Experience Manifesto

Social Networks + Advertising = Amway

(This was one of my favorite posts and was originally written in January of 2008)

If you weren't a kid in the suburbs, you might not understand my headline, but those of us who grew up in the 70's (yea, I'm that old!) had a friend or neighbor who sold Amway and you know what I'm talking about. But here's a little explanation for those that don't know what I mean.

Amway sold a number of household products that, I understand, could be quite good. But, they didn't sell them in any retail environment, they were sold by people to their friends and neighbors. And the people selling made money two ways:

1. Through the actual sales of products. They got a commission on everything they sold.
2. By recruiting new people to become sales people. If I got you to join, then I also received a very small portion of your sales and, as you recruited people, I got smaller pieces of everything they sold as well.

So, if you sold Amway, you were always trying to sell product and recruit new salespeople so you could make more money. I mean, it was cool and I guess people made good money. But you knew that every time you saw someone who sold Amway, a pitch was nearby.

And everyone knew at least one person who never stopped looking for a sale, You knew that no matter where you saw them they were just waiting for that moment to make a pitch. And you were screwed if you ever gave them an opening, say by complaining about how your favorite shirt was ruined because of a stain or something like that because they would launch into a sales pitch before you could finish what you were saying!

And eventually, you might start to look for reasons not to hang out with the person. I mean, who wants to get sold all the time??? And if they were particularly aggressive, you never wanted to introduce them to more of your friends because you knew they would be relentlessly sold and you would gear all of those complaints.

Which brings us back to advertising and social networks. Advertisers are becoming the Amway of social networking. Always selling to us and always looking for our help in recruiting new people to sell. The pitches can be relentless and, like Amway, although it can sometimes be a great product that I could actually use, eventually I don't want to be your friend anymore just so I can avoid the sales pitch. And I really don't want the embarrassment that comes when you look for my help in selling to my friends.

But, all of the can be avoided by just doing what you do well and letting me come to you. If I saw some friends making lots of money selling Amway, then I'd come looking for you. And I'd be a true evangelist for your product or service. But, if you never shut up and you interrupt every aspect of my social life with you sales pitch, I'll eventually stop hanging with you. Even if you're a good product. It's just not that much fun to be sold all the time.

So while it's probably a good idea to be looking at and engaging social networks, please don't become the annoying Amway salesperson. Give me the chance to figure out how to engage you and let that be a natural process. You'd be surprised at how successful that approach can be.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Movie buffs know that line from the great Paul Newman movie, Cool Hand Luke. Newman, as the title character in the movie, seems to have some problems in the southern prison that he's in. Each time he breaks the rules, the warden says to him "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

I did a lot of walking today, gathering information for some upcoming walking tours and this one of the the quotes floating around my head as I thought about how brands are and should be communicating to their audiences. Another quote in my head all day comes from Herbert Simon in the early 70's:

What does an abundance of information create? A scarcity of attention

The two thoughts suddenly ran together and I began to ask myself if our abundance of information might actually be creating a failure to really communicate.

A few times when I've spoken at a conference, I've opened with a cacophony of sound, building to a crescendo of just noise. And then it all stops. I then describe two futures of advertising. One where we just try to yell louder then everyone else and one we're we're speaking in a direct voice and I ask the audience which one they'd like. Everyone says the 2nd future, but I'd bet most people spend their day working towards the 1st one.

Right now, Twitter's all the rage and I'm there a good deal myself. But I did some quick math and if you follow 5,000 people and each one of those people only sends one tweet/day and it takes you 5 seconds to read each tweet, you're spending 6.9 hours per day just reading them. Right now one of my morning frustrations is trying to catch up on all of the tweets I missed overnight. And I'm following less then 600 people. Can you have any really meaningful conversation with 5 or 10 thousand people?

So first, we have an abundance of information. Then I started to think about the instantaneousness of our communication today. Does the fact that we can communicate immediately mean that we should?

For example, I think I was one of the few people who didn't really think there was a Motrin controversy. And before people say I'm a guy and I just don't understand, I was the house Daddy for Sydney before she went to day care. She spent many hours in her Baby Bjorn strapped to my body. Sydney was 9 pounds, 6 ounces, so at the end of a day of walking around with her, I felt that I totally bonded with her (at almost 8, she's still a snugly kid with me) and my back hurt. I wasn't offended by the ad.

