Covering Hot Topics: First Quarter 2007

Last year, we published a recap of our five most popular communication-related posts, based on the frequency and the immediacy of hits after they were posted. Today, we've decided to keep it simple, covering the top five of the first quarter.

Antonella Barba Buzzes Up American Idol

When photos of the presumably modest Catholic University student and American Idol contestant posing in front of the U.S. war memorial in Washington, D.C. surfaced on the Internet, everyone from the cruel and crude to the curious and complimentary surfed the Web to see what was there or perhaps not. For our purposes, Barba proved to be an excellent case study in publicity gone wrong. Although we were among the first to call the pornographic photos phony, Barba's insistence that she could sing despite some obvious inability, landed her a series of offers that suggests she has different talents. Recently, Star Magazine listed her as more foolish in Hollywood than no-talent American Idol Sanjaya Malakar. We know why. Do you?

Link: Barba

Julie Roehm Sues Wal-Mart For Her Behavior

Maybe it's because some people still think Julie Roehm sports some nude photos too or because "anything Wal-Mart" always seems to command attention. Either way, the suit and countersuit, that reveals scores of ethically challenged e-mails, raises dozens of questions related to business behavior in a new world with social media. Workplace privacy, business ethics, and the pitfalls of second-tier executives becoming public figures are all part of the equation. Perhaps we're oversimplifying, but our interest in this case study is about whether it pays to draw continuous attention to your own shortcomings. Roehm would have been better off leaving things alone than attacking a former employer who is tired of hearing her name.

Link: Julie Roehm

Jason Goldberg Can't Shake Bad Habits

Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster, presents the ultimate paradox in social media. In 2006, he used social media to float the rumor of layoffs at his company and everyone from the New York Times to (most recently) Wired Magazine, as reported by Cheezehead, has chastised him for it. Yet, as crazy as it sounds, social media saves him as often as it slays him. So in what has almost become one sequel too many for the story that would not die (much like the Halloween franchise), Goldberg seems to have taken some lessons to heart despite being unable to break bad habits. He has a nasty tendency to hint before taking action as evidenced by the layoffs, his brief 'engagement' of me, and recently, about the fate of much-loved Jason Davis at Recruiting.com, who is allowing his contract to end after Goldberg hinted that changes were in the works (Davis was not fired nor forced to resign). We're adding a post to this living case study tomorrow, hopefully to shed some light on the continuing confusion.

Link: Jobster

Royal Spring Water Dances With Creative Ethics

Although new, Royal Spring Water seems to be gaining traction as another case study to watch. Just a few days ago, we called the company on peddling fear with its anonymous publisher-produced direct mail piece that sold stocks and the end of the world. Hailing water as the new oil, Royal Spring Water seems to be coming under fire for questionable marketing practices, stock valuation, and its product, billed as "structured water." While most of the muck seems buried by a mountain of news releases about anything and everything to demonstrate momentum, we cannot help but to wonder what the future holds for a company headed by former filmmakers.

Link: Royal Spring Water

Blogging ROI Is Real With The Right Measures

We are always a bit discouraged knowing that bad news tends to trump good news in attracting attention (for traditional and social media alike), but one idea surfaced above the clutter this quarter. Although it is only a sliver of a bigger theory we're working on in between servicing our clients, the 5-in-1 tool concept for blogging accomplished its objective: we were hoping executives and communication-related professionals would think of social media as a very versatile tool rather than force cookie-cutter frameworks upon companies. Simply put, appreciating that social media is a tactic and not a strategy, we recommend looking at existing communication challenges and/or opportunities before attempting to apply social media. By doing so, it's easier to establish measurable objectives that can deliver a tangible ROI.

Links: Blogging ROI, Social Media

Those were the top five most read posts for the first quarter 2007. Runners up (no order) included: Julio "Assad" Pino, JetBlue, Social Media Influence, AP Style on Web site, Using The Force.

A special thanks to all those who dropped by, added comments, and continued to help us shape a blog that is hopefully more useful than entertaining, but sometimes entertaining all the same. Thank you very much. Until tomorrow.

