The Missing Link?

My wife and I had dinner at our neighbors’ house and our host mentioned that he has made it his mission to clear out all of the clutter in his home. The task has become somewhat of an archeological dig as he pulls out relic upon relic from deep within his closets.

One found object was his now grown son’s ham radio set – the radio itself and all of the “QSL” cards that had been sent to him over the years from people he had spoken to from all over the world.

Having gone to sleep-away camp as a kid, I remembered the camp’s ham radio shed and how such cards took up virtually every available inch of wall space within it. These cards with their official call signs and operator numbers were proudly displayed for all to see. One couldn’t help but be impressed by the collection of messages from the USSR, China, Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

The ham radio operator actually chatted with the sender of each and every one of them!

It suddenly dawned on me:

Was connecting with ham operators from around the world back then much different than connecting with people on FaceBook or Twitter today? Were QSL cards much different than “Friends” or “Follower” lists?

Can you think of any other antecedents of today’s social networks?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Until then, over and out.

-Mark

Tweet to Remind: Social Media for Memorial Day

I wish I had learned about this sooner. 

Tweet to Remind is a creation of the Bob Woodruff Foundation and the ad agency, Porter Novelli.

To use their own words, "If every person who visits tweettoremind.org donates $5.25 in time for Memorial Day weekend, we could raise $1.65 million to help America's heroes as they return home."

Woodruff, you'll recall, is the reporter who was slated to take over the anchor chair at ABC News, until he was gravely wounded by a land mine while covering a story on the Iraq War. Tweet to Remind is only the latest project of his ReMIND.org, an organization dedicated to raising money and awareness for service members injured in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their families.

Woodruff asks bloggers and tweeters to post a simple note answering, "Who is your hero?" and encourage readers to do the same. Also to set up a link to your blog post from your Twitter account. 

For the record, my hero is my grandfather, Nathan Solomon. He was an officer and physician in the Medical Corps stationed in France during WWll, but his real heroism surfaced during his years in private practice in the Bronx as the neighborhood around him burned. He refused to leave the patients who depended on him even after he was beaten and robbed on numerous occasions. He also showed his valor as both his children died at tragically young ages. And as the wife who he was married to for an eternity passed away. He was the guy who taught me all the right values. He was such a great character and had so strong an effect on me that no day goes by that I don't think about him. Thanks, Grandpa.

Sorry to post this so late, but there's still today.

-Mark

The Island of Social Media

I just read a great story on MSNBC about the power of social media.

Tourism Queensland, an Australian state's tourism bureau, invited entrants to submit videos explaining why they should be chosen as the caretaker of an island on the Great Barrier Reef.

The winner of "The Best Job in the World" is to spend six months exploring the reef and report on the experience via blogs, a photo diary, video updates and interviews.

As if that's not enough, he also gets about $110,000 in salary.

Nearly 35,000 video entries were received and news of the event was amplified throughout the blogosphere.

And while the number of entries was impressive, consider this: Tourism Queensland calculates that the $1.7 million it spent on the campaign translated to about $110 million in global publicity.

"This is probably the first time that a campaign has achieved this sort of reach with so little advertising spend other than a few strategically placed job ads around the world," said Australian marketing analyst Tim Burrowes, editor of media and marketing Web site Mumbrella.

"This has all been about the power of people passing things on, largely through YouTube. The main lesson to be learned here is that if you have an original, exciting idea that gets people talking you don't need to spend huge on advertising."

The winner of the contest is Ben Southall, of Britain (shown in the photo above).

But the real winner may be the allure of social media.

-Mark

Loch Woebegone

Last summer, while vacationing by a Scottish loch, I felt a deep sense of unease as I watched the British reality show, “Who Do You Think You Are?” This was not only because I feared that yet another horrifying UK reality show was about to jump the Atlantic. It was because this particular episode touched a nerve.

It was about being part of an industry upon which the “sun is setting”.

The show traced the demise of one family’s fortune to a single economic event: the sunset of the hand-made walking stick industry, thanks to the advent of the machine-made version. Working in a traditional advertising agency, this really affected me, as I had been seeing more and more of my clients leaving for digital and other specialized agencies. As a life-long change agent, this was the first time it hit me that change doesn’t always lead to better circumstances.

My memory of the Scottish loch came flooding back as I read a recent Vanity Fair article about the uncertain future of the New York Times. A key tenet in the article is that the company’s failure to fully embrace the digital world, combined with some bad investment decisions, led to its current financial downfall.