But I was surprised by the incredible frustration that people expressed because they had been talking about this commercial for like 24 hours -- on a Saturday, no less -- and no one from Motrin had responded yet.

Just because we can communicate 24/7, does that mean we have to respond instantly?

As I said at the time, if the complaint was that someone found rat poison or something in a bottle of Motrin, they should've responded immediately and as big as they could. But, people not liking their commercial does not create a life-threatening situation that required a response that quickly.

So if next you have a scarcity of attention, how do you break through? My previous post showed an augmented reality demo being developed at MIT and in that post I asked what happens when people actually can control all of the media that they experience.

Even with all of our talk about two-way communications and relationships and engaging the consumer, we're still frequently using the new tools just to push messages out. Hey, of course I'll tweet this post when it's done.

Most of what we call interactive really isn't. Is watching a video on-line fundamentally different then watching it on TV? Does the fact that it's on-line make it interactive? Is using Twitter for customer service really different then using any other tool for customer service? It's faster and it hits more people, but it's still, good old fashioned hearing & listening to the customer.

A while back, I wrote about a study that showed that companies were very excited about SM because it allowed them to listen to their customers. At the time, I said that's what's wrong with most of our business world, we thought it was a paradigm shift that could listen to our customers!

So we do we do in a world where we have an abundance of information and a scarcity of attention? Create just in time marketing that allows us to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. When I'm shopping for a car, I want all of the car information I can find. Once I've actually bought a car, I don't want any more car information.

I believe that just-in-time marketing creates a huge opportunity, especially for placed-based media (like at retail), that we haven't even begun to explore. This is not just digital networks running content we don't really pay attention to, this is creating ways to give people the information they need to make a purchase decision when they want to and how they want it.

But that takes a lot of work and really, for the most part, I think that too often we don't really think it's worth the effort. We've got to find the balance between the abundance of information and a scarcity of attention. That's why I believe in just-in-time communication. Get people the information when they want and you'll find that people will give you the attention you want.

STUDY: Most Fortune 100 Companies Don't Get Twitter

This story has been making the rounds the past few days and has really gotten the SM folks all a-twitter! Seems that we now have conclusive evidence that corporate America just doesn't get Twitter and I'm sure there will be a great deal of conversation about how to get companies onto Twitter and how to use it successfully.  

Of course, it wasn't but a few years ago that experts were writing lengthy treatises about how companies didn't understand Second Life and if they didn't figure it out soon, they would miss that gold rush.  We all know how that one turned out!

And it's not that I don't support Twitter and what it can do for a company, but I think that once again our industry is getting all caught up in a tactic without thinking through the strategies needed to make these tactics successful.  

Here are some random thoughts about the study:

• SM is all about conversation and relationships.  Do the 14,000 followers of @Twelpforce really have a relationship with Best Buy or, are they like me and they're there in case there's a really good deal or we have a very specific question to ask.
• For all of the discussion about conversations, I once said that conversations on Twitter are much more like solar flares.  They happen, but they are usually pretty short in duration.
• Is it really possible to judge personality?  And what does it mean that they're Twitter feed didn't have enough personality?
• The Dell site they referenced didn't seem to have much of a personality from what I saw, it was mainly pitches for things for sale.  Which, BTW, is not a bad thing.
• While some companies like Best Buy and Dell can do really good things on Twitter, others are not so clear cut.  Still others potentially have too many brands in their stable to use a single, corporate account.  For example, what would the GE account actually be used for and wouldn't it be more effective to have the individual brands have Twitter accounts?  Did the report look at just the main corporation? Some Fortune 500's have division that have very specialized businesses and could use something like Twitter in a much different way.

I think that one of the big problems with how too many people approach SM is that they want to apply a one-size-fits-all approach.  If you don't have thousands of followers and you're not Twittering all day long, you're doing it wrong.  And frankly, that's just wrong.

That's why I've talked about creating authentic experiences for years.  Because what may be authentic for company A would be completely inauthentic for company B.  Because there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach for SM.  Because there's no one-size-fits-all way to have relationships.  But like branded content, Second Life, WOM and every other tactic that we've jumped on in the past couple of years there may not be a right or wrong way to do SM.  And because like the tactics in the past, these tools by themselves aren't necessarily the keys to being successful.

