Influential Marketing Blog

The Personality Project: Women of Personality

There are generally three kinds of ideas. The most popular two are the ones that you act on right away and those that you never do anything about. Those are the majority. Most of us love the third kind. Those are the ideas that are too big or complex or important to do quickly, but that you simply cannot let die because of how you feel about them. Today I finally launched that kind of idea. Since Personality Not Included came out about a year ago - I have been getting emails from people sharing their experience with the book and how they felt about it's main premise that businesses (like people) need to have a strong and authentic personality.

Soon after the book launched, I noticed that many of these emails were coming from women working in professional roles and those that had started their own businesses. These female entrepreneurs were responding to the message of personality in a way that I didn't expect. So since that moment I started thinking about bringing those voices together. Of course, part of the reason would be to promote my book ... but like most authors the important thing for me was for my idea to find a home and actually help people change their careers or make their business more successful.

So today, you can download a free ebook called "The Personality Project: Women of Personality." It is an extension of a site that I launched some time ago with a similar mission - to get visionary people in many industries to talk about why personality matters. This ebook features 20 business women that I respect and admire who each agreed to share their story as part of the ebook. These include founders and CEOs, best selling authors, popular bloggers and online personalities and even the first woman to ever row solo across the Atlantic Ocean (and she's now making her way across the Pacific).

See the ebook embedded below and click on it to download a free PDF copy:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Books marketing blogs

Once you get a chance to read it, please visit each of the contributors sites and blogs, buy their books and support their efforts. The best thing you can do is to validate their ideas and use their examples to improve your own business and your career. And then let them know they made a difference.

PS - If you mention this ebook on your blog or twitter or facebook or anywhere else online, use the tag #wop (on Twitter) or "WOP" (anywhere else) as this is the one that all the contributors will be watching and responding to.

Savvy Aunties And Your Underappreciated Customers

Every good marketing plan I have ever seen has the same piece of critical information to answer the biggest question of all: who is our target market? This is not about creating useless age demographics to segment an audience by what you think you can measure. It is about painting an idea of who the main person is that you want to reach about your product. Let's say it's a mom of a five year old boy. Once you highlight this main customer, your marketing focuses on how to reach them. That's the traditional model.

What if you could, instead, focus on your most underappreciated customer target? The one that none of your customers are chasing. The one that is open to what you're selling, and would love to hear about it, but no one is focused on telling them. For that same five year old boy, let's assume that person is his favourite aunt. The one he loves to see and idolizes. The one without kids who has plenty of money to spend on him, and loves to see him as well.

Thankfully, there is now a site called Savvy Aunties for all those aunties out there, which offers something to the forgotten demographic of women who love kids and have them in their life, but aren't moms. That's an example of focusing on an underappreciated demographic. Of course, their whole site is about these women ... but it does raise an interesting question for you to consider. Who are your savvy aunties, and are you doing enough to reach them?

Got Controversy? Why Your Brand Needs One Today

A recently released book that I contributed to asked the question with it's subtitle, "why don't they get it?" It's a fitting question today, as brands are often divided into those that understand the power of conversation and those that don't. Slowly, however, brands are adding their names to the ranks of those that get it. Dell and Comcast are often being praised as two shining examples due to their willingness to have a conversation with customers and actively use of social media tools.

There is one fact, however, that is often forgot. Both of those brands first entered into using social media out of necessity. More importantly, they started after major brand controversies. Dell had to reinvent their reputation after Dell Hell, and Comcast had to combat the incredibly damaging Technician Sleeping On The Couch video. Similar to the natural phenomenon of some forests needing fire so they can properly burn and new seeds can be released, evolving brand communications seems sometimes to adhere to a similar pattern.

