Nestle's Facebook meltdown

Oops. Nestle, or whoever runs their Facebook fan page, stepped on a social media landmine this weekend with this update:

Nestle: To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don't post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic - they will be deleted. Fri at 2:26am

Nestle received 190 complaints within 24 hours on Facebook, and thousands of tweets reaching hundreds of thousands of consumers. You see, the surest way to tick off users of social media is to delete their comments. Yes, by the old standards of 20th century law, brands have a right to protect their intellectual property. But social media comprises fluid networks of users sharing and retweeting and mashing up material. Brands no longer command media channels or the spread of memes; if you want to win, you have to give users room to play.

Here are highlights from how it played out:

Paul Griffin: Not sure you're going to win friends in the social media space with this sort of dogmatic approach. I understand that you're on your back-foot due to various issues not excluding Palm Oil but Social Media is about embracing your market, engaging and having a conversation rather than preaching! Read www.cluetrain.com and rethink! Fri at 2:51am

Nestle: Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it's our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus. Fri at 2:53am

Paul Griffin: Your page, your rules, true, and you just lost a customer, won the battle and lost the war! Happy? Fri at 2:56am

Nestle: Oh please .. it's like we're censoring everything to allow only positive comments. Fri at 2:58am

Darren Smith: Honey you need new PR Fri at 3:20am

Jagos Golubovic: I was a big fan of your products, but now, when I saw what you guys wrote, I think I'm gonna stop buying them. Fri at 3:55am

Helen Constable: I'd like to know if the person writing the comments for Nestle, actually has the backing from Nestle? I doubt it. Even a dumb ass company like them would get such an idiot to be their public voice. Fri at 4:10am

Nestle: I think you missed out the 'not' there, Helen Fri at 4:12am

Hyra Zaka: is a nestle rep running this page????? Fri at 4:39am

Nestle: We welcome debate, @Hyra - from any opinion. It helps us to know what people think and feel. Fri at 4:44am

ymann Lee: WFT !!!! This firm is a ugly creep !! trafficking and now censorship of my personal life. it seems pretty nazi !! Fri at 5:19am

Fernanda Shirakawa: I'm not using your logo... Fri at 5:55am

Fernanda Shirakawa: You deleted my comment anyway... Fri at 5:57am

Damien DeBarra: What a total train wreck. Sorry Nestle, but you really don't seem to get it do you? Social media provides you with an opportunity to engage with your customers - to listen to them, to show that you actually care about ethical issues in business. Sadly it seems you have precisely the opposite attitude and seem determined to be as aggressive, patronising and corporatist as you can. And practically guaranteed that folks will now start shunning your products. Fri at 8:00am

Mark Watts-Jones: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Case study in how not to engage with your customers. We'll await the inevitable apology and climb down. Fri at 11:06am

Nestle: This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologise. And for being rude. We've stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude. Fri at 1:29pm

Bicycle unbranded

So this sharp blogger named Dave Wilkie, who has self-branded as Jetpacks, has always hated those plastic license-plate frames dealers stick on the back of cars cheesily advertising their dealership, so yanks them off, and suddenly realized his beloved bicycle was also covered with logos. Trek. Bontrager. Shimano. Even emblems for the local bike dealer. So he painted over them all.

The resulting image creates a surreal branding negative space. Our reaction, upon seeing the stripped bike photo, was it looked like an unbike. Is it worth anything? Hard to judge. If you're not into cycling components, brand logos help you ascertain whether there is expense here or not. Now we're befuddled. Maybe it's just a bike -- a form of transport from A to B?

Fire and fertility

Which brings up the value of brands anyway. We've written before brands are a helpful mental shortcut in a world filled with too much information; illusory, perhaps, but also a quick scoring mechanism to tell you whether a thing has value. Branding focuses communication and can sway minds. Consider the "estate tax" vs. the "death tax" -- same deal, but when conservatives began calling the former the latter, public opinion tipped away from such an evil thing. Liberals call conservatives they don't like "tea baggers." Conservatives call liberals they don't like members of the "democrat party." Names and icons have power, because our cave ancestors had to make quick decisions to survive, and rather than logically weigh the merits of every choice, they learned to follow brand images. Red = fire = danger = today's stop signs. Green = fertility = happiness = today's go signs. Brands are everywhere.

Jetpacks, we admire your cleanliness, but man, your bike is confusing.

Face time

Technology has a way of surprising us with simplicity. In the 1950s we thought by 2010 humanity would be flying around in rocket cars; instead, we've turned telephones into tiny typewriters. (We're still a bit disappointed, really.) Augmented reality is getting hyperbole today, but one of the best uses of overlaying the Internet on objects may just be recognizing things -- like people.

Darryl Ohrt points us to Recognizr, a mobile app that lets you look up people by snapping photos of their faces. Incredibly useful for business meetings, conferences, or reminding yourself of who that dude is at your high school reunion.

Danah Boyd and social network freakouts

Marketers are hungry to mine new social-network data: not just what you say, but whom you're saying it with. There's a homophily concept, you see, that birds of a feather buy together. A classic 2004 study by AT&T Labs Research found that people who chat frequently on the telephone are three to five times more likely to respond to the same marketing pitch. Twitter today has 75.2 million monthly users, and while 93% of them have sent fewer than 100 tweets, that leaves a population of about 5 million frequently updating their likes about brands, products and services, with visible connections.

Danah Boyd, in her SXSW keynote address, pointed out a nuance in networks, though, that should warn marketers to be careful before they toss offers based on sheer data. The concept goes like this: Imagine you know X people in the world and interact with all of them in some manner. Your behavioral network is everyone you touch somehow, which could be observed from the outside. Yet within this you may have a smaller group that you say you know -- by pinning their names inside Microsoft Outlook, or Facebook, or your cell phone contacts -- which is your articulated network. And within this, there is an even smaller group who are your personal network -- family, true friends, or perhaps enemies, the intimates who touch your inner mind. These are not mutually exclusive categories; an intimate friend may not be someone you log in to an address book; but you treat them as three discrete concepts in your head.

