Marketing Hipster

Been a very busy week and tomorrow it gets busier as we are putting on the Triangle AMA Social Media Boot Camp 2010.  We have an entire day of rock star speakers talking all about the in’s and outs of social media.  The event is sold out and I am real excited to speak as well as hear the other speakers.

A number of folks will be blogging and tweeting from the event live!  If you would like to keep track of it on Twitter, we will be using the hashtag #smbc2010.

You can keep track of all the action right here as well as on Capstrat’s blog.

My friend Karl Sakas for reasons beyond me wanted to interview me and talk about marketing, my history and the Grateful Dead.  Karl put out a summary of what we spoke about if you are interested.  What I enjoyed most was Karl and I getting together and having a great conversation.  How can you beat that?

An interesting discussion has been taking place in the Twitterverse and the web regarding a local bakery who tried to “garner attention to help us sell more tasty cupcakes“. Well they really got the attention part down, but I have a feeling if you asked owners of Just Crumb, they probably would like to have the last couple of days back. I am not going to go into the all the details of what happened, if you want the blow by blows, check out the following articles:  The Gloss, Jezebel, Fatshionista and Ignite.

To summarize quickly, Just Crumb bakery attempted to be hip and cutting edge and adopted the slogan, “So Good It Makes Fat People Cry”.  A woman took offense to that slogan and wrote the owners an email.  The owners responded insensitively and proceeded to ridicule this woman via Twitter up to and including calling her the dreaded “C” word.  This sparked a great deal of attention and right about this time I have a feeling the Crumb owners realized that they were not in Kansas anymore.

They proceeded to throw gasoline on the fire by tweeting, “Things we learned on Tuesday: Apparently we do not have private Twitter accounts anymore. Everything is business. Lesson learned.”  (I hear this in my best Lumbergh impression) Yea, unfortunately you did not learn any lessons because no-one cared whether your Twitter account was private or not, they cared about you ridiculing and demeaning another person for reasons unknown. Finally, Crumb posted an apology on their blog which proceeded to get 80 comments of people ripping them a new one before Crumb turned the comments off.

I am not writing this to pile on with everyone else.  To be honest, I feel sorry for the Just Crumb owners.  I have at times in my life said and written things that I wish I hadn’t.  People who are passionate about what they do at times allows that passion to get away from them and we sometimes communicate poorly.  I was actually looking at these events more as a case study in PR and social media.  I was wondering if I could speak to the owners of the bakery right now, what I would tell them and what could they do today, right now, to help themselves?  Here is what I came up with.

You reacted wrong.  You need to realize your initial Twitter post about private accounts, huge mistake.  You did something wrong, we all do, you needed to man up and admit that you were trying to be edgy and funny, but unfortunately it turned to something highly objectionable.

Stop hiding! You haven’t posted a blog post since Tuesday and you haven’t tweeted since Wednesday.  This is the time that you need to be out there communicating with everyone!  You need to turn the burner to high.  You are going to take some hits, stand up and take them.  It is much easier for people to yell and scream at people they do not know or can’t see.  It is much harder for folks to yell and scream when you are willing to pull up a seat at the table and engage with them.  You might not be able to change everyone’s opinions, but you will receive props for showing up.

Put a face to this issue. I know you just want to crawl away and hide until this is over, but you can’t.  Other than the small amount of local folks who know you, no-one knows what you look like.  Your website, blog and Twitter accounts don’t have any pictures of either of you.  If it was me, I would record a video and post it on YouTube and your blog.  Put a face to your names and show your humanity.  Show that your real folks just like the people who are angry with you right now.  Show in your faces and what you say that you realize you made a mistake and want to sincerely apologize for it.  Once again, you are human and we make mistakes.  People will forgive if you ask for forgiveness.

The web never forgets. You are waiting for this to blow over and it will.  Unfortunately, Google has become the memory of the web.  All these blog posts, all the tweets, they will all be indexed by Google and will come up when people do searches for your company as well as your own names for years to come.  Knowing this, don’t you want people to see that you reacted the right way to this crisis?

What do you think? What did I forgot, what did I miss?  Thoughts?

Here is my problem:  I had to wipe my PC yesterday and reinstall Windows and all my programs.  I know, I know, if I had a Mac that would not happen.  Let’s stay on topic.

I reinstalled iTunes and signed in with my username and password.  Now I am a big fan of a lot of podcasts and are subscribed to more than 100 audio and video podcasts.  The problem I have is I already have like 1000 podcasts on my actual iPod, but you cannot sync from the iPod to iTunes, it has to go the other way.

Even if I chose to go and resubscribe to each podcast, if I sync my iPod, it will erase ALL the old episodes I already have on my iPod because they are not part of my iTunes library.

So I am asking for any advice on how to resubscribe to all my podcasts without having to delete all the existing ones already on my iPod.  Your help is greatly appreciated!

A little random fact about myself, I am a strong believer and a big fan of loyalty.  I believe loyalty plays an important part in my life each and everyday.  I am loyal to my wife, my friends, my coworkers, my clients and yes I am loyal to specific companies.  I believe that when a company delivers an exceptional product or service, they deserve my loyalty.  That loyalty consists of me continuing to work with them year after year and recommend them to my friends and peers. This kind of customer evangelism is even more important today as the web has made the world so much smaller and allowed users to communicate and share their opinions effortlessly.

