Category: Marketing

BRTC is winding down on the East Coast as a lot of folks pack off to bed. Overall, the results of the campaign were good, especially for a first effort of its class. Could they have been better? Absolutely. Could they have been worse? Absolutely. Here’s some thoughts and initial lessons learned.

First, I would have liked to have had more transparency from the beginning. As I say often, transparency is the currency of trust. While Black Lab was a fine choice for the campaign, I would have liked to have seen more community involvement from the beginning in the selection of the band. However, that’s what I get for coming late to the party. That said, Black Lab was a good choice, and the band was certainly more than generous in their scholarship fund commitment.

Lesson: transparency pays off. The more transparent you are upfront, the less suspicion can be cast.

Second, I have the distinct sensation that podcasting is still inside of an echo chamber of sorts. When you look at the traffic stats from BRTC, you can see that there was a massive push at 9 AM ET, peaking at 10 AM ET, and then declining throughout the day. I had thought there’d be a second spike after work, when people got home, but traffic remained on the decline throughout the day. We got a lot of people to make a great push initially, but we tapped out our reach relatively early on. That tells me that we did a great job of reaching our audience, but our audience may be ourselves – the movement didn’t exhibit any exponential characteristics, as you’d normally see from a chain reaction of word of mouth. I think we would have been more successful by also sharing techniques for building audience.

Lesson: allot more lead time for a campaign like this and share more tools with the community for growing the reach of individual podcaster audiences prior to the campaign. Make the campaign benefit everyone who participates.

Third, time shifting can work against us for a small window. Podcasting and blogging are founded on RSS and the ability to consume content when you, the audience member, wants to consume it, not on the schedule of the content creator. While this is a good thing, it also makes coordinating the reaction of an audience much more difficult in a short period of time. Podcasts and blogs lack the immediacy of email, IM, and Twitter.

Lesson: build a mailing list early and emphasize it throughout the campaign to deliver better results on the day, OR expand the window of time in which action can be taken from a day to a week to better allow people to act on their schedule.

Fourth, we did not anticipate the strength of the global market. BRTC performed the best in countries that frankly, we didn’t expect it to. Looking at the initial returns, BRTC outperformed expectations in the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany, dominating the charts in those countries. It’s all too easy to forget that the Internet truly is global, and our reach might not be as great as we would like right now, but no one can deny its ability to cross borders.

Lesson: plan for the international community to participate and encourage them to do so.

Fifth, I think we had too many incongruent messages. There were essentially three main messages of BRTC – “stick it to the man/RIAA/record labels”, “raise money for charity”, and “show the power of new media”. While I think we did a decent job of tying them all together, in the beginning it was fragmented, and that may have hurt initial acceptance and uptake of the campaign.

Lesson: plan campaigns from the outset. Define a message or even multiple, congruent messages, but agree on what needs to be communicated.

Sixth, one of the things that I think hurt uptake in the more conservative parts of the country was the edgier aspect of the campaign. While the song was quite pleasant, the album art was decidedly not family friendly, and some of the initial language on the Bum Rush the Charts blog was also unquestionably not family friendly and not work safe. Also, the initial message of “kicking old media where it hurts” (albeit in much less friendly language) may have restricted traditional media coverage of the event.

Lesson: to ensure maximum audience participation, plan for family friendly/safe for work from the outset. No need to dive full-on into political correctness, but at least strive to reach the broadest audience possible, old and new media alike.

Now, after reading this, you’re probably thinking, wow, Chris, you must have thought Bum Rush the Charts was a complete failure, a complete disaster. Not so, not so at all. In fact, I think for an effort like this, it was a fantastic success. Consider this. How much does a record label spend to get a new single on the charts in one country? How much would it cost to launch a worldwide campaign to do the same? New media may not have achieved as much reach as I would have liked, but there’s no question that the campaign “moved the needle” and achieved very impressive results across the world.

More importantly, the campaign raised some money. While I’ve said before that you can’t shop your way to a better world, this was clearly a case of piggybacking for a greater good. Mark Nemcoff and Mike Yusi were going to run with Bum Rush the Charts (they are the founders) no matter what, and the fact that they were generous enough to let me piggyback on their event to raise some money for college scholarships speaks volumes to their characters. Even if only one person bought the track, that’d be 45 cents that someone wouldn’t need to take out of their own pockets to pay for college, and for that, whoever we draw for the scholarship will owe a debt of gratitude to Mark and Mike.