Gmailing Funny: Google

With a single mock marketing Web page, Google demonstrates that it understands social media and "smart" publicity better than most. I will not be surprised to see its April 1 Web page content cross over to mainstream news today and tomorrow.

As an April Fool's prank, they introduced Gmail Paper, which allows you to "print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It’s whatever seems reasonable to you." And even better, "the cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations—these are physically impossible in the paper medium."

On the mock marketing page, you can even read a few testimonials, including Kevin S., CEO AdventaStar Inc., who says:
“I've always felt uneasy about the whole internet thing. With the help of Gmail Paper, now I'm taking matters back into my own hands, literally.” Or Bill K., Armchair Futurist, who explains: "It's paper, plain and easy. I sometimes find myself wondering: what will Google think of next? Cardboard?"

The third image says it all. A woman receiving an extremely large Gmail box, apparently filled with printed e-mails. Kudos to Google for a good gag that everyone is talking about. It fits well with their brand, a prank that not everyone could pull off.

There are only two dark clouds on the entire concept. First, it really demonstrates how easy it can be to write typical ad drivel that some companies try to pass off as a real marketing message. And secondly, some people will no doubt complain tomorrow that Gmail Paper isn't real or that the prank isn't funny. I say "polliwogs" to the critics. Three cheers for Google.

Playing Shell Games: Communication Experts

All you need to play a shell game (or Thimblerig according to Wikipedia), is three shells and a pea. Sometimes it is portrayed as gambling, but it is often an illegal confidence trick used to perpetrate fraud.

Now, I am not saying that most people in communication (marketing, advertising, public relations, and related fields) mean to do it (oh, a few of them do), but social media has accidentally unmasked the communication shell game with industry buzz terms and gibberish.

For example, and I cannot be clear enough, social media cannot replace reputation management. Reputation management is a strategy. Social media is a tactic. For the most part, strategies are not measured. Tactics are measured. But the tactical measurement can influence the strategic direction. Confused yet? It gets better when shell gamers get hold of it.

You see, there are plenty of firms who agree that social media is a tactic, but then they try to sell social media "strategies" complete with analytics (the fancy name for Web tracking), saying "never mind the reputation management, because everybody knows reputation management cannot be measured by click-throughs."

Oh gosh. So now it's all about click-throughs? Stop. You're killing me. What about those folks who don't click-through? I see those people all the time who mysteriously find their way to the exact page they want on my blog because those sly little Internet savvy voyeurs don't click ... they re-input the Web address. Darn you. You know who you are (and I'm joking ... come here any way you like).

Or how about those experts who damn traditional media, er, mainstream media, er, MSM, er, whatever, because blogging, er, social media, er, SM, is so powerful that businesses just don't need traditional media anymore. (By the way, they say, did we mention that we are so right about this ... that we're being interviewed by a major print publisher? Egad! I thought you said it didn't matter so why brag!?!)

Or maybe, if you're very lucky, they'll invent a whole new term to explain what other people are already doing, just so they can look like experts. It works like this ... today, I'll call social media, um, a social computing network. Then, when competing firms come knocking, I'll say "Naw, they are no good, I bet they don't even know what the social computing network is." (I don't do that ... as I have said before, I'm happy to speak any variation of English, having already learned if the client wants to call a brochure "chicken soup," then I'm all in for chicken soup. Why split hairs?)

Recently, a self-described student of social media (I love his humility, considering he's more an expert than some experts), Amitai Givertz unmasked one of them on a slide show at Blogversity Blog. At first, it gave him pause.

There's nothing wrong with that. And then, when I hinted that the entire slide was baloney, he was all in to be more specific in what he was thinking. And, not surprisingly, we agreed.

The presentation said things like this (no order):

"Blogging changes the writer’s behaviour more than it changes the readers’ behaviour."

"If your brand is going to blog you need to understand what you want to change about it."

"Social media demand that you trade control for influence."

"Brands only have a role if they can make the conversation more interesting."

"We have to get comfortable with managing the immeasurable."

"Maybe media agnostic would be a better term."

Media agnostic? Remember what I said about inventing terms. Yeah, now you're seeing it.