Google's Buzzworthy failure

Buzz was an attempt by Google to build a new social network; to scale it rapidly, Google decided to tie the on ramp to its Gmail. Gmail users who opened their web mail in February were greeted with a message touting how Buzz would share updates with their friends easily! Trouble was, the default setting in Google Buzz was public disclosure of the names of your Gmail contacts you communicate with most frequently. Want to catch a whiff of a competitor's business development strategy? Hook in with Buzz and see who they're emailing. Users could disable the feature, but it was complicated, an opt-out, and made some worry they might cancel their entire Gmail account by doing so.

Danah summed up Google's mistake:

"Google collapsed behavioral and articulated social networks and presented them in a way that indicated that they might be one's personal network. And for many users, this wasn't quite right. You may talk to your ex-husband frequently via email, but that doesn't mean that you want to follow him on Buzz."


Metcalfe wants more

Technology companies are doing such things not to be evil, but to build networks with more utility that can be monetized at greater value in the future. It's no mistake Facebook removed privacy settings by default in December, opening your updates to everyone (with the option to go back); the greater the nodes in the network, the higher the value to potential advertisers. This week Twitter announced a new @anywhere initiative that basically allows you to click on links in news articles to follow or retweet authors, publishers or brands -- another way to expand its network nodes. Such pushes may indicate social networks are cresting in adoption; Twitter, for instance, should be concerned that 57% of its users have only 1-10 followers and 24% have no followers at all. If you run the network, you want it to grow and to be as open as possible -- because that unlocks all doors to value.

But Google, Facebook and other companies that tap networks too hard without weighing the nuances of privacy are met with a fierce backlash. For marketers about to wade into the social streams, it's worth considering more than the sentiment and volume of tweets about your brand, the connections between users that indicate their responsiveness, and the tactics you can deploy to get them leaning toward your message. You might also consider if your observant intrusion is going to freak anyone out.

The motives of futurism

Our friend Max Zeledon, likely annoyed by tweets from SXSW, grew sharp tonight. "I'm increasingly becoming bored with tech pundits," he wrote, "who continue to overreach when it comes to the future, pretending to know what the next 'big' thing is when in fact nobody can predict the future." We reflected:

We're all guilty of this to a degree. Since we all write or speak differently, perhaps it comes down to motive. Some (I like to think myself) write about future trends because we're curious, we're challenged, we're puzzled, we have questions and we're trying to sort it all out. Others may do so for more purely self-promotional motives, riding the Gartner hype cycle to draw attention to their speaking or book deals. The problem is there is huge demand for this type of bullshit. Humans, business people in particular, are exposed to massive amounts of data and have a hard time ingesting it; we long for frameworks to help us understand the world; when someone gives us a new model to screen the noise of data coming in from the future, we latch on. It could be a survival instinct, a weather forecast for winter storms ahead, but there's deep hunger for future predictions. The demand may come from fear we'll fail, or hope we'll win, so we buy into Who Moved My Cheese silliness to guide our next decision. I hope I'm not the guy feeding this to make money or to build a modicum of fame. I hope I just write because I'm trying to solve the puzzle in my own head. But thanks for the warning.

SXSW ideation: Ending hunger

The great irony of SXSW Interactive is most of its panels are one-way affairs with gurus broadcasting their business acumen at the audience. Which is why we found Scott Henderson's We Can End This workshop on hunger relief fascinating. He asked his audience to roll up their sleeves and brainstorm ideas.

We sat through Hendo's morning session with social strategist Geoff Livingston, Humongo agency's Darryl Ohrt, Kyla Fullenwider of sponsor PepsiCo, product strategist Anne Mai Bertelsen, and others. Some, like Livingston, suggested using new social media tools to connect donators with food banks in local communities. We suggested another path -- decrease the waste in our food system to fund hunger relief.

Billions of dollars now going in the trash

The United States, you see, tosses out 40-50% of food ready for harvest, and of the food we buy, half of that comes from restaurants outside the home. Americans spend $149 billion annually on casual dining and coffeeshops; increasing the efficiency of that market even slightly would free up billions to fill empty stomachs. To connect these dots, we'd simply (a) reduce restaurant food waste and use the economic savings to (b) fund hunger relief. The program could work like emissions trading for air pollution abatement:

1. Create a cap-and-trade system for food waste. A central body (government or national food association) would set total target limits on food waste, and issue credits allowing companies a certain level.
2. Measure food waste in restaurants -- packaging, portions, food not consumed.
3. Restaurants that cannot reduce food waste would trade (buy) allowances.
4. Restaurants that do reduce waste would trade (sell) allowances.
5. This economic system would provide strong incentives for restaurants to reduce food waste -- spurring marketing innovations such as menu items with smaller portions, similar to today's "heart healthy" choices.
6. A commission structure could be set on market trading -- a “tax” on each trade -- to be used to fund hunger relief programs.
7. The high visibility of national restaurant chains promoting reduced waste/hunger relief would build consumer awareness as well -- perhaps making the cause as popular as recycling, which has become the standard human behavior to reduce trash.

It's just one idea, inspired by a truly interactive SXSW panel. SXSW organizers, we'd like to see more such real engagement next year. Learn more at We Can End This or submit your ideas at Goodzuma with the user name and password "SXSW." And Scotty: Nicely done.