The author, Mark Bowden, contends that although the Times has developed one of the most successful news sites, the site is emblematic of the company’s less effective “bolt-on” strategy for the Internet. He feels the Times merely produced a “digital edition of the product” rather than creating something that fully leveraged the new capabilities of the Internet. True innovators, he argues, fully “exploit the technology of a new platform.”

Bolting-on also implies that the new technology is cordoned off, its mind-altering impact unavailable to the larger organization. As Marshall McLuhan said, “media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.”

I stumbled upon this quote in an Atlantic Monthly article by Nicola Carr, entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The article cites a number of examples of our brain’s malleability –from the development of different circuitry resulting from the study of Chinese to the change in Nietzsche’s writing style as his failing eyesight caused him to switch from pen to typewriter. The segregation in this case deprives the larger organization of the opportunity to learn how to think digitally.

Which brings me back to my moment of panic by the loch. I was reminded of all the traditional agencies that had employed this “bolt-on” strategy with digital rather than fundamentally changing what they thought and produced. They simply continued doing what they had always done – with TV and print executions as the centerpiece, but with a few widgets and micro-sites tacked on the side.

Since Mark and I formed Extrovertic, I can’t say that there haven’t been any panic-stricken moments. There are always those nagging questions: Will social media and other non-traditional solutions ever really occupy a central role in consumer health care communications? Sure, clients (and signed POs) are starting to accumulate, but never as fast or for as much as we had hoped. But at least we know that it's no more comfortable on the traditional side. So why not take a walk on the wild side? Using a machine-made walking stick, of course!

Let us know what you think. Have you seen a traditional agency truly transition successfully to the digital age? Have you seen a digital agency branch out to occupy a brand stewardship role?

-Dorothy

When Is Social Media No Longer Social Media?

We had a great discussion yesterday with a prospective client who raised a few interesting questions:

If social media is all about authenticity and transparency, can a campaign have a promotional component to it?

Can it be augmented with other media or must it rely strictly on existing peer to peer channels?

Or are these things anathema to the very notion of social media?

I know through my experience in direct marketing that there are those who are almost Taliban-like in their insistence that a creative idea only gets in the way of the offer. That there simply is no room for creativity in D.M. (To put it gently, I am not a fan of this approach.)

Might there be a similar philosophical disparity when it comes to the purity of social media?

Curious to hear your thoughts.

-Mark

When the Extra Cheese Isn't Cheese

By now you've probably heard about those two fun-loving Dominos workers who filmed themselves playfully putting cheese up a nostril or two before adding it to a sandwich, using a dishwashing sponge where the sun don't shine and generally just having a good ol' time with various bodily orifices, fluids and gasses as they prepared one tasty meal after another for their valued customers. Then, as if to bring new meaning to the term "viral video", they brilliantly posted their doings for all to see on YouTube.

Well, it wasn't long before a few viewers contacted Dominos, who quickly responded by firing the workers, pressing charges against them (tampering with food is a felony), and putting out a response video.

And where did Dominos post its video? On YouTube, of course. It put the good news right where the bad news was discovered. Then it quickly got the word out on Twitter, where negative sentiment was spreading like wildfire.

There's a lesson to be learned here and Dominos sets a great example: Companies today need to pay close attention to how they are being portrayed on social media sites. Not only will this help them to respond quickly as Dominos did when their brand is demeaned or maligned, but it'll give them a way to really understand how their consumer base feels about them.

In this case, it was learned that most customers don't want anything extra on their pizza.

-Mark

The Earth’s Plates Weren't All I Felt Shifting

Last week, I took my family on a vacation in Italy. We were asleep in our hotel in Rome when the earthquake struck in Abruzzo.

While the area of the worst destruction was about 60 miles away, the force of the quake was enough to wake us at 3:30 am. Once our room stopped shaking (which seemed a lot longer than the 30 seconds it actually lasted), my first impulse was to turn on the TV. There was nothing about it yet on the news. My next impulse was to grab my BlackBerry and check search.twitter.com

I entered “earthquake” and “Rome” and lo and behold there already were dozens of Tweets, mostly of the “Did you just feel that?” variety. But by the time the story hit the web and TV, it had already started coming together through the Tweets.

With Twitter, we can now report and read about news in real time.

The change is seismic.

-Mark