This week the Mad Men crew got a present just in time for the Christmas episode: Pond's Cold Cream. One of the old characters returned, having just left one of the big agencies in town he showed up at the doorstep of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce holding a chance to win the business of Pond's Cold Cream. In 1964 dollars this was worth about $2 million a year. Not a bad little piece of business.
The story line pits the old-school copywriter, Freddy Rumsen, against Peggy Olson, the young, brash and bright copywriter who also happens to be a woman. While working on the ad the two argue over who should be the spokeswoman for Pond's. Freddy pushes for older actresses, some who have never left Broadway, while Peggy wants someone younger, like Elizabeth Taylor. Freddy also focuses on what Pond's does for your face and how it can help younger women find a husband, while Peggy wants to focus on the act of putting on the cream and how it makes you feel beautiful, not for a man but for yourself.
All very interesting arguments, so how does Pond's look in the cold, harsh reality of 2010? Well, it happens that it more resembles Freddy's vision than Peggy's.
Pond's is a subsidiary of Unilever, so this is a company that knows a thing or two about marketing. They've obviously positioned Pond's at the over-40 crowd. But one of the first thing that I noticed in looking for Pond's Cold Cream was that it's hard to find on Google. When you Google the brand a link to Drugstore.com comes up first, with the "Pond's Institute" the brand's main site, is buried deep in the selection list, though right above the Unilever brand site for the same product line. So the first thing we here at Fresh Ground would do is get a big jar of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and schmear it on the site.
I've also noticed that the forums seemed to be filled with people saying that they love the product, so why not try to capture that a bit? Sure, continue with the "over 40 celebrity" message, but start to incorporate some testimonials. In fact, start soliciting them a little stronger, both through forums and social sites like Facebook. Keep in mind that Facebook has great growth with people over 40, so it's a perfect venue for this kind of targeted demographic.
Message wise I may take things a bit further and look for mother/daughter combinations, or even grandmother/ mother/ daughter. A big part of the brand is that it has a long history, so why not bring that to the people? Actively look for mothers who helped their daughters discover Pond's Cold Cream and ask for their pictures together, either through a Flickr campaign or on Facebook by tagging images with "Pond's Cold Cream." You can drive that action by offering up something like product (free samples), coupons or even a chance to be featured in an ad in a major publication. This would be a great way to combine the social side of things with the tradition outlets that they're already accessing.
Dove, another Unilever brand, did something similar with its Real Beauty campaign, so it's certainly something that worked before and would work again.
All that being said, Dove is a sponsor of Mad Men, so I wonder if featuring Pond's in the script was part of the deal. If so, good move marketing folks at Pond's! Though, judging by the fact that someone started a Twitter account called PondsColdCream that appears to be a Mad Men thing, not belonging to Pond's, I'm going to guess that the folks at Unilever haven't yet figured out social media for this brand.
As social media becomes more and more prevalent in corporate America, I'm seeing three syndromes emerge of what I call "social media saturation." These are the result of repeated exposure and reduced resistance to many virulent strains of social media memes.
One of our many jobs at Fresh Ground is to inoculate you against these terrible afflictions. What are they, exactly?
Fishbowl Syndrome
My dad is a very patient man, and he tried for a very long time to get his ADHD son interested in fishing. I didn't inherit his love for fishing, but I do remember some of the lessons he taught me. One of them was this: "be patient, but if the fish aren't biting, or you're sick of eating the same fish day in and day out, change up." Change your bait, change your location, change your tactic -- change your lake if you have to. If you're like me and dived right in to the social media fishbowl, you'll find after a while that the water gets stale. The tools may change, but the key messages haven't changed since the publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto.
Hear a strange echo in your head? No, it's not from that bender last night -- though I'm sure it didn't help -- it's the strange acoustics you find in the social media fishbowl: the same voices echoing over and over again about this or that. Are you reading the same thing day-in and day-out? While I still do learn from the social media community out there, I'll never innovate, or create anything new, if I limit my content consumption to the 40 or 50 blogs in my RSS reader, or my 50 closest friends on Twitter.
I spoke with a good friend just yesterday evening about what conferences and events we're going to, and though I'm going to make an exception with PodCamp, I'm really starting to move out of the fishbowl. If you find yourself chatting and tweeting at an event more than actually listening and learning, your money or time was not well spent.