Image: Guuleed

Augmenting too far

We're packing for SXSW Interactive in Texas, a conference dedicated to online evolution, so leave you with this: Is all this virtual stuff dangerous? Over at Slate, William Saletan brilliantly recounts the sad story of a young South Korean couple who spent 12 hours a day in an Internet cafe, caring for a virtual baby in an online game ... until their real baby at home died allegedly from malnutrition and dehydration.

"Maybe this is just a weird story about a sick couple on the other side of the planet. But look in the mirror. Every time you answer your cell phone in traffic, squander your work day on YouTube, text a colleague during dinner, or turn on the TV to escape your kids, you're leaving this world. You're neglecting the people around you, sometimes at the risk of killing them.

"The problem isn't that you're a bad or weak person. It's worse than that. The problem is that all of us are susceptible to being drawn into other worlds, and other worlds are becoming ever more compelling. In the old days, imaginary friends had to be imagined. Now you can see and interact with them. In cyberspace, they exist. They're more alluring and less flawed than your friends in the physical world. And thanks to artificial intelligence and three-dimensional graphics, they're becoming quite lifelike."

Whoa. Time to catch some sunshine.

Chevy vs. pollution in the stream

Very few people who work in the ad industry have the balls to question the ethics of a campaign -- ethics, in advertising? -- because doing so could burn a bridge from a potential client. But what the hell -- we're not here to play nice, we're here to advise our clients about what works, and that includes not making mistakes that damage their future reputation.

So let's take a look at, oh, perhaps Chevy's current SXSW campaign. Say hypothetically you're a car company trying to boost sales among a younger demographic, and the MRI data shows these people are avoiding TV and spending more time in social media listening to peers. It's really hard to buy advertising against that demo. And then your agency guru walks in wearing a black T-shirt talking about SIM scores suggesting there's a way to "earn media" -- and NOT pay for it -- by letting a handful of young people borrow cars and drive to an uberhip conference, say SXSW Interactive in Texas, and broadcast their Chevy adventures along the way. And they'll use a "hashtag," something like #chevysxsw, that appears at the end of every tweet. A handful of cars, a dozen people times their few thousand followers, and suddenly you have an organic loudspeaker spraying Chevy messages to hundreds of thousands of people inside Twitter every day ... for almost no marketing budget.

Is this a good idea? Does it help the Chevy brand? Do the thousands of people exposed to non sequitur messaging and strange #chevyreadthis symbols like the promotions creeping into their communication stream, and then think, heck, it's high time to test drive a Chevy? And what about the broader ecosystem issues of what happens if such campaigns take off, and one day every other tweet from your own personal online community has a #brandmention attached because someone is getting a little free gift from a car or stereo or condom company? What happens to the value of the network then?

Is anyone thinking about the adverse impact of the people annoyed by messaging vs. the people who respond?

We've seen this before in the 1990s with telemarketing. For you young readers out there, telesales actually used to be a part of most business operations and worked well ... until the aggregate calls got to be too much. Do Not Call lists were created, most Americans signed up, the government imposed heavy fines for any marketer who didn't avoid calling DNC homes, and suddenly shilling via phone did not work anymore. You'll still get calls from politicians or nonprofits who are exempt from DNC (love that, don't you?), but even they have challenges making telemarketing work, because the only people who respond tend to be the less educated, less wealthy, less desirable consumers who haven't figured out how to sign up for DNC.

The Scobleizer's take on ethics

About a year ago we had the fortune to interview Robert Scoble for a BusinessWeek column, and he said something very smart. We paraphrase: Rules in business about conflicts of interest or partitioning advertising, he said, were not invented because businesses are run by altruists. The rules evolved because businesses screwed up, overstepped their bounds, lost customers, and realized they needed rules to keep operations in order. Advertising works best when it is kept in its box and labeled as such, because people know where it is coming from. Letting it creep into the stream makes the source hazy, adds a layer of confusion, and diminishes the value of the network.

So, dear #chevytweeters on Twitter and the ad agencies who promote such hoopla. We hope your campaign is a rousing success. We're sure your social-media sentiment score will click up this week, and the metrics will look great in PowerPoint. But are you really thinking about the direction your car is headed?

Chevy campaign details here.

Confusion as a design feature

Ever wonder why Facebook redesigns its interface every six months, often adding more complexity?

Deliberate confusion can be a positive design strategy. We've been thinking of this for several years now, tipped off by the annoyingly elaborate user interfaces at weather web sites (where you must click through three pages of busy links to find a simple forecast). Today's most promising portals often require users to work hard to understand how to use them. Twitter? Yes, it's only 140 characters, but try explaining retweets and @'s and DM's and search and lists to a new user, and you realize the microblogging service has cleverly ensnared you in a complex learning curve. Facebook is even more confusing, yet consumers have responded in droves. The SharesPost marketplace, which places valuations on startup firms, recently suggested ubersillynetwork Facebook is now worth $11.5 billion due to its vast lattice of people poking and tossing Farmville updates at each other.

Part of this is psychological -- humans feel rewarded when they solve puzzles or score points (um, Twitter follower counts anyone?) -- and so complexity in design can make each experience feel novel again; the charm of Facebook, after all, is never knowing exactly what the hell you'll find when you show up. Another rationale for complex designs is business strategy; if you force a user to spend more time on pages solving the puzzling interface, like on a weather site, you can sell more ad inventory. But the deepest driver of design confusion is human desire to make anything complex. We want more information built into human conversations or our physical space, which is why when you log in to work on a Monday morning you must now check work email, voicemail, Gmail, Google chat, cell phone messages, Facebook, Twitter, the physical mail and the fax just to make sure you didn't miss anything.

Confusing interfaces might drive the great visual thinker Edward Tufte nuts (he called superfluous design "chart junk"). Yet as the world of knowledge evolves, we hunger for more nuance to allow us to dive deeper into information. It will only get worse as data begins flowing into the real view of the surroundings around us. See the video above, a graduate thesis project by Julia Yu Tsao at Art Center College of Design.

