During the dress rehearsal for a meeting with Facebook executives, one of my colleagues took some ribbing for her use of iteration when talking about the reason a Fortune 100 company’s social marketing program worked so well.
Getting called out for use of Web 2.0 jargon was funny, but the joke was on us an hour later when the Facebook honcho leading the session used that very word.
Also called successive approximation, mathematicians refer to iteration as a problem-solving or computational method in which a succession of approximations, each building on the one preceding, is used to achieve a desired degree of accuracy.
For public relations and marketing pros who have spent most of their careers winning and retaining business on the strength of their creative ideas and execution, the word might be defined as extinction unless they can quickly adapt and begin to incorporate science alongside their art.
The point was made again in a brochure promoting the Public Relations Society of America’s “Digital Impact” conference on May 6-7. One of the sessions features Gabriel Stricker, director of Global Communication and Public Affairs for Google Inc., the company famous for training its employees to say “Data shows…” rather than “I think…”
“Google has a strong innovation culture of ‘launching and iterating’ – that is, making products and features available for public use, and refining them over time,” reads the PRSA brochure blurb. “Google’s public relations team uses the same approach of Beta testing, then polishing, communications tool.”
One of the allures of social media – particularly on the Facebook platform — is the relative ease for a brand to gather information about how its fans are behaving (or not!). That stream of data gets even deeper when brands start inviting their fans to use applications.
There are relatively easy stats like growth of a fan base during a sweepstakes or product giveaway. Then there are subtler findings that fall under the category of “social optimization.” Examples:
One tab name or app design – launched at exactly the same time and served up randomly to 50% of users — attracts X% more fan interaction than another
Users are willing to share something with a friend X% more when they are not compelled to first become a fan
Walls with brand participation in the discussion X or more times a day achieve X% more fanning up and sharing versus those with less interaction
Whether the word is iterate or optimize or just improve, the concept is the same: an organization that blends creativity with strong data analysis skills will be able to demonstrate their online marketing successes better than any time in history. That you can share with a friend.
Hats off to two retailers for getting creative giving freebies to consumers in February. Neither had a damn thing to do with the Vancouver Winter Olympics, but Americans have medals on their minds this morning. (Sorry, lame attempt at SEO boost.)
Beauty school and products operator Aveda set up six-spigot water fountains in front of a half dozen of its Manhattan stores to give away, drumroll please, New York City tap water. Tying into Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, Aveda partnered with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection to use fire hydrant water and branded water fountains to diss bottled drinking water. Despite the fact that no one used the Fifth Avenue fountain while I stood by last week, I applaud Aveda for being creative. Next time, they should design the fountains so they don’t look like autopsy tables. They win silver!
Of course, gold goes to those smart purveyors of bagels at Einstein Bros. and their West Coast sister chain, Noah’s. Starting with a Facebook fan count of 4,000, the company launched a “Schmear Campaign” application that first rewarded legacy fans and then new fans with coupons redeemable for a free bagel and cream cheese.
Einstein Bros. not only saw its fan base surge past 400,000 last week, the publicly traded company also benefited from earned media coverage. Anyone who doubts the PR value of social media should just shut up and eat a toasted everything bagel with lox spread.
Underdogs are often in the best position to do things right.
That’s what I’ve been seeing at Spring Nextel, the beleaguered wireless player in a space dominated by AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.
Despite having retail stores that resemble 1970s-era bus depots, iffy network coverage in rural areas and a lack of sexy gadgets like the iPhone, Sprint Nextel is getting a few things right:
Pre-paid businesses that operate on the Sprint network, like Boost and Virgin, are going strong
Adoption of Google Android-ready devices offer a welcome alternative to those who have not pledged their lives to RIM or Apple
Customers actually have a voice thanks to Sprint’s commitment to social platforms
Led by Dan Hesse — a CEO known for accessibility to employees and partners, and for starring in the brand’s TV spots — Sprint has attracted a large Facebook following of 165,000+ fans, with whom the company engages using tools like a vanity video upload tool. Fan posts and comments are plentiful, and Sprint quickly enters the dialog to when queries are lobbed in its direction.