Shiny Object Syndrome
Let's face it: we're all a little ADHD in the social media world. We want to stay on the cutting edge, but we end up living a life of distractions. I'm Twitter's biggest fan, and just as much of a Facebook addict as the next guy, and have been found guilty of oversharing on multiple occasions -- but I try my best not to lose sight that if it's not helping me become a become a smarter person or a better businessman, I need to moderate my involvement. It's really tempting to jump on the latest and greatest social media tool simply because it's there. While I recommend reserving your personal and company names on as many services, tools and social networks are you can find, I do not recommend jumping on every social media platform that flies by your window.
My concern is not so much that there is little innovation going on -- quite the opposite in fact, and more will be coming (there's a whole week of events coming in October talking about the future of marketing). My concern is that effective use of new technology requires both dissemination and adoption, and adoption requires more than just an affinity for new technology -- it requires changing how or where you do your work. This is more of a corporate culture / change management / management consulting issue than it is a marketing or technology issue, and that's where so many of us fall short in the talent pool -- the social media world is full of marketing and technology aficionados, but not nearly as many management consultant types. How do you convince companies to change how they work in order to really get the most out of their technology investment?
We're still cutting our teeth on this at Fresh Ground, but we've got some initial successes under our belt -- it helps to be working with really smart companies who know what they don't know.
Talking Head Syndrome
One of the risks of diving head first into technology -- especially social technology -- is "talking head syndrome." My favorite example of this is a company near and dear to my heart: Home Depot. Being the owner of a condo in a very old house means I spend a fair amount of time there. A couple years ago, I found myself at my local Home Depot a day before a major snowstorm looking for shovels, car scrapers and rock salt, figuring they would all be prominently (yet strategically) placed in the store. I could not find any of the three, and tweeted about their need for better merchandising. I was very pleasantly surprised to see a reply back from @HomeDepot. It was a very nice customer touch and my opinion of Home Depot shot up quickly. But my expectations shot up as well.
When the next major storm came a month later, I was disappointed (but not terribly surprised) to find that nothing had changed -- there was no rock salt, no shovels, no car scrapers to be found. I walked away more disappointed than I was the first time around, because Home Depot's great Twitter team is growing expectations that its corporate culture and technology infrastructure simply cannot meet.
This is what "talking head syndrome" is all about -- words, not backed by action. Now they've made some great improvements in customer support since that time, but I suspect that, as an example, their centralized inventory management and supply chain software hasn't been improved to allow local store managers to respond to all the feedback they get from Twitter users about local stores. Hopefully their Twitter team is better able to get the message to their centralized purchasing team now, though. What Home Depot needs to do is change its work culture to embrace social -- no easy feat I know, but it's the only way they're going to truly live up to the expectations that @HomeDepot is setting. Nice words help, but if they're not backed by action, they can end up hurting more than helping.
I'm sure there are other symptoms of social media saturation. What have I missed?
Thanks to event sponsor and, I'm happy to disclose, Fresh Ground client Netezza, members of the Boston Social Media Club were fortunate to be able to enjoy an intimate evening with author and former BusinessWeek Senior Editor Stephen Baker. Steve's most recent book, The Numerati, looks "at how a global math elite is predicting and altering our behavior -- at work, at the mall, and in bed." He was invited to present a keynote at the company's Enzee Universe 2010 User Conference, and was gracious enough to take time out of his schedule to meet with the group and share his thoughts on life, journalism, numbers and the new book, expected out next year. You can listen to his session (just under a half hour) below.
I'm also pleased to announce that we'll have an exclusive interview with Steve for next week's Fresh Ground Podcast. (We did not include this interview in our podcast feed this week -- stay tuned for a great interview with a creative young PR pro in this week's podcast episode.)
Listen Now:
Update 23 June 2010: Tim Allik captured some video of Steve talking specifically about his BusinessWeek experience. You can read Tim's thoughts on the Tech PR Gems blog, and have a look at the video below:
During the Mass TLCSocial Media Summit 2010, David Weinberger pointed out how marketers love the "echo chamber" in which they get to hear lots of positive feedback from people who already love them. The problem with this, he says, is that the echo chamber may satisfy our bosses and clients, thereby making us look good, but it does little to help advance true thinking. He believes we should be encouraging more diverse thought.
