Marketing Hipster

There has been some interesting discussions here on a previous post of mine discussing the two guys kissing and chest hair pulling Snickers commercial. When launched the commercial drove users to the web site afterthekiss.com. Though today if you try out that URL, you will just be redirected to the Snickers site.

AdRants has a good write up on this where they say,

“While we liked this spot purely for its shock value, there’s a faintly high probability this will have a very real negative affect on sales. Can you imagine the looks one will now receive from the checkout clerk when they buy a Snickers bar? That’s just way too much snickering for most people to take and there’s plenty of other perfectly good candy choices with far less embarrassment attached to them.”

Though I do hear that the follow-up commercial to this will be video of everyone in the marketing department of Snickers pulling out their own chest hair after seeing their sales drop from their commercial being aired on the SuperBowl.

Technorati Tags: two guys kissing, Snickers, commercial

While I was working for Dell, we had this saying that each one of us were sharks all swimming in a relatively small ocean. If anyone one of us started to slow down or stop, we would be eaten by another. It might of been a little over the top, but it did make the point crystal clear. Keep pushing forward, never stop, never be content.

A couple of months ago I posted a story on the new Yahoo! Mail Beta and the issues I had with it. As the story explained, I have been using Yahoo! Mail as my primary personal email address for many many years and it seemed to me that Yahoo! released this new Beta without any consideration of the customer experience people would have. The entire user experience on this application was terrible and to be honest, a bit embarrassing to release this as a Beta.

Since I wrote that story several months ago, I have been sending Yahoo! Mail feedback on all my thoughts, issues and suggestions for this new email application. They have a little feedback button, so I thought I would share. I believe I have sent them at least 6 different emails with thoughts and suggestions. These were not bitch emails, they were my personal suggestions on what could make their new application better. I received exactly zero responses from Yahoo! on any and all of my feedback. Not even a fricken form letter. And more importantly, in the last couple of months, I have seen absolutely no changes to this Beta release, nothing.

So what happens when a company turns it’s back on longtime brand evangelists as well as giving the impression that they are doing absolutely no work? They tend to become irrelevant and fade quietly into obscurity.

So what could Yahoo! do to rectify these issues with very little effort?

1. KEEP US INFORMED! – Send out a progress email to all members. You know a little status report. Tell us what you are working on, what’s going on.
2. KEEP US INVOLVED! – Just like how every open source application does today. Create a online request log that users can add feature suggestions and thoughts.
3. KEEP YOURSELF RELEVANT! – Show some sort of progress. Change something, fix something, let us know that you are still breathing.

You are running out of times around the track here Yahoo!. Personally, I see my Yahoo! email address becoming my spam email address if things do not change in the future. As always, I am here Yahoo! if you actually are interested in communicating with your users. Please send all correspondence to my Gmail email address. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Technorati Tags: Dell, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, customer experience

Last week it was announced that Ogilvy would partner with Technorati and they would provide Ogilvy clients with blogs, video blogs, videos, photos and other online user-generated media.

“Ogilvy creatives and account teams will use Technorati’s conversational marketing products to build relationships between brands and conversations relevant to those brands. This will result in the the creation of destination sites, new forms of advertising and communities of interest.”

This will be interesting to watch and see what transpires from this. My initial thought was that this was yet another example of an agency creating another avenue for their clients to communicate to their customers, but not creating a way to better listen to their customers and most importantly understand them. I think we have seen numerous examples of companies jumping head first into the blogosphere and truly falling flat on their faces. The reason for this was that they did not understand who their customers were and what they were saying.

Developing a blog is the easy part of social media. Creating landing pages for people go to and read is nothing different than creating new landing pages for a pay per click campaign. Though if you want to capitalize on social media, there needs to be a great deal more than this.

A company needs to understand before launching a blog what issues and feedback they might receive. They must have procedures in place to not only hear what their customers are saying, but being able to respond to them quickly and correctly. And finally, a blog’s singular purpose is to engage with their readers. If a company is utilizing a blog for yet another avenue to put out press releases, they will soon realize that this blog will do nothing to enhance their brand and more often than not, it will hurt their company’s overall brand and reputation.

What do you think? If you were a Fortune 100 company, what would your initial steps be to launch a successful blog?