This is all utter nonsense. Twenty-six slides that smack of a shell game. For instance, if your blog controls your brand and affects your behavior more than than the consumer, you've got real problems.

However, as I pointed out at Blogversity, there is an erroneous assumption that brands can be controlled. It only takes … one tanker spill in Alaska … one tire recall … one bad bunch of spinach … to see how fragile brands can really be.

Givertz goes on to point out some of the flaws in the slide (there are too many to correct in a single post; each slide could be a post in fact). One of my favorite slide rebuts from him reminds us that the brand and its message to communicate and stimulate emotional attachment and identification of the subject with its consumers must somehow correlate with the medium, when in fact, whether the medium is a billboard, blog, or urinal splash-mat ... it is nothing more than a means to an end.

Yep. The medium is the messenger for your brand, but not necessarily the message. Or, in other words, your brand and message should dictate how you use any number of tools at your disposal, including blogs or social media or whatever the term du jour is.

Hey, I'm coming dangerously close to touching on the validity of strategic communication, something I know a lot about. But I don't want to do that today so here is a nutshell version...

Strategic communication is the best method of thinking to align strategies like reputation management, mission statements, corporate values (and whatnot) AND integrate marketing, advertising, and public relations to deliver a core message (not key messages) interwoven in multiple mediums like blogs, ads, direct mail (and whatnot) to change the behavior of consumers, specifically to get them to buy your product as opposed to someone else's product and, at the same time, make them feel good about their purchasing decision so they'll tell other people to do it too.

Wow! That's an awfully long sentence and here is the rub: anything can influence strategic communication at any level, but the control is best preserved by the executive management team with consult from your lead communication expert (provided they know what they are doing).

Ironically and unfortunately, a good number of communication experts know that strategic communication (meaning all communication within an organization) can be influenced by any department or subcategory or tool to such a degree that it places a stranglehold on the entire organization and forces them to move in a direction that does not make sense for the company (Ah ha! That IS what Julie Roehm tried to do to Wal-Mart!). And THAT is also the communication industry's shell game.

No wonder recruiters and executive employers always seem miffed when every interviewee is using terms that are alien. Worse, recruiters and employers become so entrenched in buzz words perpetrated by the last "expert," they begin to perplex the next interviewee with useless questions like how big is your Rolodex. Frankly, it gives the industry a bad name.

Here is the bottom line: If you're a recruiter or executive, don't be fooled by all this nonsense. At the end of the day, there is only one measurement. It's called SALES.

Sales and cost savings are the ultimate ROIs (not to take anything away from market penetration or market dominance). So if your communication is driving sales or at least helping your salespeople make sales — or some new communication tools are saving you money — then your communication is working, provided your company is reaching its full sales potential.

So the next time you meet with a communication expert (marketing, advertising, public relations, social media), ask them what are the quantitative and qualitative (measurable) results of their work. If they cannot tell you, keep your eye on the pea ... 'cause they might start talking about click-throughs and being comfortable with non-measurements.

Using The Force: Social Media

"It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together." — Obi-Wan Kenobi

I'm fully prepared to take a little flack for drawing an analogy between social media and the Force from Star Wars, but the comparison can be as startling as it is humorous. Like the Force, social media has various manifestations with the light side focused on elegance and beauty and the dark side aligned with fear, hatred, aggression, and malevolence.

One side doesn't impose any restrictions on the use of this binding, metaphysical and ubiquitous power. While the other, well, it includes a moral compass. No wonder businesses are reluctant to use what I recently called a 5-in-1 tool because some people are bent on making social media more mysterious than it is with terms like "social computing," "message salience," and "first source analytics."

This thinking serves as a precursor to tomorrow's post on the shell game being played with social media when I'll try to sound more like Qui-Gon Jinn than Yoda who might say "social media is everywhere, and everywhere is social media." Ha! Today, I'm more inclined to address a few heroes and villains in the new world of social media.

There's a smart post from Dina Metha in India pinpointing a very real Sith-minded threat against what I would say might be the least likely blogger to deserve it, Kathy Sierra. This is pretty serious stuff despite my resolve to remain light in this post. What else can you do?