David Weinberger as seen on Wikipedia
He's right, of course. Later in the morning Mike Troiano gave a shout-out to the concept of diversity of thought in his listening talk by noting that "listening is the means by which we corrupt our vision with the external reality." That is, we (entrepreneurs) may think we know everything, but when we start listening to the people around us, we realize that we know less and need to think more.
On the surface, Weinberger is right. Diversity of thought and ideas leads often leads to stronger discussions. That is, when it doesn't end with a bunch of guys yelling "You suck!" "No, YOU suck!" Or worse, with one US Senator beating another with a cane.
Generally speaking, informed discourse is the way to go, it's why we have Freedom of the Press. If we had state-run news agencies that providing everything we needed to know, we wouldn't be able to check on our government. Worse, the government would be getting and relaying information only from those with the money to lobby, and no one would be there to shout "this isn't right!" (I'm looking at you BP who told the government experts that cutting the big oil pipe would result in a 20 percent increase in oil, something that the media parroted. Only, today NPR reported that it could, in fact, be much worse.)
In any case, when it comes to diverse thought we have a small problem. Well, a big problem, actually. It's called Google.
Marketers bow before Google as the god of online marketing. Putting out a press release? Run it through a few SEO tools to make sure your keywords line up just right. Reporter writing stories find themselves rewarded based on the number of views their stories achieve, something that plays directly into Google's hands. But rising in the Google rankings means playing to the echo chamber.
Here's how it works. Let's assume that a bunch of people linked to Dave Weinberger's site calling him the smartest guy on the Internet. Eventually you'll be able to search Google for the "smartest guy on the Internet" and find Dave. Pretty cool. But if there is diversity, some may call him the smartest guy, but others may say he's the biggest moron they know. Now Google is a bit confused. Maybe both searches get to him, but more likely another guy becomes the smartest guy on the Internet and Dave loses out.
So if marketers need to get Google to look their way they need the echo chamber. They need those links that portray their company (or their client's company) in a positive light, containing the right links, etc.
Granted, this is a bit of a simplification, but you get the point.
Which raises a pretty important question. While Google opens us up to a wealth of information that has never been available, does it also push us to be less diverse in our thought?
I don't share my information with Facebook and I bet you don't either.
I share my information with my friends, I just happen to use Facebook to do it. It's a distinction that I wonder if Facebook really understands. Today in a conference call, Mark Zuckerberg pointed to Facebook's continued success by noting that people are still members, the mass quitting that so many discussed never truly materialized, though "Quit Day" still lies ahead. "We have seen no meaningful uptick in the number of people who deleted their accounts," he said.
And I doubt it ever will. But what I'm hearing anecdotally is that with each privacy concern, people share LESS on Facebook. The problem for Facebook is that if people put up less information, then I have less of a reason to go there to see what people are doing, and so do you. Think about how you use Facebook. If you're like me you log in, check out the newsfeed and see what's in people's lives. If that newsfeed doesn't interest you, and continues to be uninteresting, then you'll slowly move away. It'll become a place to grab some basic information (birthdays, locations, jobs, etc.) but its true utility will be gone.
I believe that Facebook is measuring the wrong thing. I believe a better metric would be the number of posts per person over time. You would have to examine their activity and create a standard, then measure how each user stacks up against that.
A drop in this usage would be the biggest threat to Facebook; it would be death by a 400 million cuts to the information we put out. If we stop sharing, Facebook stops existing. Not tomorrow, but slowly, over time, until it's that site you used to visit but doesn't have much pull any longer.
Will the privacy controls unveiled today keep people from fleeing? I'm not sure. In conversations with friends, mostly non-techies, their trust in Facebook has been shaken. While a change could help, rebuilding trust will take much longer and include many, many more steps. We all now realize that we're sharing with Facebook as much as with our friends, and that little change will change our behavior.We'll see what impact that action has on Facebook itself
Bill Warner gave a wonderful presentation at the Mass Inno Breakfast on Friday, one that I know a lot of people have seen. But if you haven't, you need to go. Bill begins the talk by pointing out how he founded two companies (Avid Technologies and Wildfire), one from the heart and the other... well... not so much. One (Avid) is still in business. The other (Wildfire) had some financial success for investors, but ultimately shut down without reaching its goal. Both had great technology, but one failed. He then goes on to encourage all of us to work from the heart, not just from the mind.
