Influential Marketing Blog

Untangling Your Brand: 4 Marketing Lessons From Lost

Last night was the season finale of the TV show Lost - and just in case you haven't watched it and have it sitting on DVR waiting for you, don't worry ... there are no spoilers in this post. Actually, though I'm an enthusiast of the show, the reason for this post isn't to gush about how great I think it is. It is about what you learn from how the show has been promoted. Like many recent dramas, it is not an easy show to follow. It isn't about nothing, and you can't just miss a few episodes and still get into it. Yet as I wrote about in PNI (search for "Lost" with the Search Inside feature on Amazon - it is Page 108) - the show's unique format of taking you into the backstory of each characters builds an emotional investment from the viewer in a way that many other shows never manage to do. You believe in the characters because you know about the situations that make them the way that they are.

There is a marketing lesson in that, as there is in several other choices the show's producers and marketing teams have made. Here are a few things that the show does and the marketing lesson that you can learn from them:

1. Share the backstory. As I mentioned above, giving viewers a look at where the characters come from gives each of them a sense purpose and allows you to feel more empathy towards them. As any good screenwriter knows, the point isn't for you to love every character - it's for you to feel something towards them. Once you do that, you're engaged in the show. Marketing Lesson: Make sure you share the story behind your brand so you can give people a reason to believe in it.
2. Untangle the complexity. One of the smartest things the show does is they feature a simplified 3-5 minute version of every episode untangled (see video below in this post). These descriptions are from the outside looking into the show, referring to a character who wears too much eye makeup as "eyeliner" and poking fun generally at the actors in the show and the way they portray their roles. Alongside this irreverance, Lost Untangled explains the plotline of every episode in a way that allows you to understand it despite the complexity of time shifting, multiple characters and hidden clues. Marketing Lesson: If you have something complicated to sell, get creative about how you can simplify it.
3. React to your critics. Early in the show, the creators were criticized because they got people emotionally invested in the core characters of the show, and then introduced new characters and shifted the focus. Many viewers were confused because the characters they knew had essentially vanished. Though this was presumably part of the broader story arc, the producers recognized that viewers needed some connection to the characters they already loved, and found a way to bring that back - while still progressing their story and introducing the new characters they had planned to. Marketing Lesson: Don't ignore your critics, but don't change your strategy because of them either.
4. Have a finite ending. As the trailers after last night's finale noted, next year will be the final season of Lost. For a top rated show, it cannot have been an easy decision to let the show end at what seems to be the height of its popularity - yet having a finite end is important for both audiences and for the writers of the show. Everyone knows that the show is leading toward something. There is a sense of anticipation and excitement, as well as urgency to watch. It's not a soap opera where people go into comas, die, wake up and go on again. Marketing Lesson: Having an ending is important - even if it's just a campaign that ends so you can start a new one.

TED And The Power Of Unlocking Your Archive

This week the annual gathering of pioneering minds called the TED (the Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference is taking place in Long Beach, California. In its 25th year, the conference has been steadily building a huge online following since their decision in 2004 to offer public downloadable videos of these talks to the rest of the world through a program they called TEDTalks. At that moment, what had previously been sessions talking about thoughts to change the world behind closed doors became something anyone in the world could be part of. This alone is significant, but the way in which they decided to release this content demonstrates something that many marketers tend to forget about ... the power of their own archive.

Your archive is all the content that you already have in one form or another that has either been published or remains on some hard drive somewhere. It's easy to think of this content as old and to forget about it. Yet if you look at the TED site, you'll see two dates against each video - one is the date it was recorded and the other is the date it was published publically. Sometimes there are years between those two dates. Here are a few ways that TED makes their archive work for them and how you could too:

