Jittery marketing pioneers at big brands have chugged antacids, taken up yoga and updated their resumes as they await proof that their early forays into big-budget social media programs will be successful.

Quite frankly, it’s hard to hide from data-rich digital platforms like Facebook, which are increasingly hard wired into CRM databases or, scarier yet, the cash register. And the C-suite has made it clear they want to move the needle and marketing executives are at the very tipping point of success.

When the authors of a Harvard Business Review case study reported in March that they had proven a small chain of Texas dessert cafes was experiencing a business spike because of its consumer outreach on Facebook, marketers smartly took note.

In the piece, One Café Chain’s Facebook Experiment, Utpal M. Dholakia and Emily Durham revealed that fans of Houston-based Dessert Gallery visited the restaurants 20% more than non-fans, spending the highest share of their dining-out dollars there.  The finding: the long-term financial payoff of building a fan base far exceeded Dessert Café’s investment cost.

A month earlier, a similar eats-for-likes campaign had been launched by the Colorado-based bakery and quick service restaurant chain, Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, Inc (disclosure: Einstein Bros Bagels is a client of my company).  Because Einstein Bros Bagels is publicly traded – under the apt NASDAQ ticker symbol BAGL – the company is required to share details of its financial performance each quarter with investors, so it’s not difficult to see the shmear on the wall.

A Bloomberg television interview on Feb. 8 disclosed Einstein’s inaugural campaign to distribute a coupon for a free bagel and cream cheese to every one of the brand’s Facebook fans. eMarketer’s social media analyst Debra Aho Williamson interviewed the company’s chief concept officer, James O’Reilly, who stated:

“The conversion rate we’re seeing in the Facebook-printed coupons is far greater than what we see in our regular printed coupons — well more than double our normal redemption rates,” O’Reilly said.

When the Bloomberg interview took place, Einstein was celebrating growth of its Facebook fan base from less than 4,000 to more than 300,000.  Based on the success of subsequent free bagel campaigns, through an application developed by Context Optional and promotion on Facebook, the fan base had grown to 600,000 by May.

How has Einstein’s business fared during the unprecedented bagel giveaway?  CEO Jeff O’Neill announced on May 6 that first quarter system-wide, same-store sales grew for the first time in five quarters.

“For the quarter, product innovation and creative promotions drove improvement in system-wide comparable sales and transactions, and we were pleased that consumers responded positively to our check building efforts despite intensifying competition in the breakfast daypart. We also improved our gross margins through our supply chain initiatives, and realized efficiencies in our manufacturing and store-level operations, which together facilitated 25.9% growth in adjusted net income for the period.”

On the quarterly Einstein Bros. analyst conference call, also on May 6, the enthusiasm that O’Reilly exhibited during the Bloomberg interview had not waned.

“Finally, on the advertising front, we placed a portion of our planned increased advertising investment in March and, just a few days ago, began our second national promotion on Facebook, which has already generated incredible buzz.  It provides a free bagel and cream cheese coupon to customers who choose to become a fan of Einstein Bros. on Facebook providing a significant base of customers we can market to directly and efficiently.  We already have more than a half a million fans on the Facebook network and expect this new effort to create even greater customer trial.”

In the same conference call, O’Reilly detailed the company’s multi-pronged strategy to bolster profits at the same time it was redeeming a large number of free bagel coupons.

“To counteract the check impact of our free bagel promotions, we implemented some check-building efforts, including the launch of two new, limited-time-only premium espresso drinks,” he said.

Based on its success using Facebook to boost Einstein’s fan base, brand awareness, in-store traffic, sales and profits — along with the company’s operational improvements and menu innovations — management told investors to expect an extension of this program in the months ahead.

“Looking forward, I know I speak for our entire team in saying we have the right strategies for delivering continued improvement in our comparable-stores sales performance throughout 2010 and will keep executing on what we already view as successful initiatives that are moving our business forward,” said O’Reilly.

Every industry has its own vocabulary.

“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.