Often in the social media world you hear people make similar comments, that they should capture their "passion." The concept isn't new, for years people have told me to follow your passion and the money will come.
But most importantly, Bill asked the people in the audience to think about who it is that we're helping and to keep those people in mind as we build our business. It's not an easy exercise, as you don't want to define the people you're helping as a demographic, nor do you want to define them in business terms, but you want to define them as people. You need to tell a story about them.
Let me tell you mine.
I want to help James (identities changed). James works in a retail store and has a passion for what he's selling. He doesn't plan to be there forever, but still, working with stereo products and music is something he cares deeply about. It's why he's there. Still, the owners of the shop think like marketers in that they only want certain people tweeting, blogging, Facebooking, etc. James works on the shop floor, he's not in that management area that has been "blessed" by the owners. But when I go into the shop, I work with James, I like him, he gives me great advice, to me, he is the face of the store.
Despite his relatively low level, James wants the store to succeed. He loves working there, he cares about his work, he has a job satisfaction that goes well beyond money. Still, his bosses don't see it as something that can help them.
My job is to help James and, by default, help his bosses. I believe that people like James are the key to making businesses, all businesses, successful. Helping James is no easy task, of course. A lot of education must go on from the top down and from the bottom up. Companies need to identify the "James" within their employee base. Frankly, they need to look for more James' when they go to hire. They also need to give James the tools and guidance so he can help them grow by bringing his passion to the public.
One person who understands this is Jules Pieri, founder and CEO of the Daily Grommet. She has a wonderful piece on her blog about pitching VCs with feeling. Originally she'd gone in with a by-the-numbers type of presentation, but then one day she said "I want to change the world...."
The VC told her the presentation gave him chills.
That passion comes through in ways that go well beyond VCs. Check out a post by an anthropologist who notes "As you can see from this post, the story of The Daily Grommet resonated with me. Jules and her team appear to be very passionate about and good at what they do, and it feels to me like Jules is ‘following her bliss’, so to speak."
But it's not just Jules, her employees are all out there in the public talking about their passion and lovingly describing the products they're finding.
That's why her site is, and will continue to be, successful.
A few days ago I wrote about change, and how "social media, if done right, is first and foremost an exercise in change management."
I was speaking about changing how businesses operate and communicate, but if you look at PR in a more specific sense, it's about changing minds (and subsequently creating action).
Often, it's not the minds of customers and prospects that good PR practitioners need to start with -- in reality, a good PR practitioner concentrates on changing minds (and processes) inside the organization first. This can be a challenge, but is critical not only to ensure success, but in reality, given where PR is evolving, to make sure that PR practitioners remain relevant as the media landscape continues to shift.
Trying to figure out what all the Facebook fuss is about? Considering signing off of Facebook for the last time yourself? Here's a video roundup of the Facebook fiasco, courtesy of Greater Boston (and featuring our own Chuck Tanowitz):
Chuck I think makes a very good point: "Facebook is a business and it's sitting on a treasure trove of valuable information ... demographic data that the advertising industry has been asking for for generations." As the Australian Broadcast Corporation's Stilgherrian points out:
Facebook's business model is best served by exposing your personal information as widely as possible. To advertisers, so they can target advertising more accurately and pay more for the privilege. To other users, to encourage them to share more as well. To search engines, to bring more traffic to Facebook. To anyone who wants to pay.
I have been a big Hugh MacLeod fan for years, and will often retweet his drawings (you can sign up for his mailing list at gapingvoidgallery.com), but his May 10th piece hit home closely, especially after talking about the importance of change in my recent Marine Week writeup.
It took me years to admit to myself (and my father, a second-generation salesman) that PR is really just another word for sales. And it's taken me some time now to come around to the realization that social media, if done right, is first and foremost an exercise in change management.
