How to Blow $100,000 on Word of Mouth Advertising

Do you remember your last vacation?

Whether it was Disney World, Aspen, Paris, New York or wherever, chances are you probably heard a recommendation before you went. That recommendation more than likely came from friends, family or co-workers.  Someone whose opinions you trust.

Do you remember the last time you vacationed somewhere because a politician suggested it to you?

Exactly.

So, you can see the problem in this story – South Carolina taxpayers are funding a trip for German politicians to visit Myrtle Beach this Fall. At a cost of $100,000.

These politicians will then return home, spread the word, and the German tourists will come flocking to the Grand Strand, eager to spend some of their hard-earned Deutsche Marks. Or, at least, that’s the theory.

Now, maybe I’m overly cynical, but try thinking of this in reverse. Imagine one of your state’s senators is given a free trip to somewhere in Germany. Dusseldorf say. He (or she) then comes back with a glowing report about what a wonderful time he had. Would you be booking the next available flight?

I started thinking about this after another blogger, Jacob Morgan, had tweeted (Twittered?) about an upcoming trip to Turkey.  I lived in Turkey for a short time and loved it. Any time anyone mentions going, or thinking about going, I try and convince them that they won’t be disappointed. And no-one in the Turkish government has had to pay me a dime to do this.

This is the kind of advertising that is truly effective. Not paying politicians to say nice things.

So, how could that $100,000 have been better spent?

Well, in 2006 over 17,000 Germans came to South Carolina as their primary destination. If each one of them went home and told their friends about the great time they had had, wouldn’t that have some impact? How about if the SC government spent $100,000 to make it easier for those people to share their stories, videos, photos and so on.

Many tourist destinations are already doing this. For instance, Aviemore in Scotland, a popular skiing resort, already incorporates Flickr streams, Youtube videos, blogs and more on a website aimed at attracting more visitors to the area. New Zealand actively solicits travelers’ blogs for “straight talking thoughts and opinions about our places, people and adventures”.

The most frustrating thing about this waste of money is that it’s so close to being a good idea. Word of mouth works. We all know that. The state government obviously knows it, which is why they want the German politicians to spread the word. But the beauty of word of mouth is that it’s cheap!

Wouldn’t that $100,000 be much better spent creating a central location to gather the experiences of people who are already coming? Of course it would!

Ho Ho Ho, Merry Twitter!

That’s right kids, even Santa has joined Twitter. Follow him at @santaclaus25 and the Mrs. too at @mrsclaus25.

When you check the Web site they list in their Twitter profile, it goes back to WelcometotheNorthPole.com, which appears to mostly be a site of forums where you can discuss everything from elves to reindeer to holiday treats.

I figured when I clicked on the site it would be some kind of money maker. After all, if you had a holiday site, wouldn’t that be a clever way to drive business there? Set up Twitter handles for Santa and Mrs. Claus with updates on what the Jolly Old Elf and his first lady are up to in prep for the holidays? I think so, but no money maker that I can see. Could someone be doing this out of the goodness of their heart?

Here are some of Santa’s “tweets”:

• Shhhh the elves are tucked in and finally sleeping. @mrsclaus25 and I are off to bed.
• Early dinner and then @mrsclaus25 and I will be starting to make lunches for all 932 elves. They want traditional PB&J for the first day.
• Elves back at school tomorrow. They (and @mrsclaus25) are VERY nervous.Please send words of encouragement and we will read them to the elves.

And you can “tweet” Santa and he’ll answer back! Now, I’ve got to go find Rudolph on Twitter. I mean can’t Santa show Rudolph how to type?

(By the way 121 days till Christmas)

What Microsoft and MySpace Have in Common

What’s that got to do with Microsoft? I found myself marveling at my iPhone and thinking, “Wow, if this is so incredible, imagine what it must be like to have an entire computer by these folks.” I mean, I’ve worked on Macs before, but it’s been years, and at the time I didn’t care for it. I remember frustratingly trying to take a disk (remember those ) out of the disk drive, but could not find a way, as there was no release on the drive (OK, Mac users you know you have to eject it on screen, maybe still do). It did not seem intuitive and I am definitely a fan of intuitive/user friendly (thus my allegiance to Facebook).