Here are a few reasons why having a brand controversy may be your company's best hope to reinvent itself and start to embrace social media tools that initially seem new and scary:

1. Forces you to listen fast. Relying on daily or weekly media clips is no longer fast enough in a crisis. This means your team will need to start adopting social media tools to listen faster out of necessity. This skill will remain in the team, causing them to more actively monitor social media in the future.
2. Understand the real power of individual voices. Before seeing a crisis start from a single blogger or an errant tweet, it is difficult to describe the real power that a seemingly small time content creator can have. After a crisis breaks, it becomes easy to explain this point.
3. Demonstrate to managers why social media matters. This may be one of the biggest struggles marketers face, namely convincing their bosses that social media matters enough to dedicate time and budget to it. Having a crisis and using as well as showing the power of the tools offers a tangible example of why it is worth resourcing and budgeting.
4. Identify key influencers. Often in a crisis, the key influencers in a particular category that have the power to influence thousands if not hundreds of thousands will emerge. If marketers are paying attention, they can start to understand where the pockets of influence really are, and how to influence them.

As I write this post, there is another brand that is rapidly confronting its own brand crisis. Motrin released an ad that was immediately denounced by mom bloggers and social media types as offensive. The controversy really started through public reaction on social media and is now growing beyond those confines. I believe that this may well be the greatest opportunity ever to face the marketing team for Motrin. They now have the ear of everyone in their organization and the chance to do what few Over-the-Counter medications would ever have dared to do otherwise ... embrace using social media. The #motrinmoms controversy is a huge chance for the brand to reinvent its communications. The only question is whether they will take advantage of it or not.

7 Ways To Publish A Book For Marketing

I love books. Not just for the power of conveying an idea through a printed form, but also for the emotional significance of actually holding a book in your hands. More and more recently I have been books become a brilliant marketing tool for everyone, from political candidates to technology companies. Along the way, there are several ideas that I have collected for how using a book could be an effective part of a marketing strategy. Here are a few:

1. Explain a complex idea - Some businesses or product lines are based on something complex that is not easily understood. One example of using a book to explain a concept like this was a book Microsoft was handing out earlier this year at CES about their Windows Home Server product. It was called "Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?" and took a kids book approach to explaining why anyone would want a server in their home.
2. Commission an existing author or writer - This can be a great way to build on an existing author's profile and audience by working with him or her to commission a new piece. Hilton Hotels used this strategy as part of their Olympic marketing effort when they commissioned an award-winning kids author named Todd Parr to create a new book for them around their marketing tagline "Be Hospitable." Johnson & Johnson used a similar strategy back in 2002 with Understanding Children, a book they supported the creation of from Richard Saul Wurman (well known author and creator of the TED conference).
3. Partner with a "co-author" - There are two types of situations to use a co-author - the first is if you are actually a team and share similar ideas that you want to publish together. The second is to get someone who will do the actual writing while you help to provide direction and content. This second method is the one usually preferred by politician or famous person when they get a writer to help them create a "tell-all" biography of their lives.
4. Offer a book template - Though in a very different category, the Disease Control Priorities Project has an interesting way of distributing their content in a book form. You can go online, select various chapters from a group of publications and create your own book. The model of offering a template and letting people assemble their own books with your branding/message integrated is one that could work in many other industries.
5. Commemorate an experience - Art galleries use this technique often, creating limited edition books that commemorate their exhibits and the artwork contained in them. They work well because the art is so visual and many of these exhibits can be gatherings of work that will be dispersed after the exhibit and never again brought together - so the book seems very archival and worthwhile.
6. Organize a collaboration - There are some great examples of this technique - from Seth Godin's The Big Moo collaborative book a few years ago, to the Age of Conversation parts 1 and 2 (Disclaimer - I am a contributing author to Part II) which gathered together lots of contributors and invited them to write on a related theme to bring all these pieces together into a book. The resulting publication is often something that has built in marketing support as all the contributors will promote it to their networks.
7. Sponsor a branded printing - This may be the simplest way to use a book for marketing as you are basically using a book that has already been published which aligns to your product or brand in some way and reprinting a branded edition. Pretty much any book ever published can be reprinted in a branded version, usually with a new custom foreword or different cover depending on the number of units purchased.