In marketing, there is nothing so sweet than a customer evangalist.  This person has absolutely no hidden agenda. All they want to do is freely share their happiness with a company or product.  They do this because they believe in it strongly and want others to feel as good as they do.  And when a customer evangelist has a poor experience with the company they have spent years promoting and recommending, it can be a blow to the system.

This is where I am at the moment.  I sit here perplexed with what has happened with Verizon Wireless and myself over the last 6 months.  I have been a Verizon customer for more than 10 years.  In those ten years, I have lived in 5 different states and with each move, my trusted Verizon phone and service came with me.  I am also an early adopter.  When the new hot tech phone comes out, I am usually there to buy one.  This is exactly what happened months ago when Verizon released the Blackberry Storm.  The first week it came out, I went and purchased two of them for my wife and I. 

Now I am not going to go into detail about all the problems that the Storm has had.  Let’s just say that if you do a search on Google for “Blackberry Storm Sucks“, there are 376,000 web pages willing to go into more detail.  Unfortunately, I also had my problems with the Storm which forced me to speak with Verizon’s customer service more than a dozen times.  They tried to fix things, but bottom line is Verizon and Blackberry put out a product that was not ready to be released. It was a half baked product that was rushed to market and both Verizon and Blackberry should be held accountable.

I use my phone for work.  The Storm just does not allow me to do everything i need to do in the time I need to get it done.  Fast foward to this week when Verizon releases the new Blackberry Tour.  I called Verizon and they proceeded to tell me that since I signed a new contract when I bought my Storm, I am not eligible for the $199 deal they were offering on the Tour.  I would have to pay more than $300! 

To be honest after all the problems I have had, I believe that Verizon should just give me the Tour for free and beg for my forgiveness.  Though I doubt that is going to happen.  But I actually thought they might give me the same deal they are offering to new customers since I have been paying customer for more than a decade? 

I have reached the point where this is really not about the money.  It is now the principle.  Doesn’t loyalty work both ways?  Haven’t I built up enough loyalty with Verizon to deserve to be treated better or am I being totally naive? Am I asking too much?  And if I am asking too much, what do I do now?  I believe that the only logical next step is for my wife and I to take our business elsewhere.  Though will I get the exact same poor service with AT&T?

Posted via web from Cord Silverstein

Posted via web from cord’s posterous

Did you ever see the movie Crazy People?  It came out in the early 90′s and starred Dudley Moore and Darryl Hannah.  The premise of the movie was Dudley Moore was an ad executive who reached his breaking point because he had to lie everyday in his work.  He eventually found himself in a mental hospital and began working with other mental patients on ads that only told the truth.  The movie was not the best movie, but it popped in my head recently when I watched a number of Sprint television commercials.  I am sure you have seen them, they have Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse walking down several New York City streets talking about the digital revolution and how “cool” these new cell phones are.  He ends the commercials asking us to join him in the digital revolution.

Now for the last what couple of years Sprint has been hemoraging customers.  If you take five minutes and do a few searches on the web, you would quickly realize that many of the customers left because they believed Sprint had atrocious customer service.  Give it a shot, do a Google search for “Sprint sucks”.  Now I don’t know anything about Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse and I have not been a Sprint customer for many years, but instead of spending millions of dollars on commercials that talk about the “digital revolution” wouldn’t that time and money be spent more wisely talking about how Sprint has heard the complaints and feedback and is taking steps to change?

Am I nuts or would a commercial with Dan Hesse sitting in a diner saying, “We have made mistakes in the past.  We have listened to our past and present customers’ feedback and we realized that without great customer service our cool phones and great plans mean nothing.  That is why Sprint has made the following changes….  Yada yada yada..”

I think a commercial like that would raise more attention and deliver a greater ROI than their present, “You can update your Facebook status from our phones, how cool” commercials.  Though if Dan Hesse Sprint CEO would ask me, I would say cut down your TV media buy considerably and put that money into engaging with your present and potential customers online.  Though now I am just plain talking crazy.

For anyone in the Triangle area, I am participating in a Social Media Panel discussion this Thursday November 8th hosted by Business Wire. You can learn more about it here. I guess I am still being listed as “more to be announced”.

Anyhow, it should be a pretty low key event. There will be no Powerpoint presentations just an open discussion between the panelists and the audience. Hope to see you there.

Thursday November 8th
JK’s Restaurant
4381 Lassiter @ North Hills Ave., A100
Raleigh, NC 27609
919-781-3913

5:30 pm – 6:00 pm – Registration & Networking
6:00 pm – 7:30 pm: Presentations and Audience Q&A

$10 fee for non-members

Blogging is all about community. This blog gives me the opportunity to share my thoughts and opinions as well as being able to read and hear other people’s opinions and experiences. The people who come to this web site and grant me precious minutes of their day should absolutely be recognized and thanked! Because without them, I would just be sitting around talking to myself and to be honest, I do too much of that already.

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Best,

Cord