The latest social media extension for Sprint is the creation of a Twitter feed — @sprintcare — that acts as a giant fire extinguisher for smoldering service issues. Richard Pesce, who manages social media and digital communications, for Sprint Nextel, chatted with me at a recent BDI event about how the company is successfully using Twitter.
Most academic institutions are highly structured organizations, not unlike large corporations and the military.
Students must abide by a code of conduct, faculty members have rigid tenure requirements, and campus security will boot and tow your car if you park alongside a curb that’s painted red.
The stakes are especially high for universities with prestige brands that have been built over centuries. Harvard, with its $26 billion endowment and top rating among global academic institutions, has a long way to fall if its reputation gets tarnished.
Yet Harvard is also the place where great minds are encouraged to challenge the status quo. It’s where Mark Zuckerberg, his roommate and their computer science chums founded Facebook.
It’s against that backdrop Brian Kenny accepted the challenge of becoming the chief marketing and communications officer for the Harvard Business School.
“We have to get comfortable being uncomfortable,” was the advice Kenny gave those who lured him to Harvard two years ago.
Among the tactics Kenny and his team have employed to battle what he calls an undeserved reputation for being “old and stodgy and technology-averse” are the use of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and consumer-generated content.
Kenny and I spoke at a Business Development Institute session called “Social Integration: Harmonizing Social Channels into the Marketing, Communications & Service Platform.”
“ANFO” was lingo I learned in my first PR agency job, writing a monthly column called “Shot Rock” for Pit & Quarry magazine. My account was a commercial explosives business that had been spun off from DuPont, and ammonium nitrate was a mainstay for blasters.
At UPI, articles we promised to write for newspapers were called “skedders,” because they were scheduled ahead of time.
PR Newswire loved to refer to its clients’ heifers. It was newsroom lingo for “HFR — Hold for Call.” Nothing to do with cows.
So when I took on my first operating role since leaving PRN, I expected that I’d have to learn a new vernacular. Context Optional, where I’m vice president, strategic accounts, has developed many of the most popular branded applications on Facebook. Clients include Clinique, Target, OpenTable, Microsoft and the U.S. Census Bureau.
I’m no newbie to Facebook. But it isn’t until you look beyond your “wall,” “news feed” and “live feed” that you realize how damn confusing the platform can be for anyone — let alone a brand — trying to harness the power of the medium as a way to attract and engage fans.
Facebook does have a sales team to work with deep-pocketed consumer brands. Often, though, CMOs want to do more than advertise to create a tighter bond with online consumers.
That thirst for engaging content has created a nice business for the select few who understand the always-changing technical underpinnings of Facebook and the rules concerning user privacy and best practices.
The fact that Context Optional has earned the coveted “Facebook preferred developer” label is just a starting point. It’s my job to bring my new colleagues’ API-driven creativity to those marketing and PR pros charged with attracting and retaining fans and followers, and to do it in a manner that achieves business goals and is culturally acceptable on Facebook.
So I’m learning about the differences between canvas applications and apps that live on tabs. I’m diving into Facebook “boxes” and trying to understand why they are about to be discontinued. And just when I was starting to forget about the investor relations profession’s nightmare transition to the financial reporting language XBRL, I am told that Facebook code is written in FBML.
Luckily, the fans of Einstein Bros Bagels don’t have to worry about any of that to get a coupon for a free bagel and schmear. All they have to do is click on the “free bagel” tab. My new employer has handled the back end integration with Facebook to make this special offer work. My guess is that the fan base will soon be well north of today’s 22,000.
The 548,000 fans of Chanel were awarded this week with the option to download screensavers that display the time with two vividly recreated J12 timepieces. Budget-wary teens were given a fun set of viral “Stop Me From Spending” tools. Still other soon-to-launch apps are aimed at Valentine’s Day, the Vancouver Winter Olympics and even a mobile phone texting competition.