The Great #080808 Beijing Olympic Twitter Campaign Catches Fire

Anyone who has been to enough events with social media creators knows that it is inevitable that people will find a way to connect and find one another. To a degree, Twitter first caught on from this need a year and a half ago at SXSW in 2007. I have witnessed it over and over, through examples like attendees of four conferences finding one another to share an evening of Korean BBQ in NYC a few months ago, or finding someone to hang out with as you are travelling to a foreign city for business. Social media creators are not just creating content, they are becoming experts at connecting with one another.

So I wasn't surprised to see that the tag 080808 is catching on as a way for all of us in Beijing at the Olympics to find and connect with one another. Started by three Chinese bloggers (Flypig, Webleon and Babechloe) and described on http://tag080808.com/, this campaign is already bringing together not just everyone here in Beijing who is creating social media content, but is also becoming a brilliant way to follow all these live voices of the Games in a real time stream. As the Olympics kicks off tonight, this tag and the resulting conversations on Twitter will accelerate dramatically. For my part, I have already started tagging my content with this and will soon revise my Twitter icon to use the 080808 template created for the campaign (the image below is a compilation of current icons from a post about the campaign on Read Write Web).

In addition, I just sent out a Tweet about a blogger meetup that will be sponsored by Ogilvy and Lenovo where we can try to get some of the many diverse bloggers here in Beijing together for a drink and chat. If you happen to be here, send me a message at @rohitbhargava and let me know if you can make it to The Bookworm in downtown Beijing on Sunday, August 10th at 7pm. And even if you're not in Beijing, you'll want to start using this tag to find the best content and impressions from social media creators here at the Games. This is a case study in the making ...

Official Image from the Tag080808 Site:

4 Unexpected Observations From BlogHer

I spent all last week attending events from two Mashable parties to the PSFK conference. Along the way I had the chance last thursday evening to attend the opening parties for Blogher - the conference dedicated to women bloggers. The first party was co-sponsored by Alltop and Kirtsy and held in Guy Kawasaki's house in the backyard (see all my photos on Flickr). It was a great relatively exclusive affair with just about every top female blogger you can imagine and just a few guys thrown in. I managed to score an invite thanks to the super nice Kirtsy gals (Laura, Gabrielle and Laurie) and the fact that I was giving away some copies of PNI and all the attendees were wearing their own Nametag 2.0s, which technically made me a sponsor. As I spent the evening being vastly outnumbered by women and getting just a taste of the excitement of the Blogher Conference (which I unfortunately missed the rest of due to the fact I had to be in LA the day after).

As I spoke to more and more people at the party, I learned a few things about the blogosphere, blogging and women bloggers that struck me as worth sharing:

1. Woman blogger does NOT equal "mommy blogger." There were quite a few women bloggers who were writing professional content, or hobby related content that clearly wasn't in the category of mommy blogging. Sometimes the easy assumption the many marketers make about Blogher is that it's a network of mom blogs. Actually, there's a lot more to the group than that one category of blogger.
2. The first question at Blogher isn't about what you do. Most of the time, there is a temptation at many social media networking events to focus on what your job is and what you do as a first way to get to know people. At the Blogher parties, people were not introducing themselves in this way. As a result, I got to know much more of the personal stories of people as I met them, like where they live or whether they have kids or what they were excited about from the rest of the weekend. The networking was much deeper as a result.
3. Rockstars were distributed and size didn't matter. At many other social media events, some bloggers are treated like complete rockstars. I have written before about how this feeds a delusion LINK TO OTHER POST that we all need to fight. At Blogher, whether you had a huge blog or a small blog, people were not basing their interactions on your percieved importance. As a result, bloggers of all levels of fame could feel comfortable at the event.
4. There was very little conference fatigue among attendees. Many of the women at Blogher were not on the conference "circuit." They hadn't been to twelve other social media events and were not as cynical as some people who attend too many events and have seen just about everything. The level of excitement was therefore much higher about this conference because for many of the attendees, this may be one of only events of this type and scale that they attend all year.

