to be amazed when our magic works for us–and it does

Thanks David and family for the lessons from the heart. Every little bit counts. You can help the cause by clicking over and making your donation now (I don’t know how to embed widgets in Wordpress otherwise you would be able to do it right here; don’t tell anyone :-). Be Great.

Twitter alerts users to an emerging issue.

This weekend a Phishing scam erupted around Facebook and Twitter. For those fortunate enough to have not been introduced, Phishing is the act of acquiring someone’s information by misrepresentation as a trusted entity. In this case people received email messages from their friends’ Twitter or Facebook accounts who had been duped by the scam, clicked to a site that looked like your Facebook or Twitter login page and entered their name and passwords. Then all their friends got direct-messaged and solicited and so on. If it got you, don’t feel too badly; even some of the most experienced get scammed sometimes.

Quickly Twitter engineers and operations teams responded to defend their service integrity and community. They also alerted their friends at Facebook about the scam. And they whipped up a quick blog postfor reference/search benefits. Then a new slug of text appeared between the Twitter enter form and a user’s Twitterstream: “HEY!If you get an email masquerading as a DM with a link, it could be Phishing.”

Did they have to go to these lengths for their community? These issues come and go so quickly most people wouldn’t notice. To this point, the message was gone a couple of hours later. And, think about what it takes to make a change on your corporate website. Now consider what it takes to change the User Interface of a webservices application. Nothing changes that doesn’t absolutely have to. So to answer the question above, Twitter clearly felt they needed to do something for their community and brand.

I thought it was interesting that the community was also helping out on Twitter–and therefore in Facebook for those that update their Facebook Status with Twitter–by warning others of the threat. In a way, Twitter can counter viral activity because its citizens wish to keep it pure. In a way, it’s the “diseconomy” or “deviralization” of a person or issue at work. There are those that believe Multi-Level Marketers can better exploit a platform like Twitter, but I disagree. The community will gang up against exploitive behavior faster than it can regenerate.

Protip: If you think something’s not right on Twitter you can also “Follow” @spam to direct-message them with suspicious activities or accounts. They’re great at removing the weeds and debris from their garden and rely on the crowd to help with vigilance.

How Facebook could have responded to Phishing scam.

Meanwhile, the silence at Facebook was telling. By my count and without altering their current message carriers Facebook could have warned its community in half a dozen intuitive ways. In its socialgraph, inbox, activity notification bar, status feeds, profile alerts and even in its ad space it could have notified users of the emerging issue. Instead, it acted more like a large, traditional institution that either can’t marshall the resources and authorizations to react in real-time or won’t as a matter of policy.

I’d say for this round, Twitter acted more like the Real Brand and served a good lesson in brand-as-service for its larger SocialMedia bretheren. Here’s a good link if you want to take your own precautions against Phish feeding, courtesy of Twitter.

Update: CNET’s Rafe Needleman reports that this Phish situation is ongoing. Seen many tweets requesting to be notified “if you get a DM from me.”

Update: Brittany Spears gets hacked on Twitter by the Physhing scam.

The Book Quote Game Goes Viral in Facebook

Virally speaking based on watching my own response along with others in my social graph, a clever little meme called the “Book Quote Game” is exploding over on Facebook. Over the weekend a quick challenge gambit appeared in my Facebook socialgraph and I took it. I responded in to a friend’s post asking me to find a random but specifically-placed quote from “a book near me.”

What followed surprised me: within 12 hours 18 others added their quotes–more comments than my FB posts usually get; their socialgraph represents 3641 people and inspired another 23 comments. I didn’t crawl their comments to see the network effect in added reach, but if we use the averages based on mine, the echo would include another 9300 in reach. With an average friend duplication of 7.75% you still reach over 10,000 people per post in the first two generations of the meme. Because the active socialgraph/profile will bury this meme, it needs to reappear at different times, which it does as others replicate and comment. I expect to see this meme come back around many times in the coming months.

More surprising is that this isn’t even a Facebook application. It’s an activity that’s as catchy as an application but relies on The Groundswell to crawl all the SocialNetwork’s carriers to produce the Metacalfe effect. So, without any programming and low-production content you can create a viral campaign by following the best practices of The Book Quote Game.