1. Create evergreen content. The most important element to this planned archiving is to avoid dating your content as much as possible. So don't film it in front of a big sign for an event that says "2004" and choose topics that may be relevant beyond  the next few weeks or months.
2. Enable browsing as well as searching. When you have a great archive, chances are people will stay a while to interact with it. As a result, it's important not just to let them find exactly what they want through search, but also to make it friendly to those just browsing around. Instead of just subject categories or listings by date, TED also takes the smart step of letting you reorder their archive by videos rated by other users to be funniest or most beautiful. The result is that you're likely to spend more time with their content.
3. Make your archive portable. One of the fastest growing ways that people can experience the TED content is not through their site at all, but through downloadable videos that you can get from iTunes and put onto your iPod or mobile device. Each piece of content is self contained and is supported by a relatively unobtrusive advertising message added to the end of the video. It remains one of the most popular Podcast programs on iTunes.
4. Give people a sense of exclusivity. The conference itself is the epitome of exclusivity (though they are very clear to point out that it's not "elitist" and that all kinds of people have a fair shot to attend). Not only do you have to apply to be accepted to participate, once you are you will need to pay $6000 for the privilege of attending. Of course, people do it because of the quality of the event and the others who are participating (those ranging from rock stars like Bono to world leaders like Bill Clinton, to authors like Malcolm Gladwell). You may not be able to afford a spot, but the perception that you can at least be part of the event by watching or downloading the videos after the event.

Finally, one thing I'm particularly excited about this year is that TED will have a live Twitter feed and more ways to experience the event as it happens beyond just the archive. I'm thinking about putting in my application for the 2010 event already ...

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?

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.

Addictomatic Offers The Ultimate Ego Search

If you're among the social media initiated, chances are you are Googling yourself more than once a day. In fact, you probably have Google alerts set up with your own name to notify you (and your ego) whenever anyone mentions you. It's ok, you can admit it. As many of us build our digital profiles and publish content online, seeing who else is talking about us has become more than a voyeuristic thrill ... there is a personal ROI that is rapidly emerging, and it relates to your personal brand.  I have lots of thoughts about personal branding, including something that I'm planning to share very soon which will hopefully be quite useful for any of you trying to build your personal brand.

In the meantime, you might want to check out a site called Addictomatic that I was just referred to by Dave at Rollyo - a site from several years ago that offered the then-unique ability to "roll your own search engine" based on offering search within a selected subset of sites that you could create. Addictomatic is a relatively simple meta search that returns results on a set query from multiple online services. It essentially pulls lots of services through widgets together on the same page - and is not a technically difficult solution ... but I like the way they have positioned it as sort of the super charged personal search. If you want to see what the real buzz is about you, visit the site and type in your name to see who's talking about you on Twitter, videos and photos tagged with your name, who's bookmarked your content on del.icio.us and lots more.  It's ultimate ego search for the ultimate egomaniacs ... bloggers.

Example search for "rohit bhargava":

Blog Marketing Skill #1: Master the Ego

Blogs are all about ego.  Anyone who disagrees is just kidding themselves.  Of course, ego is a word that comes with all sorts of connotations.  Many people assume it is bad.  To a degree, marketing has always been about ego, because it is a necessary element of each of your personalities.  However, here is the biggest flawed assumption about ego: having an ego is not the same thing as being egotistical.  Ego, in itself, is not bad - it's natural.  The reason I am reminded of this fact now is that Guy Kawasaki recently launched a site called Alltop.com that has been generating some great (and heated) conversation online.  The site is essentially a simplified aggregation of blogs categorized in a several different categories including fashion, green, celebrities, and "ego" among many others. 

The conversation basically breaks into three points of view:

1. This is nothing new and is available through other tools like Netvibes or PopUrls
2. This fosters the kind of A-lister vs. other bloggers rhetoric that Guy himself has railed against
3. Offense at being included in the group provocatively titled "Egos"

Personally, I think the site offers one of the simplest UI models that you can have, whether is just took a day to build or is more complicated than that.  I wish our Blogfeeds http://blogfeeds.ogilvypr.com (a similar concept to Alltop) were built on an interface like this.  But obviously there are probably other solutions out there to accomplish this as well.  Which really brings me to the title of this post ... blog marketing skill #1.  Whether you are a blogger or do outreach to bloggers, you will rapidly have to learn that ego is all important.  I would argue that many of the most commonly cited blog outreach campaigns where products were offered, such as the Microsoft Laptop Giveaway or the Nikon D80 program as two case studies were mainly criticized negatively by those who had bruised egos from not being included.