Needless to say, I am having a ball working with brands to creatively earn the right to have a relationship with consumers on the Facebook platform and beyond. Just forgive me if I don’t yet know the difference between a poke and a nudge.
When the dining room of a popular gourmet restaurant in Manhattan was gutted by fire, the refrigerators were packed with expensive food that needed a new home — fast! The solution: a donation of truffle butter, fiddleheads and other goodies to a nearby soup kitchen.
Same goes for leftover crusty French baguettes, asparagus spears whose tips have been used by a finicky chef and pans of fresh tuna steaks trimmed to the wrong size and rejected by the intended restaurant.
These tasty donations — a regular occurrence at Broadway Community’s Inc.’s soup kitchen, on Broadway at West 114th Street in Harlem — are a stark contrast to the institutional-sized No. 10 cans of food heated up and ladled out at many facilities serving the underprivileged.
The stories I hear from my wife of 23 years, Maureen Fitzpatrick, sous chef at the gourmet BCI soup kitchen, never cease to amaze me. After preparing today’s lip-smacking lunch of lamb tagine, Maureen raced to her cookbooks for details on blinis and creme fraiche. Why? Because Wednesday’s meal promised to be even more incredible, thanks to the donation of an $1,100 tin of Petrossian caviar by someone who wants to remain anonymous.
Chef Michael Ennes and volunteers like Maureen and chefs John and Bob are able to add back a bit of dignity for the 200 or so souls who are served restaurant-style — no paper plates – in the basement of Broadway Presbyterian Church.
Thanks to a generous connoisseur of caviar, the kitchen’s last meal of 2009 will be world-class fare in a world that has been less than fair.
There’s something special about a guy who isn’t a rock star yet has three times the Twitter followers of Bob Dylan. He’s not a deep-pocketed electronics retailer, yet his social media presence dwarfs Best Buy.
Jeremiah Owyang is an influencer in Web strategy, a futurist, a gadfly and — most important of all — someone who listens, studies, engages and shares. A partner in the newly formed consulting firm Altimeter Group, Owyang earned his nearly 60,000 followers the hard way.
Since I dived into the social web after leaving PR Newswire, I found that Owyang’s Forrester research reports provided a well-grounded reality check that validated fundamental shifts in consumer behavior, marketing methodologies and the demand for new PR and marcom tools. He’s routinely quoted by CMOs during conferences and, unlike many celebrities, @jowyang almost always tweets back immediately.
During my recent visit to Altimeter Group’s new headquarters in San Mateo, California, Owyang showed no signs of being jet-lagged, despite returning less than a day earlier from one of his frequent overseas speeches. He also demonstrated keen knowledge of an increasingly confusing vendor community supplying social media monitoring, analysis and curation tools.
To illustrate why the public relations industry should familiarize itself with social customer relationship management systems, Owyang shared an anecdote about how appliance maker Whirlpool failed to appease a disgruntled customer, and the damage it caused due to that customer’s ability to influence millions through social media.
“Customers do not care what department you’re in,” said Owyang, predicting that some forward-thinking companies will take on the challenge of building smart systems that inform Support, PR, Marketing, Product Development and offer a single view of the customer no matter where they touch the company.
I am aware of one large food manufacturer whose PR department is heading into the new year with amped up monitoring capabilities and a plan to pipe real-time data into their customer service call centers. If the readers of PounceNow are aware of organizations where PR is embracing the challenge, please comment on this post.
“Take a penny leave a penny” is a welcome sign at cash registers.
Sadly, I’ve seen far fewer of these spare change jars as retailers would rather weigh my pockets down with 97 cents of change rather than giving up 3 cents that could go toward rent, workers, utility bills and suppliers. The recession has clearly made even once-generous businesses of all sizes into penny pinchers.
That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to see this week’s innovative corporate social responsibility campaign from Pepsi.
In the first test of the philanthropic power of the GPS-based social network Foursquare, Pepsi is pledging 4 cents to the not-for-profit Camp Interactive for each point earned by Foursquare users. The campaign encourages more iPhone , Blackberry and Android users to “check in” with Foursquare all around town, all day, knowing that the pennies will add up.