Chart junk, we may hate you, but you are here to stay.

Inspired by Len Kendall.

Wow, old people use smart phones, too

London-based data junkie Dirk Singer notes the 35-54 age demo is now the most active group using mobile social networks -- those Twitter and Facebook apps on your cell phone. We chatted up this issue recently with mobile reps from Jagtag and Impact Mobile, who both agreed that mobile usage is "proving more elastic" among demographics than previously thought (that's marketingspeak for yes, old people use smart phones too).

Jagtag, for instance, provides a QR Code response system in which a consumer can snap a photo of a bar code image, email or tweet it in using her phone, and get a video or slide show back on her handset -- a useful way to bookmark information on a cell in case you don't want to dial in to a call center just yet. Jagtag told us that it recently ran a campaign for a large biotech firm in which posters at a state fair promoted "take a picture of this code for more information on soybean yields" -- and 14% of visitors at the fair did exactly that.

If soybeans work, could your product?

The distinction here is Jagtag gave staid consumers a clever way to respond to a message -- it did not push a banner ad onto their cell phones, but instead offered a more convenient way to get information if they opt in. That's an important point, because many marketers are rushing to push ads through mobile handsets, and frankly we're not sure outbound messaging will be welcomed in such an intimate space. Consumers certainly are not responding to the outbound equation; mobile ad spending forecasts have been missed for the past decade. The use of mobile as a new response doorway has more promise. Marketers, we all have phones in our pockets. Help us tap our way to you.

Skinput: The body as your keyboard

Chris Harrison, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, has built a device that recognizes taps and flexes on your arm to turn your body into a computer input. The basic idea is you could dial a phone number or adjust an iPod with simple body movements. It's a rudimentary but intriguing continuation of our human convergence with technology. Don't think you're part machine already? Then put down your glasses, take out your dental fillings, and remove the leather shoes that cushion your feet.

Via Bill Green.

If media is dying, why do you want a bigger TV?

(Play me.)

One of the great myths of our advertising generation is that traditional media is dying. Never mind that 30% of U.S. homes own four or more TV sets, or that the very bloggers who proclaim 30-second spots are dead also promote Panasonic high-definition televisions. Media is certainly shifting, but it's an additive landscape -- because new communication tools are overlaying old media, not replacing it.

Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff said this week that social media may be boosting television ratings, as consumers find new impetus to tune in to community events. Ratings are up in 2010 for the Grammys (26 million viewers this year vs. 19 million last), the Golden Globes (up 14%), and the Super Bowl (at 106 million viewers on CBS in January, it was the most-watched TV event of all time). Media is additive because consumers are learning to do two things at once; Nielsen reports that 13% of viewers of the Olympics' opening ceremonies were also online typing away on Twitter or Facebook.

There is no question that the currency of advertising impressions is becoming devalued, and thus marketing is more challenging, but it's a reset -- not a vaporization. This week we discussed where all media is going with the verbally elegant Angela Natividad and ideation guru Bill Green on the AdVerve podcast.

Closer, closer: Twitter's tantric ad model

So at long last and after much lustful speculation, Twitter is set to launch an ad platform. Trick is, Twitter advertising won't appear in your tweet stream -- the paid messages will only pop up when you go over to search.twitter.com to see what the world is talking about (or search inside Twitter via various other doorways).

This shows remarkable restraint, perhaps signaling Twitter realizes ads -- even if clearly marked with something such as IZEA's sponsored tweet #ad hashtag -- annoy the devil out of people when they're chatting inside social media. So rather than risk upsetting the masses, which could drive away the audience that MySpace and Friendster found so fickle, Twitter will keep interruptions away from your clever 140-character missives unless someone else is specifically hunting for your topic.

What could it mean?

1. Twitter could be using the search ecosystem as a test, to see how people respond, before expanding the ads into the main chat streams.
2. Twitter may bet its search functionality will scale and someday rival Google (although only 429,500 U.S. people visit its search page per month as of now).
3. Or perhaps Twitter is simply acknowledging that ads work best when a consumer is in a search modality instead of a social mode.

We're betting test; in marketing, as in love, it's hard to make restraint last forever.

Image: H. Koppdelaney

The tsunami of dread

We wrote this about a year ago. Today, watching a tsunami bear down on Hawaii, it still fits:

We came across a debate on Twitter recently where Amanda Chapel, the faux persona charged with poking fun at social media thought leaders, referred to Søren Kierkegaard's existential theories that people hide the meaninglessness of life by drowning themselves in diversions. (In case you miss the Amanda Chapel arguments, she's a mask, she's brilliant, she's caustic, and she thinks the social media craze is overblown -- which is right, of course.) So we read up on Existentialism and came to the concept of dread.

Dread. You know, that itching feeling that something bad is about to happen. Existentialists use the common experience of hiking to the edge of a cliff, seeing the abyss and getting a wave of confusion as you ponder your own ability to throw yourself off. This nasty little buzz is the human mind recognizing that nothing is really in control in your life, disaster could happen, and you might even bring it upon yourself.

Newscasters love dread; the weather forecasts are filled with it. In the days before Hurricane Ike slammed Texas, CNN, Fox News and the other broadcast outlets were salivating at the thought that cities could be decimated, Galveston drowned, ships sunk at sea. "CERTAIN DEATH!" cried the headline at CNN.com.

We're going to start searching for examples of advertisers who play this same game. It is a powerful emotion, at least as riveting as sex or death or chocolate, and when the wave of dread surges, we want to watch it come, hoping in some secret part of our souls that the worst will happen. If we see it, at least we'll be in control.

5 reasons why you're reading this

We've been laughing about modern bloggers' and tweeters' obsession with numbers in headlines (and have been guilty of it ourself). Thanks to Nate Davis for explaining why.