-0-

(Note:  I remain an active board member at dna13.)

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.”

I don’t expect diversity in the New York supermarket business.  Rightly or wrongly, I have long associated chains like D’Agostino and Gristede’s as places managed by brawny Italian-American men.

In the public relations professions, the spotlight has been shining on the lack of adequate representation by non-male, non-white personnel for quite some time.  Similar criticism — and in some cases, litigation — has been lodged against the advertising and financial services industries.

But the world has changed since Don Draper types ruled on Madison Avenue, right?  Surely, the next generation of technology-driven marketing services would be led by people who more closely resemble those who live in our global communities where our clients sell their wares.

If the speakers and attendees at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit in suburban Boston were an accurate sampling of who’s guiding us through the transformation from command-and-control “push” marketing to online and offline consumer “engagement” by brands, the answer is no.  The vast majority of those behind the books, speeches, opinions, videos and business models showcased at #IMS09 were  white males, mainly in their 30s and 40s.

One exception was Candace Fleming, CEO of the social media analytics platform Crimson Hexagon.  Another was Tina Hoang, whose Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm was trolling the event for companies to back.

While at PR Newswire,  where I worked from 1989 until recently, one of our overarching goals was building a healthy corporate culture and products that represented the needs of our communities.  Key to our success was attracting and retaining talent of all shapes, sizes, colors, orientations, religions and ethnicities.  The many postage stamp-sized images of my former PRN colleagues I see on Facebook each day confirms that we made plenty of progress.

Why is this important?

Census data from 2008 shows 54% of the U.S. population will be 54 percent minority groups — that is “everyone except non-Hispanic, single-race whites” — by the mid-21st century.  Professions that continue to rely on pale, male and stale people, practices and ideas are much more likely to be irrelevant.

One recent research paper on the topic, Elizabeth L. Toth’s  “Diversity and Public Relations Practice,” outlined the challenge for our profession.  Organizations like the Public Relations Society of America and the Institute for Public Relations have dedicated resources to address the issue.  But traditional PR agencies and corporate communications functions are morphing into new entities so quickly, it’s questionable how much impact the longtime industry standard bearers will have influencing the fledgling inbound marketing field.

There is  plenty of wildly successful marketing work being done in Africa, Asia, Europe and in the Americas using digital tools and creative  ideas from people who have never written a book or proclaimed themselves social media experts.  Events like the the trends-and-technologies Pop!Tech conference, in Camden, Maine, Oct. 21-24, have a broad roster of philanthropic doers who are glad to share their successes and failures with PR and marketing pros who want to learn new skills.

For people without thousands of dollars to spend on conferences like Pop!Tech and TED, last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit was well worth the time and investment.  I’d love to see next year’s event held in Indonesia, Argentina or Tunisia.  If not there, at least invite some of their digital marketing superstars to visit Boston.

New Yorker Sandy Cohen has started an unconventional translation company, Speaklike.  Rather than thriving on the conversion of encyclopedia-sized documents from English into Arabic or Portuguese, Sandy’s start-up offers Twitter users an inexpensive way to translate their 140-character messages into just about any language.

At about 25 cents per language per tweet, this can add up in a hurry.  But it’s a godsend for B2B and B2C users of Twitter who cater to multicultural and global audiences.   His service could also be used in the email and Web fulfillment world.

In another departure from the mainstream, Sandy is taking a play out of the Wikipedia playbook by crowd-sourcing his network of translators.  The similarity to Wikipedia ends there, though, as a fraction of each micropayment  will trickle down to the translations.  (Will this be the basis for a new Twitter economy in Brazil and Belarus?)

I just started using SpeakLike today and look forward to seeing if anyone in the Spanish-speaking world cares about my tweets.  My new Latino persona is @SenorDaveArmon.

The other interesting crowd-sourced translation business model involves Web video.  dotSUB , created by Michael Smolens, is free for users to upload video and a transcript so each spoken word appears as closed-captioning on the bottom of the video  (click on the “CC” button at the bottom of the player).  Those two steps opens up your video to the hearing-impaired audience.