What does Foursquare get out of the deal? Thanks to a good cause and a deep-pocketed sponsor, Foursquare will experience a supercharged rate of entries to its database from users who log in their favorite hip bars, restaurants, coffee shops, health clubs and other venues. In fact, I just added the New York Public Library’s new Grand Central branch to Foursquare (that’s 4 cents more, Camp Interactive).
Harnessing the excitement of consumer technology will continue to set innovative brands apart in 2010. A few years ago another Pepsi brand, Dorito’s, was among the first to stage a YouTube-based contest for the funniest amateur ad, to be aired on the Superbowl. Since the advent of inexpensive mini camcorders, like Cisco’s Flip and Kodak’s Zi series, it’s become affordable even for charities in third-world countries to create engaging content for global audiences. (Nokia sponsored a contest around the crowd-sourced translation of those videos for the charity PlanUSA.org)
It took just one visit to the website of Camp Interactive, the Bronx-based youth program that mixes technology with outdoors activities, to see another creative CSR linkage to another Fortune 500, Chase.
Unlike Pepsi’s decision to spend 4 cents at a time, Chase made its budget clear at the outset: $5 million. Through a very smart Facebook application, the bank is using crowd-sourcing in a very different way. Facebook users are rallying support for their favorite charities, and Chase will divvy up its $5 million based on that input.
The San Francisco-based social media agency Context Optional worked with Chase and is also behind super projects that highlight socially responsible programs for Toyota Prius, Target and ToysRUS.
As print and broadcast spending slows, CMOs appear to be channeling more resource into their community-giving outreach via social media. Working with the New Jersey firm S3, coffee and tea maker GoodEarth is pledging 50% of its profits to charity through the end of February. The larger, Nasdaq-listed Green Mountain Coffee, which uses the platform JustMeans for its responsibility program, is extremely active and global, making loans to hurricane-ravaged growers in Mexico and sponsoring river cleanup efforts closer to home.
With mass media atrophying and consumers refusing to be swayed by spin, it will become increasingly critical for organizations of all kinds — small and large businesses, associations, NGOs, political candidates, celebrities, etc. – to demonstrate their commitment to doing good. Professional communicators tuned into best practices will be far more likely to win new business, promotions and a seat at the table in this new paradigm.
Riders of elevators in New York City office buildings know what topics are trending on Twitter even before they fire up their computers each morning.
As legions of office workers scurry to their desks, the data they’re seeing on the Captivate elevator ad network is the same information driving editorial and sales decisions at a new consumer-driven online news network with a familiar name.
AOL is relaunching in December as an marketing-supported provider of original content in dozens of consumer and business markets. Unlike news products from Google and Yahoo, AOL is not simply aggregating articles from other news sites.
CEO Tim Armstrong plans to direct his growing team of employees and freelancers to write copy and create multimedia content based on what topics are drawing the largest amount of consumer attention at any given time. To hell with long tail, this play aims clearly at the head of the beast.
If executed well, Armstrong’s model will be appealing to brands that want their people, products and ideas to be included in relevant online content in real-time. The payback comes when the brands sponsoring timely articles and multimedia packages see better performance than current online advertising. The blowback, however, could happen if a brand’s desire to use the platform as an advertorial vehicle is not tempered effectively.
Advertorials and contextual adverising are not new business concepts. But uneasiness about polluting editorial content with paid information has kept them from scaling, beyond CNBC’s “Business of Innovation“ sponsored profile on IBM and a few similar efforts.
For decades in the news business, PR people and marketers have done the best they could to anticipate when topics will flare up in the media. At United Press International, where I cut my journalistic teeth, and later at PR Newswire, legendary features editor Fred Ferguson’s annual calendar (PDF) of “special sections” guided us to gather content just ahead of events and holidays.