Death threats against people in the public eye or with a public opinion predate blogs by a few million years. Ask any celebrity or politician on the planet and you'll find most of them have more than their fair share of nasties tucked in between the fan mail. It's not right, but it's certainly the price of being a public figure. My sympathies to Sierra; I am hopeful they catch the perpetrators. Indeed, a death threat is NOT protected speech.

In a seemingly unrelated-yet-related story, stands Julie Roehm, who is hoping social media begins to buy into the idea that the evil empire is Wal-Mart. She told the Associated Press in a statement and anyone else who will print it that "...Wal-Mart is insinuating things about my personal life and pretending I violated some code of ethics with advertisers, all to distract from the reality that it didn't want my form of progressive marketing." And then goes on to say: "When you patch together pieces of messages sent at different times, you can create pretty much any story you want."

I'm sorry. For all of Wal-Mart's overspun and supposed "public relations" woes (which is baloney, considering the public seems to shop there with a clear conscience ... giving rise to the notion that Wal-Mart has media relations challenges, not public relations challenges), it's hard to misconstrue "kissy face" e-mails. I write e-mails to people all the time, and don't recall ever needing to mention how I like to look at their face when I'm kissing it, in context or not.

The tie-in here is how some folks like Roehm attempt to manipulate mainstream and social media. Sorry Ms. Roehm, the ethics debacles are your own and I have yet to see any progressive marketing. (Clarification: I have nothing against Ms. Roehm, but I disagree with the concept that you can sue your employer for your own bad behavior.) Still, it's working. Ho hum. Some bloggers are beginning to feel sympathetic toward her (Google: Julie Roehm sympathetic and you'll see). Given many of her supposed professional decisions were obviously for personal gain, how can we really separate the two?

And finally, in what almost became its own post entitled "A Tale Of Two Idols," some folks seem confused as to why Antonella Barba and Alaina Alexander can create such different online images by doing virtually the same thing. In what some might call the school of new social media ethics, it's pretty easy to understand.

Barba, who doesn't sing well (but wants to be a singer without selling sex), presented herself as a good girl but secretly enjoyed bad girl behavior. While Alexander, who can sing pretty well (but is happy to sex it up), presented herself as a borderline bad girl (who burps) who decided to go for it without any remorse on MySpace. The difference is miles apart, but both hoped to sway public opinion by employing traditional and social media directly and indirectly for their own gain. Given the two outcomes, it proves once again that publicity without strategy is fraught with disaster.

The lesson for today, before tomorrow's more business-minded post, is simple enough. Social media (and the publicity that comes with it) is not all that dissimilar from the Force. The big picture is that the social media world, or blogosphere if you prefer, is a collective that binds people together, and is ripe with Sith, Jedi, and everybody in between. There will be those who use it to create wonderful things and those who abuse it for their own agenda, even if that agenda is nothing more than to fulfill their own source of self-loathing by sending death threats.

Really, it's not any different from any community with its heros and villains. It just "feels" different because the community is newer, bigger than ever, and the people, by in large, seem less reluctant to interact with anyone they meet in passing. For those who use the Force for good, you need to know that it takes some resolve, courage (preferably fearlessness), and skill to swim in these waters because the better you swim, the more likely someone will come along to try and sink you.

No wonder executives are unsure of social media. It seems crazy, unless you accept that most often, like anywhere, you create your own experience in the blogosphere just as Roehm, Barba, and Alexander created their own experiences. (I'm excluding Sierra here because I just don't get it beyond the idea the death threats are merely random acts of violence.)

You see, business blogs or any other blog ideas I shared a few days ago do not need to be controversial to be effective. They simply need to be strategic. Oh, and you might want to look for social media Jedi, avoid the social media Sith, and use the Force for good. Just don't fear it because, well, you know, "… fear leads to anger... anger leads to hatred ... hate leads to suffering."

May the Force be with you. Ha!

Spinning Silly: Julie Roehm

The Wall Street Journal has published a statement (for subscribers) from Julie Roehm. Here's the opening of the 520-word story:

"When I look back over the whirlwind of the last 15 months of my life, here's what I see: I left a successful career in Detroit, uprooted my family to move to Arkansas, and took on a demanding job at Wal-Mart as part of its shift in marketing strategy. I threw myself into the job, traveling constantly and working tirelessly to master several components at the same time. ..."