If the iPhone is anything like a Mac computer, it’s the most &@#* user-friendly piece of equipment I have yet to run across. Brilliant.

Glitches, Tiger & Bugs – Oh My!

To anyone paying attention, it is quite clear that businesses have to be a lot more engaged these days in managing their reputations online.  Yet I’m still amazed at the number of people who have still failed to grasp this fact.

The world has already changed. You have a problem with a company’s customer service, you’re not limited to bad-mouthing them to a couple of friends anymore, you can blog about it, Twitter, put up a rant on YouTube, etc, etc and have your complaint heard by millions. At little or no cost to you at all.

Some people are catching on, and unsurprisingly, those in high-tech industries are quick to adapt. Here’s an example I loved this week, showing with humor how to turn the tide from negative to positive:

A couple of years ago, games maker EA Sports released the 2007 version of the popular Madden Football game. It contained a bug which caused your quarterback to throw the ball backwards. Not a big deal, but pretty funny – one fan’s video has had over 300,000 views on YouTube since he put it up.

Then this week, another game from EA Sports, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 had a similar bug. With a certain shot you could make Tiger walk on water and play the ball from a floating spot. Again, a fan video generated over 250,000 views.

This time though, EA Sports was on the ball (so to speak). They responded with their own video, featuring the real Woods ‘really’ walking on water to play the shot from the game:

At the time of writing, this has had just shy of a million views. In a week. That is an enormous amount of free publicity, and an even better example of how to manage your online reputation.

Googleless

I’m a little late picking up on this, but it seems that Google Minus Google is garnering some major attention.

The site utilizes Google’s own Custom Search Engine, which allows you to tailor your search to specific sites, topics and so on, to remove all the Google-owned sites from the results.

So searches on Google Minus Google will not show any results from YouTube, Blogger, Knol, Orkut and others, removing the potential bias that some are suspecting may be going on behind the scenes.

I wrote previously that I was skeptical that Google would allow Knol pages to rank artificially well, but I may have been too hasty. Much has been made in the search engine community during the last week of some results that are doing exactly that. At the time of writing, for instance, a search for ‘buttermilk pancakes‘ has a Knol page as the top result.

Is that page really the most useful one to be found throughout the whole Internet? Better than all the recipe sites which have been around for years, all the manufacturers, How-To sites and Wiki pages? Perhaps, perhaps not. What is more important, to paraphrase Lord Hewart, is not that Google be impartial, but that that Google is seen to be impartial.

Much has been made of Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ policy. Something which initially helped establish the company as trustworthy and set them apart from the Big Business types at Yahoo and Microsoft has become something of a millstone around their neck. Every controversial move they make now is analyzed to a greater degree than perhaps it would be otherwise, and Google really needs to be careful.

There have been questions raised about Google’s role in shutting certain political Blogger accounts, silencing controversial videos on Youtube and skewing Google News results in China, among other things. All of which Google has answered with seemingly reasonable explanations.

The problem will be when there are so many questions raised about ethics, along with eyebrows raised at the search results, that people will begin to look elsewhere for their search. Google Minus Google is not going to be the answer, but it is a warning sign that Google would do well to heed.

MySpace: Justin Timberlake or Britney Spears?

I was intrigued by a stat I heard on the most recent Brand Bandits podcast, that Facebook had finally overtaken MySpace in May for the number of unique visitors. This surprised me – not because I thought MySpace was dominant, but because I thought Facebook had done that months ago!

These were ComScore numbers being cited, Google Website Trends seems to show that Facebook actually overtook last Fall:

Either way, however, I think most people would agree that MySpace has a serious problem on its hands.

Which brings me to Justin & Britney (bear with me).

Five or six years ago, they were an item.  Both former Mickey Mouse Club members. Both attracting legions of teenage fans. Heavily managed ‘brands’, Britney as a pop star, Timberlake as a member of N*Sync.

You wouldn’t have bet a lot of money on either one becoming respected, or perhaps even still relevant today. And yet…

Britney has had a spectacular, and well publicized fall from grace – breakdowns, divorce, custody battle, drugs, failed comebacks, etc, etc.