What Guy knows about blog ego is that having one of his categories for the site titled in this way is sure to stand out and get people's reactions.  Along the way, his site (which may very well be only slightly different from other competitive sites in terms of functionality) gets a lot more attention, conversation and traffic.  Since the site's launch, Guy has also been actively commenting on posts, and inviting bloggers to share their thoughts (full disclosure, he also sent me a note - but I had this post half written over the weekend anyway).  All of this adds up to what anyone would have to consider a successful launch into the blogosphere of a new service.  He has used his reputation to build a buzz, got some top "egos" writing about the site and created just enough controversy to make the site memorable.  Don't let ego get in the way of letting you see the obvious marketing lesson here.

Influential Marketing Blog Featured in Wall Street Journal

Many of you may have already caught this yesterday, but this blog was cited in the Recommended Reading  section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article by Keith Huang.  As Jay Berkowitz from Ten Golden Rules shares on his team blog, my blog was one of 60 resources that they recommended to the journalist as part of their reading list and was selected from that list as a recommended resource for companies looking to "optimize their online presence."  Here's the writeup:

Influential Marketing Blog, rohitbhargava.typepad.com
Rohit Bhargava's blog is intellectual and educational. In a recent post, he discusses the art of stamp collection and how, even today, many smaller countries use stamps as a key marketing tool. He writes, 'Next time you pass a post office in any country, pay attention to how they are using their philately to promote the country, cater to tourists, or commemorate moments of significance.'

It is a great media hit and to be selected from a list of what I am guessing were 60 stellar resources is flattering.  I'm in awe at being included among the other bloggers and authors mentioned in the article - including Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Chris Anderson, Joseph Jaffe, and Danny Sullivan. Thanks to Jay for including me in this great list, and to Keith for selecting to include my blog!

8 Unique Reasons People Like Twitter (And Why Microblogging Matters)

On the surface, capturing what you are doing on daily, hourly or even minutely (double meaning intended) basis seems like a useless activity.  Who has the time to send these incessant "tweets" all day long?  As it turns out, lots of smart folks with respectable jobs, but that's besides the point.  Driven by Mark Simon's dismissal of Twitter and my hectic travel schedule of 5 cities in 5 days last week, I decided to give Twitter a real test run and become an active user of my dormant account I created several months ago but never really used.  This post is a compilation of the lessons I learned about Twitter and an inside look at the appeal of microblogging and why smart marketers should pay attention to this trend and some ideas for the possibilities it offers. 