Finally, look at the incredible amount of press about the event despite an effective budget of 800 (for two press releases) plus the time and labor of those involved. Worldwide top 100 charts in Rock? Worldwide top 100 charts overall in select countries? For800 plus labor? You can’t beat that return on investment. No, Bum Rush the Charts was a great first experiment to test the reach of new media, and with the lessons learned from our first collective efforts, it’s only going to get better from here on out.

Thank you to everyone who joined in.

After more than a month of intensive work, preparation, marketing, and craziness, Bum Rush the Charts is here. You know what you have to do.

John Wall and I did the second beta test episode of Marketing Over Coffee this morning at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Natick. Today’s topic was Bum Rush the Charts, and I thought I’d blog a little about the marketing efforts going on behind the scenes, plus some thoughts so far.

First, a huge thank you to everyone who’s participating. That’s awesome. That said, I’ve found so far that audio promos in podcasts are great for building awareness, but you need at least a month’s time ahead of a word of mouth campaign, because podcasting by nature is time-shifted. It’s a lousy medium for getting a message out in force in a small window of time.

Behind the scenes, Bum Rush the Charts has had the help of a bunch of different tools. We’ve issued two press releases, one through Black Lab and one through the Student Loan Network. We’ve also been using several distribution email lists. Despite the fact that email is pre Web-1.0, it’s still a major player, at least for this campaign; the bulletins we’ve published via email to folks have had very good open rates.

We’ve leveraged Feedburner not only for feed management, but also for site statistics. As we’ve seen in the past, Digg and Reddit bring in a lot of traffic, but the quality of traffic is relatively low – few people sign up for the email notices or subscribe to the RSS feed out of the thousands who stop by.

MySpace has been a major player in the campaign, at least for touching base with bloggers and podcasters. Every time I log into the BRTC profile, there’s betweeen 20 and 50 people requesting friendship, leaving comments, etc.

Most importantly, we’ve gotten a LOT of buy-in from fellow new media professionals, and even buy-in from more traditional media outlets, which is pretty incredible. The CBC, BBC, San Jose Mercury News, and even Billboard Magazine have picked up BRTC from various sources and leads, and have been promoting it as well. The real power of this campaign is that it’s brought together people from all the different groups in podcasting and new media.

Time will tell whether we can convert buzz into buy, conversation into conversion. I sincerely hope we can. Hopefully this time next week I’ll be writing more about how Bum Rush the Charts was a successful campaign and that we’re sending a bunch of kids to college for free.

At last count this evening, MySpace is about to overtake, in terms of “population” the nation of Pakistan. Now, some would argue that the raw number of MySpace profiles is not an accurate count of how many people actually use the service, but I’d argue that population census surveys aren’t all that accurate anyway – how do you account for the homeless and the illegal immigrant population in any given country?

At 163,740,888, MySpace, if it were a nation, will shortly be the world’s 6th largest population. Oops, 163,743,337. I just hit refresh in my browser.

With this many people on MySpace – even if only 1/3 of them are active users – social networking sites are a force to be reckoned with and a marketer’s dream or nightmare, depending on how you approach the services.

So, how do you approach MySpace? Here’s my thinking on the topic, which is admittedly influenced by a very tasty margarita. MySpace is a hub, in the sense that on the information superhighway, there are certain intersections that a large number of people pass through on the way to their final destinations. MySpace is one of them, like a city that springs up at the intersection of two major highways. Having a place to call home on MySpace establishes at least a token residence in that neighborhood, from which you can plant a sign in your front yard advertising your presence. This is the most basic use of MySpace, and vitally important at least as a defensive measure to prevent someone else from living at MySpace.com/YourNameHere.

Second, MySpace is a bridge. There are a lot of people on MySpace, including people who you might not get access to in your daily interactions offline or online. Some progressive CEOs have MySpace pages, as well as other top executives and leading edge marketing professionals. You might not necessarily reach, say, the CEO of Twist Image (a leading Canadian marketing firm) via conventional channels, but you might find him on MySpace or Facebook. MySpace can bridge the gaps set up in normal social interactions to people who are interesting.