Justin Timberlake, amazingly, seems to have re-crafted himself and is something of a 21 Century Renaissance man. A hugely praised stint as host of Saturday Night Live . Cred-building collaborations with top producers like Timbaland and Will.i.am, and well received acting roles in Indie films. Oh, and he hosted the ESPN awards, dated a lot of beautiful women and impressed with his golf skills at the PGA Pro-AM. You get the picture.

So, how does this apply to MySpace?

Well, right now MySpace is Britney and Justin 7 years ago. No-one can predict which path it will take – burn out and fade to irrelevance, or reinvented and loved by everyone.

Despite the beating it may or not be taking, MySpace still attracted 115.7 million unique visitors in May, just a million or so behind Facebook. It is still a big brand name. It has the financial clout of News Corp behind it, and it drives a ton of traffic to Google, Youtube, Flickr and many other of the top sites.

In other words, it’s not dead yet.

How to Save MySpace

Simply, MySpace needs to reinvent itself a la Justin Timberlake:

• Just like N*Sync, MySpace is, or appears to be, aimed at kids. The gaudy, blinking backgrounds and embedded tunes are like a particularly bad Geocities page from 1997. They need to be overhauled, desperately.  Facebook has shown the way that profiles can be made personal with photos, interests and so on, while keeping the headache-inducing extras to a minimum.
• Stop the Spam! I’m sure that a large number of people jumped ship due to the increasing amount of spam that was filling up inboxes. Combating bogus accounts, and only allowing mail from verified people would go a long way to helping.
• Be like Timberlake, focus on what you’re good at! Music, events, live shows, etc. For all it’s growth, Facebook is doing a pretty terrible job of promoting its Fan pages. Can you even find them in the new look? MySpace, on the other hand, is still the best place for new bands to demo songs, grab fans and keep them interested. In the last couple of years singers as diverse as  Lily Allen, The Black Kids and Glasvegas have all picked up record deals after building a fan base on MySpace. Push this – let people promote sports teams, politicians, movies, and other things that people get passionate about.
• Grow up! When your parent organization, News Corp, chooses your main rival to promote their news channel, you have an image problem. Fox News wants to be seen as serious. So they *don’t* want to be seen in the same neighborhood as kids with Scarface backgrounds and blaring music. Take back some control. Be the adult and set limits for the children.

Almost everyone I talk to is rooting for MySpace to fail, as they prefer Facebook. I’d rather that we had two strong competitors in the field, so that we don’t have another Google-like near monopoly. I think there’s room for both Facebook and MySpace…they just need to figure out how to get their sexy back!

MySpace Just Won’t Die

I keep thinking MySpace is on its way out, especially with Facebook overtaking it in unique visitors earlier this year, but good grief, it just won’t go away.

New numbers from comScore show that MySpace had its highest number of unique visitors to date in the month of July: 75.2 million. Come on, people, who’s still going there instead of Facebook? If it’s you, please tell me why. I just don’t understand…

I guess it does look some better since they upgraded the design. I can stand it just a little more, but it’s still no Facebook.

Die, MySpace, die…

Conquering the Web: Lyn Mettler

After successfully starting one company, Lyn Mettler’s entrepreneurial drive prompted her to tackle a second company.

With her public relations firm, Mettler Public Relations, established, Mettler saw the potential for another company in a similar vein, but with an online component.

She wanted to tap into the bevy of technological strategies, such as blogging, micro-blogging and social networking, to boost brand awareness.

“I started recommending these Web tools to clients but got stuck because they didn’t know how to use the tools,” Mettler said.

So in October, she partnered with Bud Di Maggio and Simon Ashton of the SIMS Agency to create Step Ahead Web Strategies. They now are able to take clients from start to finish using Web tools, and they can maintain them if needed.

Mettler personalizes a Web PR plan for each of her clients and includes tools such as blogs, social networking sites, Twitter and podcasts. She emphasizes how clients can strategically use these tools to increase the company’s Web presence.

One of her recent clients was Golf Island, a partnership between the Hilton Head Island Chamber of Commerce and a Hilton Head Island-based association of golf courses. The association wants to bring golf tourism to Hilton Head Island, so Mettler created Facebook and MySpace pages for it and makes sure the content stays fresh. She also ensures continued communication between users and the company.