For video producers who want to reach those who speak another language, dotSUB has a network of professional translators who will do the work for a few bucks (the charge was around $10 a video minute the last time I checked).  There are free translators who know how to use the dotSUB tool, but the content has to be interesting enough for someone to volunteer their time to convert your video into something that will win an Oscar in the Ukraine or Nepal.

There are already a few examples of marketing programs taking advantage of dotSUB and Speaklike.   Use the Comment function below to let me know your thoughts about these tools.

I’m in awe of the tens of thousands of games and widgets that are now part of Apple’s App Store.

This touch-screen ecosystem doesn’t net big bucks for most developers. Many apps are free; most sell for under $10. But the fact that more than 10 million miniature applications – with quirky names like Midomi and ShoZu — have been downloaded thus far means that it can add up quickly.

The phenomenon is not limited to the consumer space. Salesforce.com has been encouraging developers to post their zany inventions in its AppExchange so there’s more stickiness with subscribers, some of whom might be tempted to leave for a cheaper software-as-a-service sales automation tool.

What has been less apparent, both in the B2C and B2B marketplaces, is a burgeoning service industry surrounding many of these large software innovations or online communities.

Just as Joseph Jaffe and his pals created the agency Crayon a few years back to monetize the frenzy around those setting up communities and businesses in Second Life, a number of PR pros and marketers are specializing in Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Few argue that experimentation and innovation are not vital to keeping brands relevant in today’s business world, so there is strong demand for a helping hand to prevent potentially highly visible online missteps.

The one category of service business we’ve seen and heard about the most is monitoring and gisting services. Corporations and agencies gladly pay services like Techrigy and Radian6 to learn what is being said about them and competitors online. (see Dan Schwabel’s list of players here.)

But monitoring alone does not give companies a voice in the conversation. That’s where England’s Twit4Hire.com, Australia’s Twitter Agency and similar outsourced service models pop up, along with Twitter practices inside traditional PR firms and ad agencies.

It remains to be seen whether this model will scale. Just as there are dangers of not being on Twitter, it is equally risky to task third parties with the upkeep of a brand – especially in an environment where authenticity and trust are such precious attributes.

Another service model that is flourishing, at least on Facebook, guarantees at least a million views of videos to audiences that can be targeted by age, gender and other demographics. Involver.com appears to be the Typhoid Mary of viral video.

While most of the world is in a recession, the stimulus package for risk-taking service providers is just a mouse click away.

Drivers and pedestrians bitched about workmen unloading delivery trucks on East 40th Street near Bryant Park last night.  They don’t know how good they have it.

Fashion Week, opens Feb. 13 for its final run at the midtown Manhattan park.  When it leaves for a new home at Lincoln Center, so will millions in hotel room and restaurant revenue (though models don’t eat very much) at nearby establishments.  Two chic W hotels on East 39th Street, the Tuscany and Court, are already on the sale block.

On the surface, it appears Fashion Week’s owner,  IMG, is simply trading one location for another.  Beneath the catwalk, though, looms the more ominous truth that the business model for event organizers is beginning to break.

Two top designers, Vera Wang and Betsey Johnson, will not be displaying their latest creations on the runways in Bryant Park.  Instead, each will attract a throng of media and celebrities to events at their own New York flagship stores.

In another highly publicized case of the middleman being eliminated, Apple decided against future participation in IDG’s MacWorld tradeshow.   Whether Apple goes it alone in publicizing new iProducts or cozies up with the not-for-profit Consumer Electonics Association, which operates the massive Consumer Electronics Show, remains to be seen.

What’s clear is that disintermediation is not just an online phenomenon.  Conventional wisdom is that “face-to-face” would prosper even as marketers moved their spend online and away from print and broadcast.  In-person events are indeed happening, but brand owners are choosing to rewrite the rules and control their own gatherings rather than spending their budgets with organizers who cannot swear allegiance to a single brand.