More importantly, MySpace allows you to infiltrate the social space of people who have dissimilar social spheres from you. If you’re in marketing, this is critically important, because it allows you access to your audience, and your audience may well not be your peer group. Most of us tend to have friends that are relatively close in age, social class, income, etc. It’s just the nature of life that our friends tend to be people somewhat similar to ourselves. This is changing as the world becomes more digitally connected, but for now, it’s largely true. That means that if you want to understand what your customers in a different generation or area are thinking about, MySpace can give you access to them, to talk to them, to ask questions, and most important of all, to listen.

Listening and gathering information is the key to MySpace. Make friends with your customers and their friends, subscribe to their blogs and listen carefully to what’s on their minds. Through this, you can gain insights into their behaviors that under normal circumstances would be impossible. There’s a phrase – the perils of introspection – which Malcolm Gladwell talks about from time to time, in which the very act of asking the question skews the result. If you don’t have to ask the question at all – if you just have to listen, then you can get unadulterated answers.

Time to wrap up this blog post with this number: 163,776,951

36,000+ profiles since I started writing two hours ago. Are you listening?

I had an interesting experience on my way to PodCamp Toronto that I recorded as audio, but unfortunately, the quality of the audio was less than ideal, so I’m turning it into text. When I first entered Canada (thanks to the folks sitting at the table next to us at dinner for clarifying what Canada was, a former Dominion and now a federal constitutional monarchy – the US is a federal republic), I saw some brands that I completely did not recognize.

What was interesting though, was that other brands that I was familiar with conferred information about the unfamiliar brands. On the drive to Toronto, I first encountered a sign for Tim Hortons almost as soon as I entered the country. I had no idea what Tim Hortons was at all. However, what helped immediately was that it was next to a Wendy’s and McDonald’s logo on the road sign. That instantly communicated that Tim Hortons was a food source of some kind.

In this case, known brands established the function of another brand. While they didn’t necessarily convey any information about the quality of Tim Hortons, it told me enough to know what general function Tim Hortons played.

In another instance, driving along the QEW, I saw a store called Chapters. It was somewhat apparent that Chapters was a bookstore of some kind, but what really made it obvious was the positioning of a Starbucks coffeeshop in the corner of the Chapters. In this case, architecture and design of another brand indicated to me what the main brand was all about, much more so than the name or logo. Christopher Alexander, author of The Timeless Way of Building, calls this a pattern language of architecture – how we use a space defines the space. How bookstores use coffeeshops not only define the coffeeshops, but also define the bookstores.

The most interesting thing to me as a marketer, driving into Canada, was that purely Canadian brands had exactly zero brand equity with me, being an American who doesn’t get out much. As a result, I was being exposed to their brands for the first time, and I took note of what their brands conveyed and how quickly I “got it” with regard to their brands.

In an environment where brands have no equity, no mindshare, functionality is king – the brand name itself has to provide useful information so that I know what it does. On the top of the obvious charts: ScotiaBank (extra props for sponsoring PodCamp), Bank of Montreal, Maple Leaf Foods, Rogers Communications. On the list of brands whose names conveyed no useful information: Leon’s, Tim Hortons, Aviva, Country Style, and Domtar.

If you’re not a brand equity leader, or if you’re the leader with only a certain segment of the population, make sure your brand name conveys useful information in and of itself. Edvisors, Inc. is not as helpful as Student Loan Network or Financial Aid Podcast. Tim Hortons doesn’t say as much as Dunkin Donuts, but says about as much as Starbucks. If you’re in a niche market and looking to expand, think about what your brand says to someone with whom it has no equity – do they know enough to at least inquire about you if they need services in your vertical?

Audio, one of my Twitter friends, pointed out that my Twitter profile for work, financialaidpodcast, is #3 on Google for the term “financialaidpodcast”. This makes total sense – Twitter is perfect Google ambrosia – rapid, fresh, original content, the kind of food that Googlebots relish.

This, then, is something of a red alert – with Twitter being the belle of the ball at SXSW and its popularity skyrocketing, if you don’t make defensive moves to protect your brands by securing Twitter namespaces, you may suddenly find someone else Twittering using your brand name. While you could get lawyers involved as a countermeasure, that’s a heartache you can avoid right now by securing the remainder of your brand names and identities that are important to you on Twitter.

Photo by PowerbookTrance, Creative Commons license.

Mitch Joel asked the Twitterati the following question:

Interviewing Jackie Huba from Citizen Marketers in an hour – any questions for her?