I’ll give more evidence and details then see if there are best practices that can be applied for Marketers. Please add your reactions below in the comments area as well.

The “Book Quote Game” is simple: find the 5th sentence on page 56 of a book near you, add it to your friend’s note/comments and repost it on your Facebook page ensuring delivery to your socialgraph. You can click into the image to see more how this works, but for the text crawlers and image-challenged, here are the rules:

• Grab the book nearest you. Right now. <comment: love the Call To Action & Immediacy>
• Turn to page 56. <comment: love the Randomness>
• Find the fifth sentence. <comment: love the Specificity>
• Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall, and post your sentence in a comment here as well. <comment: love the Virality>
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. <comment: love the Authenticiy>

Best Practices I believe can be applied more broadly for SocialMedia and Digital Marketers:

• Clear Call to Action-this is the essence of and direct response program and needs to find its way into the application-level design/UX
• Immediacy-Do it now. In the fast-paced, short-attention-span, microformat and ephemeral nature of updates, if you blink you miss it.
• Randomness-This creates game-play along with the simple challenge. Better, this is randomness generated by the crowd.
• Specificity-Acts as a boundary and “control” against the randomness while adding the signifiers of game play
• Viral/Socialgraph Prompts-Like the call to action, create activities optimized to socialgraph carriers for the message/meme. In this case, it’s through commenting, walls and the note application. Photo sharing and tagging would work in other instances.
• Authenticity-in this case there wasn’t a commercial benefit to a marketer, but it still demanded authenticity in the form of not trying to look smart, pithy, cool, etc. Don’t be afraid to ask people to “keep it real.”

This game exploits the Technographics Ladder for “creators,” “critics,” “joiners” and “spectators” as well as the SocialMedia dynamics of microformats and status. I wouldn’t be surprised if this little meme moves towards Twitter.

There are probably other lessons–I’m thinking simplicity, universal access (everyone has a book at hand, what does your specific target have nearby?), starting with influencers, etc.–but I’d like to hear your thoughts and reactions. Please comment below.

Check out this page. It’s content right? This is the Election ‘08 page on Facebook.

It’s got your voting booth location mash-up powered by Google Maps, some info graphics and even a gift/badge for you to wear your colors–Red or Blue. It showed volumes in real-time as people clicked the “I voted” link on their Facebook profile page after visiting the polls. I tweeted about the page in the morning of election day when 1.1 million people had already been counted and watched the numbers swell each hour until the polls closed. Nearly 5.5 million acted making it one of the highest daily-use apps to date (think about how few YouTube videos get that much play in a single day, let alone month for comparison).

The genius is in the Ben & Jerry’s map/application integration. This is content, but it’s also a delivery mechanism for the advertising sponsorship by Ben & Jerry. Simple. Natural (as in additive and not interruptive). Brilliant.

In this case you were able to find the local Ben & Jerry’s store to get the free icecream cone they were offering for those that voted IRL and in the integrated link you could also send a “vote cone” virtual gift to your friends in Facebook.

For Ben & Jerry’s it’s a win across the board. The association is perfect for a brand that has in its roots social change and political activision. That future analysis will likely attribute SocialMedia and Facebook’s influence on 14mm new young voters heavily skewed to Obama as a determing factor in the race can’t hurt the brand. And the message was party-neutral regardless of the results. These are the kind of brand-fit filters every connection planner should find: Content, Context and mission.

As a campaign tracking mechanism, free cone redemptions will be an easy metric. Virtual gift talleys will also be telling as will traffic to the Election ‘08 page. Without a doubt, Buzzmetrics and other influence trackers will be tallying total blog mentions and related viewership. And, I’d love to see the total impressions this campaign earned from the SocialGraph as well. We’ll reach out to Facebook, the brand and related agencies to see if we can get the numbers. And, if you’re related to the brand and know, feel free to share below.