So, we'll see where those all leads in the future and whether or not Twitter joins Friendster as something few people will remember was once discussed as a game changer.

In August we reported that a large number of Fortune 100 companies have embraced Twitter, but how well are they actually using it? A study released today (PDF) by Weber Shandwick says the answer is not very well, and that the majority of Fortune 100 companies don’t really get Twitter. Though 73 of 100 companies had at least one registered Twitter account (up from 54 reported in an unrelated study released in August), the majority of them weren’t using Twitter effectively to engage their followers, weren’t tweeting often, and didn’t display any personality in their tweets, according to the study.

Most Fortune 100 Companies Don't Get Twitter

Dell Outlet (DellOutlet) on Twitter

Are Your Frontline Employees Part of Your SM Strategy?

I've written about this topic in the past, but as more & more companies move to SM and SM strategies, I thought it was worth revisiting.  You can't really read any advertising/brand article today without reading about how important people think social media is.  There are any number of weekly conferences on the importance of SM and how it's changing business as we know it.  Yet, at the same time, it seems that the in-store experience gets worse and worse.

Yesterday, my wife & I went pre-shopping for Christmas.  Yea, I like to pre-shop, one of my quirks.  And it's clear that stores are beefing up their sales staff in anticipation of the shopping season that starts in a few days.  Unfortunately, much of the staff that we encountered didn't seem all that interested in being helpful and even those that tried to help, sadly didn't have the information they needed to be helpful.

I sent out several Tweets yesterday about our exploration of the Sony Reader and how disappointed we were by our experiences.  Our first stop was Best Buy, where we couldn't initially find the display.  The helpful associate in the phone department (we also needed a battery for my wife's old Pebble) and he sent us to the computer department.  But, that's not where the Sony Reader is and the 2 people helping us in the computer section weren't even sure if Best Buy carried any ereaders.  In fact, one of the guys was positive they didn't carry any.  But, we listened to the other person and went over to where he suggested and there was a display of the Sony Reader.  But, one of the readers wasn't working and we tried everything we could to get it restarted.  When we finally went to get another person to help, he told us that the units were locked in a demo mode and there was nothing we could do.

Best Buy is one of those stores that I usually find to be a good example of a retailer in desperate need of e-tailing their retail.  Their web site is full of useful and helpful information.  I use it a lot.  I like the consumer reviews, I like the depth of information.  I find it easy to research products on their site and use it whenever I'm looking for electronics.  But going into their stores is usually painful.  It's easier now to find the right section thanks to the redesign of the store and the new graphics.  

But once you get to the right section, it's really hard in my experience to get any information about the products.  I usually look at the product, then head over to the Apple section, go to the Best Buy web site and then continue my research there.  The first thing Best Buy should do is at least put computers in each section so I don't have to trek across the store to get to the computer section.  But they should also be doing a lot more training.  Then, they should require the staff in each section to review the web site for that section and know what people are saying about the products.  They shouldn't be allowed on the store floor until they can pass a test about their section.

But, I'm not writing a piece about Best Buy, because each of the stores we visited yesterday had the same problem.  An Office Depot where no one knew where anything was, even with one item being a featured item in their circular.  Most places we visited didn't have nearly enough staff to handle the business that they had in the store.

And when the store experience is this bad, it's just easier to shop online.  And then you're spending a lot of money on physical space that you're not using well.

But the major point for me is that if you're putting all of this effort into creating social experience online, why are so few companies even trying to create a social experience in-store?  Some are and doing a great job at it.  

For example, lululemon athletica is a great store where you really feel a part of the community when you're there.  Simple things, like teaching free yoga classes once/week in the store to the chalkboard by the dressing rooms where they encourage notes from consumers about the product that the store shares with the design team to the boards in the store showing the 5 year goals of the employees.  Whenever I've taken a group a group to any lululemon store, I've found a staff that's engaged and very happy to be there.  The same thing is true of the new Hollister flagship store in Soho, although not always true of their more normal mall locations.  And, of course, the Apple stores usually have a great staff that knows their product and always seems to want to be there.  And I was told a story where an employee of a store was going to be out for 4 months and the store management was told to let that person go. They store staff covered this persons schedule for four months so they could keep their job.  That's a team.