Network neighbors: Targeting the soul, not vinyl siding

The real value of social networks may not be advertising, or listening to sentiment, but instead in profiling customers who previously were hidden from view simply by looking at their network neighbors.

For a vivid example, visit Slate's new "News Dots." Slate has taken homophily analysis -- the concept that birds of a feather flock together -- into reporting by looking at connections between topics in the news. Its method is simple: software reviews 500 news articles from major publications daily; if a major term such as "health care" or "Obama" is mentioned at least twice, it gets a tag; the software then draws correlations between other keywords. And voilà -- a visual map of connections between the day's most urgent news stories.

Network analysis works for consumers as well -- and can be critically important to marketers who can't see inside homes of customers, because traditional demographic tagging has wild assumptions. PRIZM data, for instance, says you may be a "Beltway Boomer" if you live in the suburbs because your group of neighbors on average has certain characteristics, such as wealth, intellectual reading of pubs such as Architectural Digest, and shopping at upscale stores like Talbots -- but what if you're a former hippy now wearing hipster sneakers breaking out of the mold? What if, God forbid, you're unique?

Behind your new detailed Twitter profile

Instead of looking at your house location or credit card habits to define you (PRIZM, for instance, stuffs you into 1 of 66 segments), network analysis would parse the connections you make in your personal life -- the core logic being people tend to be drawn to other people with similar personas. The hipster breaking away from his neighbors likely shops, talks and works with other avant-garde types, even if the people just over the backyard fence are staid lawyers and doctors. So it's no mistake social networks such as Twitter are asking users to complete more personal information. It's a treasure trove for marketers, revealing what each consumer is like by the peer group she builds around herself. Studies by AT&T, for instance, have found that people who communicate with each other frequently by telephone ("telephone network neighbors") are 3x to 5x more likely to respond to the same marketing offer.

So if you work in marketing, instead of putting up a Twitter feed or silly Facebook widget, perhaps you should have your social media agency start talking to the data guys who build models for your mailing lists. You have an opportunity to move targeting beyond the house to the people who actually live inside.

Lust in the bag

Advertising observer Angela Natividad hints she wants this duffel. We responded with this:

Yes, entire libraries have been written about the psychology of consumer desire, but it's still amazing how some objects incite such lust. You can keep the bag; for me it's leather jackets or the sheet metal of certain cars. My first such memory is from about age 17, when I worked at a country inn in Vermont and saw a red Porsche in a cottage driveway. The car had fenders jutting over the wheels, glowing cherry paint, and say your Freudian-cigar-or-mother's-milk whatever I admit being struck with a sharp pain in my chest. I had a crush on a piece of steel. I have no answer as to why some objects make us want them so badly (with the irony being it is the longing we cherish, because once we buy leather coats they end up in the closet cause they're rather heavy and uncomfortable). Evolutionary psychology blames it on our need for shelter; Geoffrey Miller says we do it to signal to others. Dunno. Maybe we don't desire objects; we instead desire *desire,* because longing for that which we can't have validates the truth of the emptiness inside us.

Or, it could just be a damn fine bag.

The manification of Toyota

It's a shame Toyota is getting drawn and quartered over its stuck-pedals-or-sliding-brakes complaints because we've been admiring its new campaign for the revised Sienna minivan. Minivans, as you know, are the Great Compromise of automobile purchases, the harbinger of mid-life crises, the acknowledgement that a man has moved beyond the age of hot dating to P-whipped marriage to schlepping children with sippy cups to the local park and you better stop fighting in the back seat or no TV for a week! dialogue. You don't have to put on the red dress tonight, Roxanne, because you won't be caught dead with a guy in an egg-shaped hunk of sheet metal.

Toyota's redrawn 2010 Sienna steps away from prior feminine-hygiene-packaging allusions. Sure, it is nowhere near as manly as Ford's Flex -- which hides its vanness with a Mini-on-steroids facade and a grill fresh off a Mach 3 razorblade -- but from ads to brochures, Toyota is crowing this is a minivan that dads can drive. The Sienna's top designer allegedly loves sports cars; the SE model option includes a dropped suspension and aggressive tuning; the dashboard has a Nike-inspired swoosh inlay either in wood or some fake form of carbon fiber (the swoop is actually a psychological device to give both front-seat passengers the illusion that they own 60% of the forward visual space). And banner ads online, which retarget you aggressively if you visit Toyota.com, proclaim "Daddy Likes."

It's a clever combination of product design and ad communications to appeal to two demos at the same time, men and women -- and in a recession, both males and females in a household have to agree before shelling out $30k for a family bus. Toyota is obviously pushing the van because it is one of the few models not involved in its current massive recalls. If Toyota can put the brakes on consumers' safety concerns, sales may suddenly accelerate.

Rebooting the FCC: When gov't needs your help

When the Federal Communications Commission was founded way back in 1934 as a replacement for an earlier government radio panel, no one thought 75 years later it might spend half a billion dollars annually regulating airwaves that bring consumers radio, TV signals, computer and mobile wireless data. Alas, in 2010 the proliferation of media makes governing the electromagnetic spectrum a billion times more difficult than solving, say, how to expand healthcare to Americans.

So now the FCC has basically said screw it. Rather that impose specific suggestions, it has launched a "Rebooting the FCC" web site asking you, dear Americans, to write in with your own answers. So go ahead!

1. Should Internet providers be charged with "network neutrality" and give everyone equal access to the Internet (feels good, right?), or make heavy users like the brat next door downloading movies on your shared cable tether sucking up bandwidth pay more (um, that feels good, too...)?

2. Should big companies be allowed to continue closed standards to maintain market share (sure), or does that stop free-market competition (um, no, that sounds better)?