I will miss my Viagra note pad. And my Rogain roller ball pen. And my Nexium coffee mug.

Expect to see more doctors and dentists shopping at Staples, now that drug companies have enacted a voluntary ban against branded tsochtkes. Any doctor that didn’t have the sense to stockpile hundreds of Vioxx pens before the pain reliever was pulled from the market will now have to join the ranks of common folk and write with a 19 cent Bic ballpoint.

Naturally, the $19 billion advertising specialties industry is in a tizzy.

Pharmaceutical companies were the largest single purchaser of branded giveaway items, plunking down customer Andy Cohen, editor of Counselor magazine, published by the Advertising Specialty Institute.

If Cohen’s numbers are correct, the fact that drug makers accounted for 10% of all the advertising specialties sold in 2007, that means approximately $1.9 billion has been shaved off the marketing budgets of companies like Pfizer, Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb.

The Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America says its new code, governing interaction with medical care providers, seeks to stop the many marketing freebies to focus on four things:

• inform healthcare professionals about the benefits and risks of our products to help advance appropriate patient use,

• provide scientific and educational information,

• support medical research and education, and

• obtain feedback and advice about our products through consultation with medical experts.

This seems like a boon for public relations agencies and marketing services vendors who have expertise in healthcare. By not gifting doctors with pens and logo-embroidered clothing, there’s a significant amount of marketing money that can be re-allocated to more substantive awareness programs that ultimately should benefit the drug companies, doctors and patients.

Now that we know the next big growth category for PR agencies in 2009, one big question remains unanswered:  Will the pen manufactures and tsotchke sales reps qualify for an AIG-style government bailout?

]]> http://www.pouncenow.com/2009/01/how-will-drug-makers-spend-their-pen-money/feed/ 0 http://www.pouncenow.com/2009/01/zappos-bares-its-sexist-sole/ http://www.pouncenow.com/2009/01/zappos-bares-its-sexist-sole/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:17:15 +0000 Dave Armon http://www.pouncenow.com/?p=11

Along with Comcast, JetBlue, Marriott, Southwest Airlines and PR Newswire, I have always viewed Zappos as a Twitter poster child. The shoe retailer has been praised by many for taking part in the online conversation, rather than simply pitching corporately approved drivel in the direction of consumers.

That’s why I was taken aback yesterday when Zappos tried to generate headlines by insulting the independence – both financially and intellectually – of women.

In a press release and via its web site, Zappos claimed it received complaints from spouses that some shoe buyers had significantly overspent their families’ budgets on footwear. The company’s publicity stunt included the ability for angry husbands to pay $50,000 for an intervention that blocked the ability for the little misses to spend the family fortune on shoes.

About three hours after I tweeted that the campaign was sexist, @Zappos_Service responded: “The shirts are actually for boyfriend, husband, girlfriend and wife.. the shirt’s message changes for the different colors. “

The default photo that pops up on the ZapposGear page promoting the intervention is a black men’s tee shirt emblazoned with “It only cost me $50,000 to stop my wife from shopping at Zappos.com!”

I have no vested interest in this issue, having never worked with Zappos or its competitors. Nor have I shopped with Zappos. I have followed the company’s social media exploits and admired the clever sponsorship of shoe bins at airport TSA security checkpoints.

I also empathize that Zappos did not escape unscathed from the brutal spending slowdown that has impacted virtually every retailer – online and offline – and that prompted CEO Tony Hsieh to slash staffing by 8% in November.

For a company that basked in the glow of corporate social responsibility, particularly around the issue of transparency, it must have been very tempting to quickly return to “business as usual” in a playful way after suffering such a jolting setback.

In choosing such a cheesy way to generate buzz, it is possible that Zappos considered the risk and genuinely knows its customers so well that it can safely say they will not be offended by being caricatured as shopping-frenzied, financially irresponsible women whose husbands hold the purse strings. Misogynistic remarks by Hseih have been part of his spiel before, such as at the June Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, sponsored by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb. (Watch video) The joke fell flat there, but Hseih didn’t get the hint.