For far too many retailers, the frontline staff is treated like a necessary evil. Something they have to do, but wouldn't if they could figure out another way to accomplish their goals. They don't train them well and they don't seem to care if they're there or not.

But in an age of social media, how can companies be spending time, effort and money to create online social media engagements and then spend so little time figuring out how to create a social engagement in the physical stores? After all, each day, thousands of people walk through the doors of their stores, theoretically to spend money and buy their product. Yet, too many store employees act like having us in their to shop is an imposition.

If they want us to keep shopping, stores are going to need to beef up their in-store experiences to match the SM experiences they're creating online.

BTW, an interesting side note about SM folks.  While I hear a lot of discussion about breaking down the silos to make SM successful, I hear very few of them talking about this issue.  It's interesting how they are still creating silos between online & offline.

Facebook | Status

Last night, Chris Brogan asked this question:

Trust Agents What are the first steps for helping a business understand why trust is important to its customers?

And he got a number of comments on the FB page about it with people answering his question and giving advice about how to get businesses to understand that trust is important to its customers. Some very thoughtful comments there and probably some things that could certainly help a company deal with the trust issue.

In March of 2008, I wrote a post called Why Advertising Will Destroy Social Media that was triggered by a study that had been released that used this headline, "Revolutionaries focus more on listening to consumer and bloggers’ points-of-view." Here's a quick little piece from that blog post:

What is amazing to me is that our industry has so lost touch with the consumer that we think listening to the consumer is a revolutionary idea! Engaging the consumer isn't new, companies have been doing that for centuries! Listening to the consumer certainly shouldn't be new. And it sure as hell shouldn't be considered something that's only done by revolutionary companies!

And this question about trust just once again shows me how far off our entire industry has become. Should we really even be having a conversation with a client about why it's important to have the trust of your consumers? As I replied back to Chris, dare i say that any company that doesn't understand the importance of trust shouldn't be in business?

I think it's tragic that companies have become so dysfunctional, so incredibly out of touch with the real world about them, that we feel the need to congratulate them for listening and teach them about trust. Look around at the companies you use. Do you have to teach them about trust? Do you consider it revolutionary when they listen?

And here's where it rubs up against everything that the social media folks stand for. No amount of Twittering, cool iPhone apps, pages on Facebook or any other use of whatever new tools we can come up with can fix a company that people don't trust or that doesn't listen to its customers. These tools can only enhance a company that's doing the right thing to start with. And it will only piss customers off when their fake or misguided use of SM shows how little they actually care about their customers.

If you're not creating compelling, authentic and relevant brand experiences to begin with, SM will only be a short-term fix at best.

via www.facebook.com

Experience Manifesto: Why Advertising Will Destroy Social Media

Disney Draws on Steve Jobs and Apple for Retail Store Makeover - Mac Rumors

I'm behind on posting this, because, I honestly forgot about it. But, it's one of those things that shows you just how much Disney has lost some of it's retail magic. It used to be that Disney was the company that other companies went to for help in creating cool retail experiences. Companies sent employees to Disney University to learn the Disney way and bring it back to teach other people. Now, Disney has to reach out to other companies to create retail magic. Kind of a shame, if you ask me. Of course, I admire what Apple has done at retail, but they've got a real challenge ahead of them.

Now, I worked retail at Disney for a few years out of college.  I was what they called a "cross-u," meaning I worked in retail for the first half of my shift and then headed to a parade (check out Some Lessons from My First Job if you'd like to see what I did and what lessons I learned back then). We were the kings of experience back then and everyone came to us for advice.

The challenge with Disney retail is that the reason people bought so much merchandise is as an artifact of their Disney experience. So, they'll buy a bunch of t-shirts and stuff so that when they get home, they can remember their Disney theme park experience. The problem with the Disney stores is that buying things there aren't part of a total experience. You're not buying a memory.

So, it'll be interesting to see what Jobs & Co come up with for the Disney stores. It's certainly going to be a real challenge and I hope they come up with something that makes the stores work for them.

Disney Draws on Steve Jobs and Apple for Retail Store Makeover - Mac Rumors.