3. Should the FCC step in to help save ailing mainstream media (yes!), to keep dying journalists from passing away leaving us nothing but blogs, or would that be government putting its thumb on history's scale of content evolution (um, big government)?

On one hand we admire the FCC's openness in seeking feedback. On the other, it feels a bit like seeking help from a counselor who says only, "sorry you're upset, it's OK to feel that way." To ask a populous that fights over fictional death panels to make decisions about complex wireless technological enablers leading to game-theory conflicts in business seems a stretch. The FCC's site proclaims: "The starting point for this effort, of course, is the First Amendment." Great, FCC. Can't wait to hear the solutions.

Today, we're all plagiarists

There is a legend in marketing circles that those little circular pull-tab pouring spouts at the top of your orange juice carton were invented by a chemical engineer seeking to sell millions of pounds of plastic. We didn't really need a new way to pour juice, but an extra ornamentation drew attention to the package, and the plastic product, thus boosting sales.

This reminds us of plagiarism. Plagiarius was the Latin word for "kidnapping," and while the snatching of others' ideas for use as your own is still frowned upon in academia and will get you fired in journalism, our world has become awash in it as we all seek new ways to sell our personas. Blog posts that shallowly recast ideas from The New York Times or Wired; videos or music you don't own that you pass to others; even the epidemic "retweeting" on Twitter in which you pass someone else's cleverness along with your own name tagged for credit -- all could be considered forms of plagiarism. Idea kidnapping really has two components: the false assumption of authorship, definitely a no-no, and the misrepresentation of an idea as one's own. While most of us know better than to fake authorship, social media provides huge temptations to allude we helped create a concept.

Are we taking too much credit?

In blogs, for instance, there is a culture of covertly demanding "link love" for finding an idea. Say we discover a brilliant new crowdsourcing platform for customer service and mention it in this blog; we might expect others who write about it downstream to link to our blog, even though we did not write the original story or ideate the business model. Curious -- because why in the world should we get any credit for being observers of an observer of an idea, three steps removed? This also occurs in Twitter, where people who retweet a find then expect their names to be mentioned in future retweets. This is not necessarily bad -- as Danah Boyd has noted, "retweeting brings new people into a particular thread, inviting them to engage without directly addressing them" -- but the lust for mention really is a misrepresentation that you had something to do with starting the idea.

Social sharing tools allow concepts to be passed like footballs tossed for amusement among a stadium crowd. We live in an age where our masses of contacts can help us discover brilliant new ideas, jokes, threats, news or amusement. That's all cool. The only catch is we all want a little juice from the credit.

Beyond sentiment analysis

Most social media monitoring tools track mentions of your brand and then score whether the sentiment is positive or negative. But how do people position your product in their minds? What connections do they make? And how should you respond in ad messaging?

Data visualization guru Jeff Clark has created four tools that give new insights, including the Twitter StreamGraph shown above. StreamGraph shows the last 1,000 tweets about a term with the other words most closely associated with it, with waves denoting the frequency of each mention. Kleenex brand managers, for instance, obviously know their product goes with colds and noses, but the concurrent waves of "movies" and "men" might give them new ideas for ad messaging.

Scott Berinato at HBR notes that such data visualization tools are still in their infancy. Or maybe not. We have to wonder what the boys behind the Facebook curtain are doing with all our pokes and Farmville messages.

GE's 'Beautiful' idea vs. your stupid agency structure

We cried watching this ad. But before we explain why, if you don't work with people in black T-shirts you may have missed the Big Debate About Ad Agency Structure, a navel-gazing exercise that occurs every six years or so during cyclical let's-cut-marketing recessions in which advertising brass reassess how to structure their agencies.

This debate is Very Important because the future of America hinges upon the answer. Does the creative side rule? as former Adweek editor Andrew Jaffe suggests. Is media planning and measurement most important? as we might counter. Or Edward Boches' creativity tailored for social media? Or Joseph Jaffe's balance between idea "generators" and "integrators"? Or crowdsourcing? Or maybe the future doesn't need advertising agencies at all?

And just when we thought we'd figured it, along comes BBDO New York with a new foray for the GE Healthymagination campaign that took our breath away. Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, the brilliant Mexican cinematographer behind films such as Y Tu Mamá También and Children of Men, the spot conveys in a few images something we may always remember. Sometimes, perhaps, the idea rules after all.

Backstory on the GE spots can be found here.

Sometimes it makes sense to ignore your customers

Social media gurus suggest listening to customers is everything. We say it's not.

If you pan out and look at the five real forces that drive competition, customers are only one -- and the way they feel about you at any time is often not the most important factor guiding your future decisions. Yes, user-content platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and YouTube provide marketers a chance to eavesdrop on conversations; add listening tools such as Brands Eye, Radian6, ScoutLabs, TruCast, or Umbria and you can watch the "sentiment" or vibe about your brand rise and fall like a weather report. Of course you should listen for flare-ups, and if sentiment falls suddenly and sustainably, you have a structural problem in your business that must be addressed.

But consider the things consumer sentiment could not have predicted:

1. The near-death of Detroit. As late as 2005 and 2006, Americans were still in love with SUVs and big trucks. Spiking oil prices and Wall Street-fed recessions were just about to strike, but an automotive planner of the time, if given the chance to listen to consumer needs, would have designed flashy huge new trucks. GM failed because it did what customers wanted in 2005, and its business ecosystem shifted two years later.

2. Cameras on cell phones. When these first popped up, people laughed. The New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a guy complaining he had just taken a photograph of his ear. But the version creep expanded and built the platform for today's iPhone-app-styled smartphones which do almost anything.