Apparently, Roehm has decided to put on her best spin until the very end. Here's what I see: someone who regrets a whole bunch of choices she made because it didn't work out as expected, despite saying she has no regrets. From this opening line, it is difficult to buy into a message that ties in the very family she recklessly gave up for what she thought was an marketing upgrade.

Wrapping Up Mooninites: TBS

A few days ago, Marianne Paskowski, writing for TVWeek.com, covered the Women in Cable & Telecommunications conference in New York, and shared how Shirley Powell, senior vice president of corporate communications at Turner Broadcasting System, was quite open about Cartoon Network's marketing ploy for Adult Swim that went awry, costing the company $2 million.

Although Powell said there is no crisis management playbook that prepares public relations executives on how to deal with this kind of outcome, there really is. Just not the play book people want. They want multiple choice if A = B then C answers when most communication problems are problem-solving exercises.

Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote about the same problem in science, noting that students were very adept at remembering facts but not so good at thinking new problems through. "I discovered a strange phenomenon," he wrote. "I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask a question—the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell—they couldn't answer at all!"

Simply put, Feynman was writing about memorized bullets vs. applied thinking. Communication is like that today, with lots of people trying to write rules and then forcing those rules to every equation. It's crazy of course, but that has pretty much been the approach to most crisis communication problems in recent months with rare exception.

TBS is one exception because it did a fabulous job for its part, while its vendor, Interference Inc., struggled with the viral outdoor marketing campaign crisis. What's the difference? TBS applied thinking. That's what Powell told the conference attendees when she said "You just jump in" and put out the fire.

I wasn't there, but I'm pretty sure most attendees considered that information useless though Powell was mostly right. There is a play book, but there is not a play book. And the probelm with the play book is that most people use it wrong anyway.

Back in February, for example, Sam Ewen, founder of Interference Inc., finally talked to BRANDWEEK about the subject of the unfortunate Boston bomb scare. Here's an excerpt of Ewen wrapped up a bit too tightly in his message:

BW: Were these devices supposed to look like bombs? Was that your intention all along?

SE: It was certainly never our intention to create something that would scare people. I couldn’t comment on whether they looked like bombs or not. It’s not my training or specialty. I know that they were designed to highlight the show’s character.

BW: Was there any concern in the planning stages that it could be taken out of context? Somebody could see this as a scary threat? If so, did you have any kind of backup plan or any idea . . . just in terms of maybe a brainstorming meeting? Do you have to get permits to do that sort of thing or was it all kind of done on the sly?

SE: The signs were never designed to scare people, to get people into a panic state. They were designed for what they were, which was a showcase, the characters, the flight. That’s as much as I can tell you, anyway.

BW might as well as asked if the signs had something to do with the "cow jumping over the moon." Ewen would have answered the same, he is not an expert on farming or planetary bodies, but the signs were not designed to scare people. We're sorry. And that's that.

Let me briefly interject that this is not a dig on Ewen. He had enough drama about this incident as far as I can tell, and Interference Inc. has often produced some pretty good viral marketing ideas before the the Cartoon Network one-upmanship stunt got away from them.

But as a study in post crisis communication choices, it seems someone gave him a formula to always bridge back to a specific message. What they forgot to tell him is that message management is often a framework for communication and not just a few lines you say over and over again. You may as well not do the interview if you are going to do that.

So what's the answer? Same as it always was: recognize the real issues, identify the crisis team, determine potential impacts, prioritize your publics, synchronize the message, designate and prepare spokespeople, determine message distribution, collect feedback, and adjust.

In such a simple, no-nonsense format, just recognize that this isn't a checkbox exercise. You have to have someone who can think it through rather than someone going through the motions. If I have learned anything over the years about crisis communication, it all comes down to understanding that every crisis is different and requires thought before formula.

It's very rare to have two companies handling the same crisis, especially when one did everything right and the other did everything not so right. The bottom line: Turner applied thinking. The guerilla firm did not. And as a bonus, they proved once again that not all publicity is good publicity. Case closed.