Some Lessons from My First Job

Many years ago, my first job out of college was working on Main Street at Walt Disney World in Orlando. For the first summer, I worked in one of the retail shops on Main Street and learned a whole lot about creating a great guest experience. Later, I became what they called a cross U, meaning that I worked a half-shift in the merchandising group and then I got to head off to the entertainment division and perform for the rest of my shift. My first show there was with the Tencennial Parade, where I was a part of the Main Street Trolley team and we did a routine to The Trolley Song, from Meet Me in St. Louis. It was a hoot, although wearing a three piece, wool suit in Orlando in August for a 30 minute parade while dancin' around was kind of a pain in the ass!

My second parade at Disney was the Main Street Electrical Parade, which used a seriously cool song called Baroque Hoedown as its main theme. Interestingly, They Might Be Giants recorded a version of this song too.

I don't know what made me start down this memory lane, but thanks to youtube, I was able to find video of the parade, although this is the newer version from Disneyland. Since it's someone's home video, there's lots of talking and stuff, but you don't really have to watch the whole thing. Just listen to the first minute or so. The anticipation as the lights dim. The synthesized-voice introduction. The cheers, the clapping. You can't imagine the energy that we would feel as performers when that music started and the audience came to life! It was incredibly powerful.

And although it's been 25 years or so since I did the parade, just hearing that music and the crowd brought all of those feelings back to me again. Sitting on my couch in West Orange, NJ, I felt the energy that I used to feel waiting to go out the gate at step-off. That performers high you get when you know you're about to bring something special to the audience that's been lining up for probably an hour just to see you. That my friends, is the hallmark of a great experience.

So, take a look at the experiences you're delivering right now and ask yourself this. 25 years from now, will one of your employees see something that brings back those memories and feel elated and excited knowing that they were part of it? Or will they be thinking I can't believe I used to do that. What a waste. We spend so much time trying to figure out how to create great experiences for our guests, but many times we don't even think about the employees. And if they're not feeling the elated and excited first, your guests never will!

UPDATE:

Just found this video of the Tencennial Parade, back at Disney World in 1981! I'm on the wrong side of the trolley (I think), but yep, I did this for a full year!

This is not the version I did, but I couldn't find anything from back in the 80's.

Lessons Learned

During my recent venture into politics, I had a great opportunity to see how politics works from the inside and it wasn't already a pretty trip! I wrote When do you Respond & When do you React? from my time of being in a storefront political office and having people come in off the streets to talk about their needs. 

So I've been thinking about political advertising and brand advertising and it's making me ask some questions about the whole process. This isn't about any specific campaign, just what I saw in general working on this one campaign. 

1. I think that the most frustrating thing that I dealt with is that there's seemingly no "truth in advertising" body that makes sure a campaign is telling the truth about themselves or in what they say about their opponents.  If your opponent says you're from Mars, then you have to proof that you're not from Mars.  When a brand says something about a competing brand, there's a process for dealing with that and allowing the truth to come out.  A brand can be fined and be told to take an ad down if it isn't factually correct.  How come we don't have a process like that in political advertising?  Why don't we have a neutral body that can verify claims made by one candidate against another?  Could this group actually make a candidate pull off commercials that don't 
2. The political veterans in our campaign told us that candidates don't put out specific plans before the election so that the opponents can't attack the specifics of any plan. Think of this in terms of brand advertising. Could you imagine if you didn't know what a product did until after you bought it?  You could look at the slick packaging and you could make some educated guesses based on past interactions with the brand, but you wouldn't know what the specific package you were holding would deliver until after you purchased it?
3. And just think about political advertising in general, most if it is pretty negative, more about what's wrong with your opponent then what's good about you.  Again, would be a pretty interesting way of doing brand advertising, wouldn't it.  Could you imagine if brand advertising was built around this level of negativity?  If Coke didn't run ads that told you why you should drink Cokes, but instead told you why Pepsi was bad for you?  If people didn't like our advertising now, imagine how they would feel if it were all as negative as political advertising.
4. In the US, we have a complete (IMHO) over-reliance on the 2 party system.  Here in NJ, the process so favors the 2 parties, that it's even difficult to figure out your placement on the ballots. Chris Daggett, the candidate I worked for, was in a different location in every county.  People here know to look for the 'R' or the 'D' column and they just vote that way.  If you're outside of the system, it's really hard for people to find you.  The question is how to create an "independent" party?  Can you create a system for the people not affiliated with the 2 parties that doesn't create just another party and all of its problems?  It's an interesting question and one I might be working on in the future.