Here’s some of what streamed in:

1. How do you make evangelists out of a one-and-done product/service, where there is zero potential for return customers?
2. Insights for developing predictive analysis of who is upcoming mover/shaker in a given vertical? Who should you talk to today?
3. Outside of pure luck is there any way to get a successful word of mouth campaign going in a very short period of time?
4. Strategies and ideas for dealing with competitors evangelists? (Particularly when they’re paid shills)
5. What tactics increase probability of word of mouth campaign going nuclear in a good way?
6. What’s her formula for analyzing value of new media online? What metrics/benchmarks for success in branding?
7. Your worst nightmare has come true – company’s all over the headlines for xyz scandal. What’s your grassroots strategy?
8. What things can you do to encourage social media to blog/podcast/etc write about your product/service/event?

What are YOUR answers to these questions about citizen marketing/grassroots marketing?

HBR Ideacast had a fascinating little gem in a recent episode – a twist on Malcolm Gladwell’s connectors (from the Tipping Point). Their version – that unless you have the amplifying power of a network, like Oprah, an idea may not necessarily take off like wildfire unless conditions are ripe for it.

The analogy given was a spark in a forest. A spark is much more likely to start a forest fire if conditions are right – drought, high winds, etc. – than under normal or wet conditions. Furthermore, you don’t have to be anyone special to be the one that starts the spark as long as conditions are right for a fire.

If you’re in a forest that is unfavorable for fire, then you need to have more than a spark – you need to have a blowtorch and a few gallons of gasoline. The Ideacast folks made a passing reference to Oprah and her media empire, but what if your media empire is your network, your personal reach? If you have a large, large network that is automatically more favorable to the spread of your idea (because they know you) then the spark you create is more likely to catch and spread than a random network or no network at all.

Networks are power amplifiers. Your voice can be amplified through your network, made stronger, louder, more clear with the help of others. This is why collaboration is so vital, and why things like bickering and petty politics inside the new media community are so absurd. Our voices together are far louder than any one of us apart. Even the rockstars in our community have comparatively little reach compared to someone like Oprah, who has a much larger audience and farther reach. Together, we could probably match her, but even in little cliques, we’re far from that kind of power.

This is also why the philosophy of “give to get” works so well in social media. You have favorable conditions in the form of your network, but in order to accelerate a campaign, the fire itself has to be intensely hot so that it catches quickly and spreads quickly. This, to me, comes in the form of value. If what you have to share with your network is of value, it will spread faster than something that is purely self-serving.

As a marketer, can you make your offering so value-rich that everyone who touches it gains value? This makes me think of network effects and fax machines again. What can you create of value that not only is something that is worth sharing, but as it is shared, it increases the value of what you have? The 2000 blogger project comes to mind – every time you pass it on, you provide value to someone else, but you also get great value as it’s passed on, because it generates continuing inbound links and Technorati buzz.

This is where I think projects like LinkedIn LION networks really shine – as you build your network, you add value to others’ networks, and vice versa.

Today’s puzzle: how the heck to do this with student loan consolidation. What can we do here that can make the value of an individual consolidation more valuable?

Viral marketing and word of mouth marketing are not the same thing. They are not interchangeable, and it’s getting kind of old seeing various media outlets and even job postings getting them mixed up. This is my interpretation of the two.

Word of mouth marketing is simply referral and recommendation. If I like a product or service, I’ll tell someone about it, or possibly a bunch of someones about it, and if it’s really good, they’ll pass it along as well. Word of mouth is one of the very best sales and marketing tools, since the credibility of the product or service is tied to the credibility of the speaker.

Viral marketing is a marketing message that is self-replicating – hence its comparison to a virus. An example is when a service like Hotmail, Yahoo, Blackberry, or any of the free providers adds a “Get your account at xxx”. Every message, every contact point contains a call to action designed to enhance the spread of the message – regardless of whether the speaker endorses the message or not. You may use Yahoo mail, but you may not necessarily endorse it or recommend it to friends. Nonetheless, when you use it, you are automatically transmitting the virus to others.

Viral must sound more hip and more cool to marketers than word of mouth, but when you step back and look at it, viral is non-consentual. Whether or not you endorse the message, it’s embedded in your communications. Word of mouth is by far more powerful because endorsement is implicit in the message transmission.

Also, last I checked, viral things generally involved stuff like colds, flu, sexually transmitted diseases, and hard drive crashes involving non-recoverable data. These are not things that I as a marketer want associated with my product or service. “Get a student loan, it’s just like the clap!” No thanks.

Word of mouth.

Word.