1. Broadcast Yourself For Real. This may be YouTube's tagline, but it really applies more to Twitter.  As you start sending these messages to update what you are doing right now and gain "followers" - you start to feel like you are broadcasting yourself.  When you're Twittering, you're on the grid and sharing your thoughts and actions real time.
2. Replace Invasive Instant Messaging. I don't use instant messaging at work, because it is interruptive.  Even when you set your status, you'll often get instant messages that are hard to ignore.  Twitter has the same qualities of instant messaging, without the interruptive qualities.  As a result, it lets you send quick short instant messages to people that they can view and answer when they have a moment.  I found myself quickly using direct tweets the way I might use instant messaging to ask a quick question to one of my contacts.
3. Build An Entourage Quickly.  With the easy import feature from Gmail and the relatively low barrier for following someone, I was up to more than 70 contacts in my Twitter account within 5 minutes of starting to use the site.  Not bad for a quick payoff, considering how long it would take to build a friends list of that many people for a new user of any other social network like Facebook or Linkedin.  Even better, the vast majority of people who you follow will start following you right away.
4. Get Satisfaction by Venting. Throughout the week last week I found myself occasionally annoyed at a stupid ad or a flight delay.  I would never "waste" a blog post on these topics most of the time, but found myself twittering them with great satisfaction.  Somehow, just sharing the negative experience of having to walk all the way to the last gate in the B terminal at O'hare made me feel better about it.
5. Always Find Out What's New.  With Twitter, I knew right away when Matt posted a photo of the guys from our panel at Promo Live, and when Gordon Moore finished his chat at IDF.  The running commentary of the latest news from my contacts was actually really useful and somewhat addictive.  Longer term, at the very least I'll be sending a Twitter update every time I publish a new blog post.
6. Fills A Gap Left By Blogging. Now that I have gained a few thousand consistent readers, I find myself considering more carefully what I write about.  The people who subscribe to this blog invest their time and expect to find something of use ... and there are often times when I abandon a topic because I don't have a strong point of view about it.  My blog has never been about pointing out things out there without some commentary.  Yet sometimes there is something that is interesting which I would just like to share a link on, but not necessarily write about.  Twitter is the perfect way to share those links and a quick thought without spending a whole blog post on it.
7. Highly Useful for Live Blogging. There are several events in the past few months that I have had the chance to attend and live blog.  For most, my live blogging consisted of taking notes during sessions, coming up with a point of view and posting a blog post on it.  This is what I did at the CCR event, and the Ogilvy Verge event.  At Intel's IDF and Promo Live, I tried using Twitter for live blogging instead and found it to be really useful because you can get your thoughts out much more quickly, you can really do it real time, and it forces you to focus on capturing the really key points.  I'll be Twittering many of my other upcoming events now as well.
8. Facilitate Meetups.  When I was heading to a media event after the first day of IDF, I was looking for bloggers to invite to the event.  Luckily Karl from ExperienceCurve spotted me on Twitter and suggested we meet up.  This is one of the earliest benefits that I realized some time ago about Twitter, but it was really nice to see it in action.  Imagine this blown out beyond cities to destinations and you can really visualize the potential power of Twitter.

So what does this all add up to?  For me, Twitter is a compelling platform that can easily become addictive once you start to use it ... a quality that many great sites share.  The marketing opportunity here is super simple:

1. Start following people that care about what you do
2. Respond to their messages where appropriate to start dialogue
3. Send consistent and substantial updates of your own
4. Use Twitter as a platform to inform your followers of news they might care about

Today the end of my week long experiment, I'll be continuing to use Twitter and I'd suggest you give it a go as well.  Now I need to go and send an update to my group letting them know this post is live ...

5 Web2.0 Sites That Don't Forget About Usability

Several years ago I wrote a two hundred page thesis for a Masters program all about user interfaces.  The premise was that simplicity and usability were guiding principles to making any online site successful (seems obvious, I know, but it didn't use to be).  Since the late nineties, the importance of usability had slowly been getting more and more important.  If the beginning of the web was about presence (look, we have a website!) then in the late nineties and early 2000s, the focus shifted to improving that experience and making it more usable and intuitive.  So, here we are in 2007 and the new buzz is Web2.0 and interfaces that are focused on helping people to collaborate with one another and network.  The largest social community online is MySpace - and every month new sites are launched promising the latest and greatest in technology to make your friend circle wider, your life more productive or your blog more popular.  The only problem is, many of these sites are losing focus on the power of having a good and usable interface. 

MySpace is the easiest example of the devolution of user interface quality, but neither Facebook or Second Life offer what anyone could call an easily usable experience (though after using each for enough time, most users likely get over it).  I see new sites every week with basic usability problems such as poor navigation, unclear menu items, confusing design, unreadable text, and extra steps.  So it's easy to wonder if, in the craze of Web2.0, we have lost sight of the importance of a good user interface?  Thankfully, there are a few sites that still have great interfaces, and they seem to be getting recognized for it.  Here are just a few (of the hundreds I have seen) that I would single out as being great examples for anyone out there putting together a site and needing a guide on interfaces that work:

1. 37Signals - The company behind services like Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack, they are probably the ultimate company to watch in terms of creating an amazing interface that makes it easy to work better.  Basecamp is the one site and service that I have recommended to the most people - and one that I am using extensively to coordinate research for my book.  They even have their own book on building successful web applications.
2. Wufoo - I have written about this site before, but it's worth mentioning in this list only because they make something that used to be extremely tough (creating forms for websites) into an easy drag and drop experience.  Wufoo makes forms sexy, and adds good reporting on the backend. 
3. Harvest - As someone who has spent years working in agencies, I am used to timesheets.  No aspect of agency life is as universally hated - but the reason most people despise it is because of the systems companies have in place to track it.  Harvest is an alternative that offers an easy to use interface to track time, and reinvents this hated task into something much easier to do. 
4. Picnik - A relatively new site, Picnik is already getting rave reviews from all kinds of sites, including one of the most influential ... TechCrunch.  The site lets you edit your photos with easy fixes and save the edited versions.  Offering a much simpler interface than Photoshop, the site has lots of little features (like a running tracker telling you the pixel dimensions of your edited image) that make it a pleasure to use for editing photos.
5. Flickr - This is the only site that makes my list of great interfaces which you might call "mainstream" with millions of photos, dedicated users and a growing community.  The site is not only one of the largest photo sharing communities online, it also offers lots of tools like photo clouds and tags to search and organize images.  All that stuff is great, but what makes it really useful is that it can be used by all members of the family - even the non-techie ones.

What each of these sites have in common is an understanding of what their users are trying to do and an interface designed to help them do it.  Web2.0 shouldn't just be about finding new ways for technology to let people collaborate.  It should also mean that we don't forget all the lessons we have learned over the last ten years about how people use the web and the importance of usability.

Live Earth Includes DC, Thanks To The Native Americans

Today might be the largest simultaneous social marketing event ever staged - as Live Earth concerts light up stadium stages on 7.5 stages on 7 continents.  In case you're wondering, the "0.5" stage is right here in DC.  The concert taking place now is at the American Indian Museum after they offered their venue for a "Mother Earth" version of the concert.  Why this venue instead of the preferred larger one on the steps of the Capitol in DC?  Mainly because partisan politics from Republicans who believe global warming is a "hoax" (led by James Inhofe) threatened to keep the DC event from happening and blocked it from taking place in Gore's originally preferred venue.  Regardless, the event is here in DC and I will be heading out to see it live and share photos later tonight.

In the meantime, there are live video streams and information available at http://liveearth.msn.com/ as well as a full schedule of artists and shows.  Despite this live satellite feed - I can't help but wish for more integration of social media so I could share in people's experiences of the shows real time throughout the day.  There is a Live Earth blog, but it is authored by a single individual who is going to the concert in NY and watching the rest online and on TV like the rest of us.  Even the Unofficial Live Earth blog is mostly updated by a single person.  Michael Prospero from the Fast Company Blog is promising to live blog the New York event, and I am sure there are other similar individuals at the other concerts doing the same - but there doesn't seem to be a way to collect this aggregated conversation in a single location, which seems like a big missed opportunity. For a global concert event across 8 cities - one person is never going to be able to share the entire experience of the event in a comprehensive way because they cannot be in more than one (or 2) places at once.  If there was ever a moment where I might actually care to read Twitter updates from lots of people I don't know, this would be it. 

Regardless, watching these events unfold live around the world is addictive and I've been spending much of a day where I intended to work on my book watching the films and concert performances in HD on TV.  The campaign has a very simple call to action and plenty of easy ways for each and every person to make a pledge to "answer the call."  Every social marketing campaign should be so relevant and have such a clear way for anyone participate.  If you haven't seen any of the shows, be sure to visit the Live Earth site today - and stay tuned for a report from the DC event and hopefully some live photos from me later this evening.

Update Rant - Can someone explain to me why the sound and video crew covering the DC event are the only ones that don't seem to understand how to get a good camera shot (without sun flares or blue overtones) or how to get microphones to work where you can actually hear the singers performing?  There's a big step down in quality of the TV broadcast between the DC event and all the other events I have seen so far ...