I guess what disappointed me the most was that this is almost how we expect a political campaign to be run these days.  We seem to reward negative campaigns (to a point, to be sure) and since the people running the campaigns know that voters don't really put a lot of thought into voting here in the US, their superficial attacks and statements can be very effective.

I'm looking at whether or not I will continue to work on some aspect of politics in the future, but as I said at the start of my work with the Daggett campaign, everyone should work on one campaign and learn how the system works.  It doesn't matter what your political believe, people should be more involved.  I hope that I can maintain my level of interest in politics going forward and that Sydney, inspired by her work here, will continue to be involved in making the changes we need to make in this country.

And I hope that some people with better thoughts on how politics should be run get involved in the biz. Political advertising should be critically important to us and it shouldn't rest on the level of negativity I saw during this campaign.  It's really much too important to keep running politics this way. 

Stopping the Blob

[Full disclosure, I am part of the staff of the Daggett for Governor campaign. This note was originally sent to NJ101.5.]

Since I've started working on the Daggett campaign, I've begun listening to 101.5 radio almost every day.  Unfortunately, we don't get 101.5 in West Orange, but since our office is in Piscataway, I've had a chance to listen more often.  While listening to Dennis Molloy last week, he was attacking Chris's run for the Governor's office. This is not an unusual approach for Dennis, or really any talk radio program, since the drama of the attack is why people listen.  But he said something almost as an aside, that really is at the heart of the challenges we're facing here in this country.

From my listening, its obvious that you guys are long time proponents of a third party here in NJ and beyond.  In fact, Jim Gearhart and Dennis constantly rail against the system, demanding that all incumbents are voted out of office.  You all speak of "the blob," the party infrastructure that needs to keep feeding itself in order to justify its existence and that both the Republicans & Democrats have been feeding and will continue to feed "the blob."

And the people I've met since I started this campaign are tired of this blob too.  They know that the blob is in it for themselves.  That the blob ceased being by the people, of the people and for the people a long time ago.  In fact, an article in the Wall Street Journal wrote that  "the fastest-growing political group in America is "none of the above."  They go on to say "This is more than an abstract finding. There is an important contest under way that will test how the rising "pox on both your houses" thinking can affect real-life outcomes."

But what Dennis said next, this man who uses his radio show almost every day to rally people against the system and bring about a new, independent third party to help eradicate the blob from politics, is exactly why the blob survives day after day and year after year.  He said:

"This is not the time or race to make this change."

Haven't we used this excuse long enough?  Isn't that really just what the blob wants you to think, that today isn't the right day, month, year to make a change? It'll be do hard if you do it now, the blob says. You should wait until the next election, it'll be easier to change then. And the blob uses its soothing voice to hypnotize us in keeping the status quo.

But there are a lot of people out there who are not hearing that soothing voice any more. The hypnosis is wearing off.  They're seeing that the blob isn't there to help us, it's there to help them.  It's a self-serving, self feeding, eat everything it can, blob.

Behind that soothing voice, many of us can hear the fear.  The fear that we, the people, are coming out of our trance.  The fear that each & every day, we, the people, are beginning to see that they, the blob, don't serve or represent us any more.  Because we could see that no matter which party was in office, Republican or Democrat, they aren't truly working to make things better for us.  Certainly here in NJ, neither party has worked to tackle the serious challenges our state faces.

Today, we must stop listening to the blob telling us it's not the right time. Because, it is the right time.  It is time to make the real changes in our country that are needed.  It is time to tell the two party system that it is now longer working in our best interest.  As Chris has been telling the voters of NJ, "It is never wrong to vote for the right person."

We can no longer afford to be governed by the blob.  It's time to put the blob on ice. Vote for real change in NJ, vote for Chris Daggett.

You can go to GOTV for DAGGETT - Daggett For Governor for additional information about Chris Daggett. As Chris says, "it's never wrong to vote for the right person."