Perhaps the fact that I grew up as the only boy in a household of four sisters in the feminism-crazed 1960s and ‘70s is tainting my view of the world. (My immediate family now is women, too – my wife and two daughters.) But I have worked closely with enough talented and professional women colleagues and clients to know that perpetuating the dated stereotypes of television sitcoms is unnecessarily hurtful.

Unless, of course, Zappos is planning a re-imaging campaign along the lines of TV shoe salesman Al Bundy. In that case, the Cease and Desist tee shirts illustrate the company’s values perfectly.

]]> http://www.pouncenow.com/2009/01/zappos-bares-its-sexist-sole/feed/ 0 http://www.pouncenow.com/2009/01/coffin%e2%80%99-up-some-publicity/ http://www.pouncenow.com/2009/01/coffin%e2%80%99-up-some-publicity/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:51:44 +0000 Dave Armon http://www.pouncenow.com/?p=3

Jay Richardson views The Big Bopper

Chantilly means something different to just about everyone. To my wife, a talented baker, it’s the whipped Chantilly cream she serves atop her pecan pie. Those who rely on Pepperidge Farm to cook up their desserts will know the Chantilly brand of raspberry cookie.

Then there’s the French city of Chantilly, a section of Fairfax County, Virginia, named Chantilly, and even a small neighborhood bearing that name in the city of Charlotte, N.C.

The strongest imagery for me involves The Big Bopper’s 1958 rock and roll hit Chantilly Lace, which has since been covered by dozens of bands. The opening line, “Hello, baby!” is arguably one of the most recognizable lines in rock.

The Big Bopper, aka Jiles Perry Richardson Jr., and two other young pop superstars, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, were killed in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, an event memorialized as “the day the music died” in Don McLean’s balled American Pie.

Leaping ahead nearly 50 years, a marketer with the appetite for publicity and the stomach for controversy has the opportunity to become a hero to The Big Bopper’s son, Jay Richardson, and the sponsor of a rock concert to keep his dad’s musical memory alive.

What’s the catch? Only the fact that Jay Richardson has decided the only way to fund his dream is to sell The Big Bopper’s used coffin. And he plans to do it via an eBay auction.

Jay Richardson, 49, has owned the 16-gauge steel casket since last year, when it was exhumed from Forest Lawn Cemetery in Beaumont, Texas, which just erected a large statue and memorial to the Big Bopper. The re-interment into a new casket gave the funeral industry a chance to test the quality of their circa-1950s product which, upon close inspection, stood up to 49 years of muddy entombment with only minor rust spots and lime stains.

Inside, as chronicled by Ron Franscell of the Beaumont Enterprise, “forensic examiners found the Big Bopper’s well-preserved corpse, dressed in a black suit and a blue-and-gray striped tie. He wore socks, but no shoes. Most remarkably, his thick brown hair was still perfectly coiffed in his familiar, 1950s flat-top.”
eBay has been a remarkable vehicle for marketers to acquire the oddest objects, along with plenty of media attention and the associated surge in web traffic:

– Goldenpalace.com, an online casino, paid $28,000 for a partially eaten grilled cheese sandwich auctioned by a woman who claimed an image of the Virgin Mary suddenly appeared on her lunch. In 2006, actor William Shatner sold his kidney stone to GoldenPalace.com during an auction that helped victims of Hurricane Katrina.

– Dr. Pepper Snapple Group earned an avalanche of positive media coverage, including NBC’s Today Show, this past June when it heard a Virginia hairdresser was trying to fund her wedding by auctioning off a bridesmaid spot on eBay. The beverage company and its agency, Ketchum, spent $10,000 and could very well send a celebrity bridesmaid to the April 19, 2009, nuptials.

Will a rusted casket that for nearly 50 years held the remains of The Big Bopper find a home with a familiar brand?  I’m dying to know.