For example, if someone writes in with a question for a golf pro, Mettler makes sure it gets answered and posted.

“Once people make contact, it’s important to keep up that communication,” she said.

It’s basic public relations: Manage and monitor the company’s reputation and see what customers are saying.

“The wonderful part is that most of this is free, but you have to factor in the value of time,” she said.

Online sites are great, Mettler said, because they’re like “online watercoolers” where you can see what people are saying about your company. And seeing negative feedback can be useful, she said, because companies can address issues if necessary or clarify concerns on their blogs.

Mettler approaches this new online venue for public relations and marketing with a solid background. In 2001, before the advent of Web 2.0 brought even more functionality and integration to the Internet, she earned a certificate in Web design from Purdue University.

It’s a subject she’s taken an interest in, especially relating to her PR world.

“I saw the winds of change coming in,” she said.

To stay current with the ever-changing virtual arena, she immerses herself in these technologies and reads up on the new tools and trends. In realizing that technology is more specialized than ever, and one size does not fit all, she tailors plans for her clients.

For the downtown restaurant Circa 1886, she created video podcasts of the chef cooking dishes and posted them on video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube. As a result, people would come into the restaurant after seeing the video and ask for whatever dish was featured in it.

Mettler has taken her own advice and used social networking to get into The Wall Street Journal.

After she read an article about small businesses using online strategies for marketing, Mettler wanted to let the reporter know what she felt had been left out of the story. Eschewing e-mail as overcrowded, she sent the reporter a message via Facebook introducing herself and pitching her idea about social networking tools as marketing devices. The reporter messaged her back, and Mettler was quoted in the article that followed.

“I practice what I preach,” she said.

8 Gold Medals?! That’s Nothing

I know that we’re all supposed to be more attuned to avoiding hype these days, but I think the folks at Facebook are setting the bar a little too high…

Promoting a Facebook Page

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Wow, it’s not. Facebook has made this a tricky task to accomplish. Geesh, they should offer a class in it.

Because our friends at Facebook have for whatever reason decided to make this more difficult than it should be by 1) burying Pages under the Info tab in the new design 2) not having changes made to Facebook Pages show up in its fans newsfeeds (come on, this is so simple, why can’t you do it, Facebook?), I am offering a 101 class here in how to successfully promote your Facebook Page.

1. If possible, choose someone besides the most visible face of your business be the administrator of the page. Why? Because anytime they do something to the page, it is not associated with their personal profile and only shows up as if the business has made the change. This means it does NOT show up in any newsfeeds. So pick an intern or something to do all the admin stuff.
2. Then, have the person who IS the most visible face of your business be sure they are “friends” with all “fans” of the page and then engage in a lot of activity on the page. That will then show up in their friends’ newsfeeds that they have engaged in activity on the page and hopefully drive them there to comment, post photos, watch videos, read content, etc.
3. Anytime you do something to the page that is halfway interesting, note that in your Facebook status. Again, this shows up in your newsfeed and makes it more likely for people to see it. Try to come up with a compelling question, invite people to submit photos, create a contest or ask them to check out some fascinating new content on the page.
4. Anything you post on the page, post it in your personal profile as well with a comment to check out more on the business’ page.
5. Easiest way: Send an update to the fans of your page. Try to provide them with useful or interesting information, though, and a reason to go to the page (see No. 3 for ideas).
6. Anytime you make a new friend on Facebook and they are remotely related to your business, ask them to be a fan. When they become a fan, it will show up in their friends’ newsfeeds and hopefully, spread virally, encouraging others to do the same.
7. On that same note, nicely, with no pressure, ask clients and colleagues to submit a review of your business if they are so inclined. Again, all the (hopefully) wonderful things they had to say about you shows up in their newsfeed.
8. Include a link to your Facebook page on your Web site, in your email signature, in your email newsletters, in your social media profiles, anywhere you can think of.
9. If all else fails, I guess you can buy an ad on Facebook. I’m not a big fan of paid advertising, but Facebook does allow you to target your ads pretty specifically and I like that they only have no more than two ads per page. If you try it out, let us know how it works for you.

Any other ideas out there? Let’s hear them.

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