3. Employer-provided health insurance. David Goldhill noted last fall in The Atlantic that our modern U.S. healthcare system in which most Americans are covered by insurance from their employers was an accident of law. In 1954 Congress passed legislation making employer contributions to your health coverage tax-deductible, meaning it was cheaper for your boss to pay you in health benefits than to pay you with a wage. The incentive of a tax benefit led to today's insurance culture, which most people like ... yet no poll or "listening in" of consumers in the 1950s could have predicted this sea change in an industry.

4. Airline baggage fees. Perhaps the best current example of something consumers say they hate but love to buy is airline tickets. Supposedly add-on surcharges for blankets and baggage are despised by today's consumers. A simpleton could fire up Radian6, hear the complaints, and change the pricing strategy. Yet that would wreck an airline business -- because the reality is consumers shop for tickets using online aggregation services such as Travelocity that compare ticket price points as commodities, and choose the cheapest fares they can find for Hawaii. By leaving some costs elsewhere, an airline makes its ticket price on the web comparison sites look more attractive. If any airline removed surcharges, it would have to add perhaps $100 to each ticket price, and that uncompetitive price point on Expedia would crush its sales.

People talk, but talking isn't the same thing as what drives their action.

Yes, consumers are smart. Yes, your business should to listen to them. But raves and sighs about satisfaction today are just a small drumbeat in the competitive forces that shape your industry. Social-media monitoring is a powerful addition to your toolset, but beware any consultant who tells you that listening to your customers' whims today gives you all the answers you will need for tomorrow.

Want to connect with John Mayer? Twiangulate.

Say you dig musician John Mayer and want to chat, perhaps to find out why he said some strange things about dating in a recent Playboy interview. Good luck, of course: John's famous, you don't have his phone number, and if you try Twitter, well, you'll join a throng of 3,052,153 people who follow him -- of whom John only follows 80 back.

So ping Tom Lee instead.

Tom Lee, you see, is one of the least-well known people John Mayer follows on Twitter, and there's a good chance Tom would connect with you, respond to your tweets or even take a call. Get to know Tom, you might get to know John. Such "social graph analysis" is part of a growing trend supported by free tools such as Twiangulate and HiveMind. ReadWriteWeb has a terrific overview of the services, which can lead to freaky-cool findings. Twiangulate, for instance, allows you to compare the online networks of up to three people and then sort them by "smallest tweep," so a reporter trying to chase down Al Gore for an oil energy story could compare who he follows on Twitter vs. friends of Exxon's top brass. That common person probably has a few good stories about Al Gore and energy giants. Or you could find an unfamous person followed by both John Mayer and his ex-flame Jessica Simpson and take him out to lunch. Maybe with Jessica.

Hmm. The idea of someone being able to sift through your own network may seem Orwellian, but then, you knew information wants to be free, didn't you?

Out of context: Google's new ad retargeting

Google has launched advertising retargeting. So what does it mean?

The new ad program, like most Google innovations, is deceivingly simple. Now when you search for a term at Google.com, say "golf equipment," you'll not only see text ads for golf stuff next to your immediate Google search results, but hours later Google will continue to serve you golf-related ads when you surf over to news sites far from the Google search window.

The path of consumers responding to ads is very fragmented, and Google appears to realize it's often more than search-click-buy. While Google is best known for its AdWords "sponsored link" ads that drive billions in revenue by popping up next to search results, it also runs an AdSense program that places similar text ads on web sites based on the editorial material in the copy. AdSense is a way for web publishers to make a little money, but has always been the ugly stepchild next to AdWords, largely because contextual placement is difficult for any computer algorithm to get right. An article on "raging fires sweep through California" could attract context ads for "hot hotel deals in Los Angeles." Contextual advertising often misfires so badly that some bloggers call it madness.

But by tapping data from the user's recent searches, Google can make contextual ads far more relevant. Now, it doesn't matter as much what material is inside the article; what counts is your recent interest in a specific series of products. A cynic might say this is Google's way of admitting contextual ads don't work. Marketers may rejoice as these ads start getting better results. Either way, be careful what you search for ... because Google is watching and will remember.

Image: Gin Able

Tis the season to advertise, or maybe not

Would you launch a Valentine's Day promotion in September? Of course not. But it's an interesting strategic question if you ask your business peers "is our advertising campaign in line with the peak periods of our customers' demand?" Every product has seasonal cycles of consumer interest (pop over to Google Insights for Search for a peek at yours), yet oftentimes marketing budgets are driven by corporate requirements to hit certain sales targets each month.

It's tricky. If you have $1 million to spend on advertising over 12 months, you'd want to deploy it at the periods of heightened interest that will pull the most sales per dollar spent. But if you're running a real business, you may need to push harder in fallow periods to keep your staff or supplies moving. The only way to solve the puzzle is to build response models that compare the potential upside of pulsing advertising with high demand vs. the cost downside of a business operation sitting idle in the off months.

The real question: Is anyone at your advertising agency asking this question?

When we have telepathy, who will own your mind?

Who owns your social graph? According to Super Bowl fans, anyone can. According to Forrester Research, only your employer -- or at least your boss owns a big chunk of your personal human network.

We'll start with football. On Sunday ad shop Mullen and social-tracking service Radian6 captured up to 0.7% of all tweets with their clever BrandBowl 2010 advertising portal. The site, if you missed it, used Radian6 monitoring to rate chatter about Super Bowl ads. But beyond buzz, BrandBowl also illustrated an agency and software firm co-opting the Super Bowl social experience.

What did Mullen and R6 really do? They didn't take over the sports brand. And this wasn't about content. They borrowed someone else's audience. And if you think about it, far more than a brand or product, an audience is the most valuable thing anyone can create, because only your customers are a source of inflowing value.

Social networking has destabilized customer bases because now anyone can find a way to pull an audience to their own hub. In the past, the only way to watch a national football game was to dial in to the correct TV channel; today, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, LiveFyre, and soon Google Social Gmail create fluid hubs that carry conversations elsewhere. A smart marketer has an opportunity to build an axis that spins another brand's existing audience. Or, in financial parlance, it is now possible to steal someone else's customer stock portfolio.