I've been reading many more real time observations from others who had the chance to attend the entire event, and it has made me completely jealous that I was not able to be there for more of it. I am definitely going to do my best to be part of their next event and if you happen to be a female blogger, I highly recommend that you consider it too. Along with SXSW, Blogher may very well become one of the best events of the year for social media types.

Lenovo Extends The Olympic Experience With 100 Athlete Blogs

For any die-hard Olympic enthusiasts like me, you already know that today is a special day. It's exactly one month from the beginning of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing (on 08/08/08) and media attention is already starting to turn towards these Games in a more frenzied way. For several months now, I have been part of the team here in Ogilvy's 360 Digital Influence group working on what I believe will be one of the most unique Olympic sponsorships of the coming games. Of course, I'm biased since I work on the campaign, but yesterday we started to spread the word about a new campaign that I have mentioned already once before on this blog.

The campaign is called The Voices of the Olympic Games and over the past several months we have recruited 100 athletes from more than 25 countries and more than 30 sports to all blog about their experiences leading up to the games. Our campaign strategy, in a sentence is:

Use Lenovo products to power athletes sharing their real experiences leading up to and during the Olympic Games directly with fans around the world.

There are several reasons why I'm really excited about this campaign. The most obvious is that as part of it, I will be heading to Beijing to offer a live voice - something I can't wait to do. More than that, however, the scale of this project and bringing this many real voices together from so many different cultures and sports is a much needed view of the Games that will be unique in its lack of melodrama.  None of our blog posts will be set to sappy overture-style music, and the stories we have are all an unfiltered view directly from the athletes that are competing. 

Along with our site aggregating all these voices at http://summergames.lenovo.com, we are also going to be using a live Twitter feed (@lenovo2008), Flickr, del.ici.ous, and there is a Facebook application created in partnership with Citizen Sports that has already topped 60,000 downloads. I'll be blogging lots more about the Olympics, but for now please check out our site and let me know what you think. We've got another month to put the finishing touches on it before Opening Ceremonies!

Campaign Mentions & Buzz (leave a comment if you'd like to be added to this list):

• Kevin Dugan: http://prblog.typepad.com/strategic_public_relation/2008/07/social-media-br.html
• Adrants: http://www.adrants.com/2008/07/ogilvy-er-lenovo-blogs-and-tweets.php
• MarketingVox: http://www.marketingvox.com/39699-039699/
• Kyle Flaherty: http://www.engageinpr.com/2008/07/08/olympics-and-social-media/

Don't Be A Password Nazi: Rethinking Your Approach To Passwords

How many sites are you currently registered for? Unless you are particularly organized with all your sites, usernames and passwords in one place - chances are there are probably too many to count. Among those dozens or hundreds of sites, there are a select few that you access everyday and the rest fall into your own long tail of sites you have registered for but only log into infrequently. Over the last several weeks, I have found myself resetting passwords, sending reminders and guessing my own passwords for some of those sites that I don't access that often. Along the way, I started to think about some password setting best practices that I wish sites would adopt. What if there was a best practice for setting and requiring passwords that didn't make life harder for users?  Here are a few ideas that could be part of it:

1. Let users choose an appropriate level of security. I understand that to access your online banking, you need to have a really secure password. The problem is that many sites take a one size fits all approach to passwords. Do we really need the same security to log in to read my subscription of the NY Times? Of course not. More sites need to consider how secure their site really needs to be, and give users more flexibility to choose any kind of password instead of doing things like requiring capital letters, numbers or changes every 3 months.
2. Use password hints instead of just resetting. Many times, a user will know their password, they just need a hint in order to get it. For this reason, password hints can be very effective, because they are immediate and let a user get their password without submitting a form, waiting for an email, clicking a link and going through a long process to access your site.
3. Share your syntax rules. I have one type of password I use if a site requires me to use a capital letter. I have another if a site tells me I need to do that along with a number. Sometimes, if I knew the syntax rules that a particular site used, that would be enough of a prompt for me to "remember" my password and get into the site. The most frustrating thing as a user is to go through the whole process to reset your password only to realize that you had it correct all the time, you were just forgetting to capitalize a letter.
4. Think outside the "password." One thing that I have always loved about Priceline is after entering my email address on the site, it never asks me for my password. Instead, based on the email, the site asks my response to a personal question that I set when I first registered. As a result, I have never forgotten or had to look up my password for the site. It also makes me FAR more likely to visit that site first and return over and over - because they make it easy for me to login.

NOTE - Before I get lots of comments about how I should save my passwords through the browser so they automatically come up when I visit a site ... I do that, however for sites I access infrequently sometimes these are cleared when I clear cookies or if I'm using a different computer.

Fly Derrie-Air Proves Newspaper Advertising Still Works (Sort Of)

A few weeks ago the Philadelphia Inquirer and a few other local papers in the Philly area launched a very interesting mock advertising campaign for a new airline called "Derrie-Air" which was proposing the revolutionary new business model of charging air passengers based on the combined weight of their luggage and themselves. The site describes what makes Derrie-Air unique: "the magic comes from our one of a kind "Sliding Scale" the more you weigh, the more you'll pay."

We've all been in situations where we could imagine the logic of having a policy like that, but it turns out the campaign was a joke that ordinary consumers could pass along to others, and one from which the newspaper could collect valuable metrics from. The problem with the campaign is that it takes exactly the kind of one sided view the doesn't work anymore. For example, the newspaper ad drove a group of people online from the Philly area, and those people likely emailed the site to friends or blogged about it. Other sites picked up on the campaign and decided to also feature it. I learned about from an email - and found coverage on several advertising and marketing blogs already about it.  If you are reading this now and hadn't heard of the campaign, you just learned about it from a blog.

I am sure the site got great traffic and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the other papers behind it reported these fantastic metrics to advertisers in order to get more of them to buy into the paper. I think real lesson here, however, is that no matter which channel you choose to promote in, they will all be interconnected. For this campaign, newspaper provided the initial surge in traffic, however anything after that would have to be attributed to word of mouth, either online or offline. The irony is that inadvertently, the campaign probably proved how interconnected media really is ... and how clueless some advertisers really are if they believe a pitch that tells them all the visits to this mock site can just be attributed to a few newspaper ads.

10 Easy Ways to Piss Off A Blogger (from SXSW)

At SXSW yesterday, I ran a "core conversation" called 10 Easy Ways to Piss Off a Blogger.  This year at SXSW, these aptly titled "conversations" were a type of speaking slot where there was a round table and the challenge of engaging people in a discussion about a particular topic.  Mine was one close to my heart ... the best way to piss off a blogger.  I had created a Facebook event page before the session to try and build the buzz and going into yesterday I had almost 50 people signed up.  So I figured we'd get about 20 to 25.  After the session, I spoke to one of the participants who said he counted about 70 - so we had a really tough challenge of having a conversation with 70 people.

Learning from some of the feedback that came from a panel on Social Media Metrics that I had participated in a day earlier, my main aim was to make sure everyone walked out of the session with what I had promised them ... the 10 easy ways.  The format of the session was a bit different too - as there was no presentation or powerpoint, and I didn't walk in with the 10 ways.  Instead our aim was to collaborate, discuss and walk out with the ten.  I think we managed to make it to more than ten.  A few folks kindly offered to take some live notes and have posted about the ten, but without further ado ... here are the 10 Easy Ways to Piss Off a Blogger, as defined by a group of super smart and engaged folks who all made it to be part of this conversation:

1. Invite bloggers to participate in something and don't give them a chance to talk about themselves. This was what I opened the session with, followed by letting people around the group introduce their name and their blogs.  A list of people who chose to share their names and blogs is at the end of this post.
2. Pretend to be a "long time reader" when you actually just visited the blog once and read a few posts.
3. Use a blogger's content or identity without giving proper attribution
4. Send irrelevant information that exhibits no understanding of what they care about or fail to personalize it
5. Add them to a PR list and don't let them get off of it
6. Make it hard for them to link to something by hiding your content behind usernames/passwords, giving them uncertain directions or requiring them to take multiple steps
7. Ask for favors as part of your first outreach to them without building a relationship or earning the right to ask them to help you
8. Fail to identify yourself or falsely represent yourself as something or someone you are not.  This includes failing to mention something about your or your employer that is relevant.
9. Set an unreasonable expectation for a blogger and expect things in an unreasonable amount of time ... ie - sending informaiton and expecting them to post within a few hours.  Quick poll of our session showed that for the vast majority of bloggers, it's not their day job.
10. Get the journalism relationship right.  Some bloggers consider themselves journalists and others don't.  It was clear from the participants that this is a tricky subject, as some people also noted after the session. 

I think we actually ended up with more than ten, but these were the main ones.  I'm looking forward to hopefully hearing more thoughts from some of the participants as the SXSW haze settles and they get a chance to get back to their computers.  It's a crazy show ... lookout for a post here tomorrow on what I think has been the most interesting cultural and technological story of the show: the dominant use of Twitter.

Finally, special thanks to Aaron from Longstation and Steve Harbula (Director of Marketing for the Denver Broncoes) who were both kind enough to take live notes and post them almost right away after our session.

============================

Partial List of Participating Bloggers (from a list passed around - we missed many bloggers, so please add your name and thoughts in a comment if you were there and I'll update the post):

• Destin Joy Layne - The Green Fork http://www.eatwellguide.org
• Biray Alsac - Fitness & Technology Blog http://www.befitwithberay.com
• Beth Carls - K-Ized Mindoh! http://mindoh.wordpress.com
• Lindsay Yaw - Body, Mind & Soul http://www.bethree.com
• Sunil Doshi - http://blog.swiftmob.com
• Adam Brohman - http://amediacirc.us
• Brian Buser - http://www.minggl.com
• Daniel Englander - http://www.greentechmedia.com
• Meghan Warby - http://withoutayard.blogspot.com
• Ruth Ward - http://ruthward.wordpress.com | http://www.sxswm.com
• Jonny Goldstein - http://www.jonnygoldstein.com
• Eric Bryn - Real Estate Relativity http://www.realestaterelativity.com
• Heather Barmore - No Pasa Nada http://www.nopasanada.com
• Amy Bills - Bullblog http://www.bulldogsolutions.com/bullblog
• Eloy Zuniga - http://www.eloyz.com
• Aaron Long - http://www.longstation.com
• Greg Swan - Perfect Porridge http://www.perfectporridge.com
• Danielle Kozich - http://danipennsylvania.blogspot.com
• David J. Neff - Futuring and Innovation in Non Profits http://www.fispace.org
• Marjan Jindrich - Consumers Union Blogs http://www.consumersunion.org/blog
• Tara Anderson - http://iquitforlijit.typepad.com/i_quit_for_lijit/
• Eric Berto - http://www.etelos.com/blogs
• Jackie Huba - http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/
• Samantha Warren - http://www.badassideas.com

Also, thanks to Maura Welch, Sanjay Sabrani, Tracy Locke, Liz Link, Shannon McKarney, Gladys Kong, and many other participants who didn't add their names to the list for sharing their perspective as people who interact with bloggers and want to do it better.  We may have focused on ways to piss off bloggers, but clearly there is some great interest and emerging guidelines on how to end up with happier bloggers.  For reference, the guidelines from our 360 Digital Influence team that I mentioned to several of you at the session can be found here: http://blog.ogilvypr.com/?p=244

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