Technorati Tags: Ogilvy, Technorati, blogs, social media

I am sure most of you have already read their fill on the latest Microsoft controversy. I do not plan on discussing it any further here. Just for the sake of anyone who is not up to date, Microsoft paid a blogger to write information on Wikipedia regarding an open source page. Microsoft wanted what they called a more “fair and balanced” article. Then the blogger went and posted a story on his own blog about how Microsoft just paid him. This was followed by a big uproar in the blogosphere of course.

After reading a number of articles discussing this incident, I think this highlights in no uncertain terms a lesson that all companies with products and services to sell should learn. Instead of wasting an incredible amount of time and effort on spin, how about you put that time into developing a product or service that your customers will love in the first place? If you have a product or service that your customers love, there will be absolutely no need to prompt or pay anyone to write or talk about your product. They will do so without hesitation because people do that with things they love. They are passionate about things they love and want to tell anyone and everyone who will listen. Do you think that a story about Apple paying bloggers to write about the iPod will ever happen? Of course not.

Microsoft, if you felt like your Office Open XML was not getting the due it deserved who is to blame for that? The writers in Wikipedia or you for releasing a product that does not capture the minds and imaginations of the people you covet? When this latest debacle calms down, sit down and think about how much time your employees spent dealing with the negative press and then think how that time could of been used for better pursuits like developing products that people will want to sing your praises from the rooftops.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft controversy, Microsoft, Wikipedia, blogger

One of the things that I hate most in this world is going to a mall. It doesn’t matter if it is a big or small, good or bad, great deals or not; if it is a mall, I would rather have my teeth pulled out with a pliers than go to one. So because of my hatred for malls, online shopping has been my haven for holiday shopping for many years. I am usually already done my shopping by this time of this year, but I have run into a couple of problems finding the right gifts for a couple of people. I have spent the better part of today scouring the internet looking for good gifts to wrap up my holiday shopping for this year.

One of the sites I use most when it comes to both holiday shopping as well as shopping for myself is Amazon. I have been a regular shopper on Amazon for many years. I have found their web site to have excellent navigation, good look and feel, plenty to choose from and I love the customer reviews. I am such a fan of them that I joined their Amazon Prime service I think two years ago where I pay them $40 or $50 bucks a year and I get free second day shipping for anything that Amazon sells.

So today as I was browsing around Amazon, I ran into a little issue with the site that I thought would make my shopping experience even better. When I did a search, let’s say for a digital camera, I wanted to have the results come based on which products are part of Amazon Prime first, so I do not have to see a bunch of products that I will have to pay more for shipping. After trying many different things, I came to the realization that Amazon does not have this feature so I wanted to send them feedback to see if they could add it.

Here is where things got interesting. I surfed around their site for almost a half an hour looking for somewhere, anywhere that I could provide this feedback. I checked the help section. I went into my account. I looked everywhere and there was no-where that at least I could find that offered an online form or a mailto that I could send them this feedback.

This really caught me by surprise to be honest. Why would Amazon not want to hear from me? I understand they do not want some place where people can send in complaints, etc., but you see all over the web, web sites offering links for site feedback. Especially, if you are a paying customer, like myself and one who has been for many years. Why would Amazon make it so hard for me to provide what at least I consider to be valuable feedback?

I think this is one of the major issues that is going to determine the success or failure of many companies in the future. Companies need to start realizing that they cannot assume what their customers want anymore and they need to hear it right from the horses mouth, their customers or clients. More importantly, even if a company’s assumptions are correct, it still will not be enough. Customers want, no demand, to feel empowered when it comes to where they spend their hard earned money and time. There is so much competition and variety to choose from, we as consumers have enormous choices of who to buy from and when. Companies like Amazon and many others need to realize that they need to take the relationships they have with their customers to the next level. I know I want to feel that a business is going the extra mile for me. If not, I will choose to take my business elsewhere. Bottom line is customers need to be shown that they are valued and the simpliest and easiest way to do that is by listening to what we have to say. During my career, I have gotten better ideas and feedback from my clients’ customers far more often than I do from my clients’ themselves. I am going to go into more detail on how to listen to your customers in a future post.

If you happen to know anyone who works for Amazon, please send them a link to this story, I would love to hear feedback from Amazon to see what their thoughts are on this.

Technorati Tags: online shopping, Amazon, shopping experience, feedback