Likewise, publishers prepare editorial calendars to make sure there’s ample bridal content to surround the inevitable bridal advertising that characterizes wedding-planning season, or Mother’s Day stories for late April.
That long-lead material will be easy for Armstrong’s team to produce, with or without the sophisticated web-consumption algorithms and freelancer assignment site that are the secret sauce for the new AOL.
But it’s much harder to quickly build out credible, sponsored content around timely topics that could not be easily forecasted.
When Kanye West dissed Taylor Swift during the MTV Video Music Awards, it meant a glut of searches about the teenage crossover star and the rapper who loves Beyoncé. Social media chatter about the episode hockey-sticked first, followed quickly by entertainment news sites and mainstream broadcast and print media.
Some “breaking news” can be pre-packaged. There’s going to be two feet of snow in Buffalo any day now, so why not hit up Goodyear for a sidebar on snow tires? Likewise, food poisoning outbreaks are happening like clockwork these days, so Seattle attorney Bill Marler has developed a formula for getting his name into the hands of media and victims’ families within hours.
If AOL can systemetize and monetize this “PounceNow” approach to marketing, it will become a welcome source of income for writers, photographers and videographers displaced in the old media Armageddon. They’d welcome hearing the familiar AOL voice over their computer speakers saying, “You’ve Been Hired.”
Don’t let the mustard-colored sports coat fool you. Tom Kunz is one hip CEO.
As head of Cenury 21 Real Estate LLC, Kunz is in an industry that’s being disintermediated by the Internet and ravaged by the recession. Yet I have never met a more positive, open-minded and technology-friendly executive.
What does he do right:
He’s not afraid to experiment. Century 21 pulled its TV advertising budget and spent the cash to bolster its presence online. Kunz says brand recognition for the franchise was already in the high 90s, so there was no reason to spend millions on 30- and 60-second image spots. The company is contemplating a switch back to TV, but it would be a web-based format where Century 21 branding was visible at all times on the screen.
He understands the time-sensitive nature of news. When Congress extended incentives aimed at first-time homebuyers, Kunz dropped what he was doing to record a 2 minute presentation on a tiny, inexpensive Flip video camera. His comments were up on Century 21’s YouTube channel within minutes. As of today, the video had been watched nearly 1,700 times.
He takes counsel from Matt Gentile, Century’s 21’s director of corporate and brand communications. In an interview with PR Week’s Eric Iacono, during the Next conference, Kunz talked about making media outreach in local markets a priority. By incorporating interviews with local print and broadcast media into trips, and inviting local Century 21 franchisees to participate, the organization lands extended coverage rather than the short soundbites afforded by national media.
He doesn’t hoard good information. While many CEOs would stay silent about marketing strategies, Kunz is a walking dictionary definition for transparency, even sharing his age (61) with the crowd. As for naysayers, he advises them to watch the AT&T “Lost Dog” YouTube spot to explain power of social media.
I also liked Tom’s ability to be self-effacing in a manner that seemed genuine: “I’m a gadget freak,” he told those attending the Next event at the Waldorf Astoria. “It doesn’t mean I know how to use them all, but I buy them all.”
Tom was kind enough to do a short interview with me following his appearance at Next. Please excuse my camera work, as his head is halfway out of the frame for portions of the video. Yet another reason I never worked in TV.
During the dress rehearsal for a meeting with Facebook executives, one of my colleagues took some ribbing for her use of iteration when talking about the reason a Fortune 100 company’s social marketing program worked so well.
Einstein Bros. not only saw its fan base surge past 400,000 last week, the publicly traded company also benefited from 
Underdogs are often in the best position to do things right.
The stories I hear from my wife of 23 years, Maureen Fitzpatrick, sous chef at the gourmet BCI soup kitchen, never cease to amaze me. After preparing today’s lip-smacking lunch of lamb tagine, Maureen raced to her cookbooks for details on blinis and creme fraiche. Why? Because Wednesday’s meal promised to be even more incredible, thanks to the donation of an $1,100 tin of 
Riders of elevators in New York City office buildings know what topics are trending on 