Ben & Jerry’s won big on this campaign–even before all the numbers are in–by hitting the right tone of placement and pitch. I learned about new retail locations in a relevant way. I also didn’t feel like they were selling me. In fact, they were offering a number of value-exchanges I couldn’t get without them entering my social interactions on Facebook. Consider how different this is from the “Market Stall” approach of fast and casual food retail where the strategy based on ad spend (shout louder, sooner and with a better offer than your competitors) dominates their consumer communications. The Market Stall has 90%+ of ad spend concentrated on TV and traditional media in a cluttered, interruptive market place. Ben & Jerry’s essentially opened a new market away from the noise, clutter and lack of relevance of the traditional approach.

Every brand marketer should be asking themselves and their agencies: What’s our occasion(s) that should be so integrated with Facebook? And then buy the date to lock out your competition and outplay them.

Added: was reminded that I previously posted about Lee LeFever’s Common Craft show,  “SocialMedia in Plain English” and it was the metaphor told via Ice Cream retail. Fun conincidence. All our SM Answers Haz Ice Cream.

]]> http://beta.marksilva.com/2008/11/07/ben-jerrys-killer-facebook-ad-integration/feed/ http://beta.marksilva.com/2008/11/06/socialmedia-with-obama-as-president/ http://beta.marksilva.com/2008/11/06/socialmedia-with-obama-as-president/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:31:09 +0000 marksilva http://marksilva.wordpress.com/?p=279 Ellen McGirt of Fast Company asked a couple of questions about the new administration and SocialMedia which she summarized in a moving, personal post that combined fresh reactions to the President-elect and perspective from a wide range of respondents. The two questions and my quickly prepared response follow:

Questions:

1) What would be some things that a modern president could do to embrace new technologies?

2) What, if anything, should we be worried about with a wired, connected citizenry?

My Response:

I’ve heard Obama will appoint a Cabinet-level IT/Digital Czar. Very good start. Would recommend that they have a primary office in Silicon Valley/Palo Alto/S.F. Here are 5 other ways to embrace:

1) Fund at earliest education levels. Fund access, literacy and security. If we want to change the way the world views us as well as our world view, also extend each new laptop purchased in US to “One Lap Top Per Child” initiative and connect both ends (past efforts from OLTC didn’t keep donation and donators connected). Pen pals, but via txt.

2) Extend literacy and access to all areas of the US and every strata of income. Bart Decreem, now of Tapulous (the iphone app guys) created a non-profit in East Palo Alto in the early 90s called “Plugged-In” that taught inner-city kids how to code websites and create rich media storytelling. Like teaching them music, but perhaps more lucrative. This is a BIG idea that should be revived and nationalized. Not a hand-out but a true hand-up.

3) Create Innovation Incentives. Instead of a housing rush, create a start-up rush and make it easier to start, create, fail and reiterate–just as the silicon valley has done for nearly six decades. Not asking for long-term loans that can default, but offering incentives to employ local talent, breaks for incorporation, perhaps even pooled resources like Amazon’s backbone but funded by Government–reduce the final barriers to the true two-guys-in-a-garage dream. Also under incentives, consider extending cap-gain incentives for tech; tax moratorium on emerging areas as they did ecommerce; esp social commerce; etc.

4) Net neutrality.

5) Increase Security in a way that does not diminish rights. Financial. Identity. Corporate.

To answer second question, I grow stronger each day in my faith in the citizens/community to self-regulate and police. Based on my first two responses, I’m a big fan of access and literacy to make us more connected. I believe the upsides of a connected citizenry far outweigh concerns.

In fact, as Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff point out in Groundswell, Social Media amplified by Social Networks have changed the game where people now source from each other what they used to through corporations. That means the ignorance or the arrogance of Power is now accountable to the collective intelligence. As we look back five years from now, I believe our analysis will tell us that this is what ultimately changed the tone and tide of these elections. It made smear politics more difficult. It made previously silenced voices heard. And it gave candidates unprecedented access to constituents, influence and even funding.

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang also posted a reminder of Barack Obama’s campaign promises around technology reform as a good anchor. They include R&D funding and credits as well as Anti-trust law language. Would love to see more on the other initiatives above. So, what do want to see? Add to the list in the comments below.