More specifically, my job is to help you change the culture of your organization. Here are some slides, derived from my recent session at NewComm Forum, that explore this a little more deeply (sorry for the small font, you can get a bigger version here):
Most companies look at Social Media only as a marketing concept. That makes sense, it touches quite a bit of the marketing function such as driving web traffic, engaging and educating prospects, building sales leads, etc.
Anyone who watches social media trends knows that it's moving deeper into the organizations, everywhere from HR to customer service to finance. Christina Warren at Mashable asks the question "Who owns social media?" (Full disclosure: I'm quoted in the piece) and it's a good question, but it's also a short-term question. She references the November 2009 study by Econsultancy that points out that the majority of social media programs today are owned by the PR and marketing team.
But it shouldn't stay that way. It can't. Because companies need to focus on becoming social organizations, not on producing "media."
At LaunchCamp David Beisel asked a panel of entrepreneurs about their marketing spend. Each said they hadn't spent a dime, but the marketers in the room bristled at the notion. "Of course they spent something," the argument went. "They spent their time and energy." But if you go a layer beyond that you realize that they are social organizations. That is, the media that they produce as part of who they are is their marketing, their marketing is in their social DNA.
This is where Todd and I are taking Fresh Ground. Yes, our background is PR and marketing, and like other social media programs we start there, but we see our role as helping companies transform into social organizations.
We see this as a process that has four distinct phases. Companies today fall at different points along this spectrum, but if you look hard you'll see your own group here.
Phase 1: Authoritarian -- As traditional as you get, this model is a top-down approach with a central voice that pushes out communications. Think of the traditional press-release driven PR and you get the idea. Some people put on a social-media dressing, like a Twitter account that only faces outward, or creating social media releases that still announce the same old stuff, but it's the attitude that defines the phase.
Phase 2: Inclusive -- This is where companies begin to truly walk down the social path. You see them start developing more journalistic-style content and interacting with the social world. In this phase you can start to hear the tone in their blogs posts. The Facebook pages start to interact and speak to the audience while the marketing department starts listening to the Twitter stream.
Phase 3: Collaborative -- Now things get interesting as they move out of marketing and into more customer-facing departments. No longer content to just listen, the marketing department, as well as customer service, HR, tech support, etc., begin answering queries. They are starting conversations and continuing them. Measurement gets put in place, but usually with a marketing-bent.
Phase 4: Social -- The company is now a hub of a community, with everyone taking part. Marketing has now turned its attention as much inward as outward, providing employees, customers, partners and investors with the tools and information they need to interact directly with the community. Companies are now able to take advantage of the army of employees at their disposal, but so are customers. Information that flows in from the community can be put to work helping create new products or offer new services.
How long does it take to move through the phases? Who initiates it? Can every company achieve it? How do you open the lines of communications internally? Those questions are left to be answered, as each organization is different.
Some of it lies in trust. I know small business owners who don't want their employees tweeting or otherwise engaging because the owners worry that they'll lose their best employees. Others feel that marketing must engage because it's "media," despite the fact that the front-line employees engage with customers every day, doesn't it make sense that they engage here? Why doesn't marketing train them and offer the tools they need?
No matter what, this isn't a fast-fix, it's a progression that takes time. Internet time may be quick, but true change happens slowly.
Pond's is a subsidiary of Unilever, so this is a company that knows a thing or two about marketing. They've obviously positioned Pond's at the over-40 crowd. But one of the first thing that I noticed in looking for Pond's Cold Cream was that it's hard to find on Google. When you Google the brand a link to Drugstore.com comes up first, with the "Pond's Institute" the brand's main site, is buried deep in the selection list, though right above the Unilever brand site for the same product line. So the first thing we here at Fresh Ground would do is get a big jar of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and schmear it on the site.
My dad is a very patient man, and he tried for a very long time to get his ADHD son interested in fishing. I didn't inherit his love for fishing, but I do remember some of the lessons he taught me. One of them was this: "be patient, but if the fish aren't biting, or you're sick of eating the same fish day in and day out, change up." Change your bait, change your location, change your tactic -- change your lake if you have to. If you're like me and dived right in to the social media fishbowl, you'll find after a while that the water gets stale. The tools may change, but the key messages haven't changed since the publication of the 
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