Forrester says, no way

Many businesses with customer equity, such as Forrester, aren't keen about this. When the superbly talented Jeremiah Owyang left Forrester last year to move on to a consulting role, Forrester asked his replacement, Augie Ray, to shut down his prior marketing blog and only post comments related to marketing on the official Forrester sites. It's hard to peek behind Forrester's curtain but outside data shows traffic to its main web site down about 50% from summer 2009, so we understand why Forrester is building a wall. Augie appears happy to do so and has defended Forrester's policy as a basic intellectual property agreement.

According to 20th century business logic, Forrester is absolutely right. IP produced by employees, or even the client roster an employee builds while working there, should belong to Forrester. But the real question of Forrester's wall is not who owns content or IP, but who controls an audience. Augie's past blog, according to Quantcast, reached about 1,200-2,400 users per month -- not a large crowd, but likely highly influential in the marketing industry. The real risk for Forrester is Augie becomes the next go-to social media star like Jeremiah and then leaves, taking his fans with him.

So who is right? If the issue is not your product (services, methodology, thoughts, blog writing) and really your audience network, should a brand be able to own that as well? What if the audience is following your persona as the center more than the illusory corporate brand?

It's a serious issue because as networking technology improves, you, dear individual, will become the center of everything. Another Forrester ex-strategist, Charlene Li, has proposed social media will soon "become like air". Imagine Facebook in the year 2030 when a chip in your ear and webcam on your wrist allow you to post videos of your every thought to everyone in the world, and social media approaches telepathy.

Who owns your mind and its human connections then? And can you take your own brain with you when you change jobs?

It's been said open systems flourish and closed systems stagnate. Social media systems, on the other hand, simply rewrite the rules of business.

Retargeting Crazy Heart

Two days ago we clicked on a New York Times review for Crazy Heart, the Jeff Bridges film gaining huge Oscar buzz. Soon banner ads for Crazy Heart started following us everywhere. It's possible that Fox Searchlight Pictures has launched a massive online media buy, so everyone is seeing lots of banners, but far more likely we're being retargeted.

Retargeting is a simple online trick in which banner ads are served to users who are previously identified as interested in a product. You can launch them in several ways: (1) if someone visits a web site, you cookie their computer; (2) or, more interesting, if someone only sees a banner ad -- and doesn't even click on it -- the banner can still tag that user's computer so that he or she gets served additional banners elsewhere. The second approach is called "media retargeting" and is a bit surreal for the user experience; after all, you don't even have to touch the original banner ad to be tagged and chased with followup messaging. So in this case, we suspect:

- Fox Searchlight bought banners to be placed next to the online New York Times' film review.
- Fox Searchlight then included an invisible pixel in the animated banner that tagged our computer when we read the review.
- Now knowing that we have interest in the film, Fox Searchlight serves us additional banners when we enter other web sites such as Salon.com by buying into an ad network (ad inventory on a vast collection of other web sites).

Retargeting risk vs. reward

Retargeting is clever (and honestly, we've recommended retargeting for our own clients using ad networks such as Value Click and Fetchback). It essentially lowers online ad costs by 50% or more, because the cost of subsequent impressions is much less than the original expensive media buy on a top site that kicks off the sequence.

But retargeting also carries risks. If rules are not set up to limit the number of impressions given to the user, the vibe becomes one of stalking -- OMG, that product is following us everywhere! The second risk is it's still easy to chase the wrong computers. A year ago we researched nursing homes for an aging relative and began receiving ads for Viagra and wrinkle cream, and laughed 'cause we're not there yet. The third risk is for publishers, who may lose their value as online marketers learn how to "steal" their audiences for future ad impressions on other web properties; after all, why spend big bucks to advertise on a marquee site such as NYTimes.com if you can serve the same ad to the same audience later, via retargeting, on a less-expensive site?

As online media and Internet gadgets continue to fragment, we expect to see such individual targeting continue. Just be careful not to stalk customers too far; if they pick up they're being watched, they could go crazy.

Mullen tells you which Super Bowl ads work

If you want to learn if a $3 million pop on a :30 second spot while overweight men wrestle in spandex is worth it, social media can explain the reaction. Last year, for instance, Teleflora won the Super Bowl. The flower delivery service had a 14-fold lift in online mentions on Twitter after its ads ran during the big game, while chatter about many other brands that advertised went down.

This weekend, ad shop Mullen and social media monitoring service Radian6 will expose buzz to the world with a web site tracking which brands get the most chatter after their Super Bowl ads run. Mullen creative chief Edward Boches explains it wasn't easy:

"We’ve studied lists of spots and scoured the web for any information that would help – celebrities appearing in spots for example – and then created combinations of words to increase the likelihood we don’t grab anything that isn’t a comment about a commercial. In addition we’ll monitor the game throughout, modifying keywords based on the storylines in the commercials."

There are now scores of services that watch social media buzz, usually focused on quantity of chatter and "sentiment," or whether the talk skews toward love or hate. On the plus side, it's cheap consumer research; on the down, it remains to be seen if short spikes in consumer interest -- such as the waves of response in social media that typically crest and fade within two weeks -- really influence sales. Ken Burbary, digital strategist at Ernst & Young, has compiled a comprehensive list here, and many of the tools are free. It may be worth seeing how your brand scores among the public, too.

What are brands?

From our comment inspired by Jim Mitchem at Obsessed with Conformity.

Like fish that can't feel water, it's hard for consumers to notice brands. But they are everywhere.

America is a brand. The Tea Party. Fox News. The Yankees. Your religion. Your family. Chris Brogan and David Armano. Hell, the very concept of "social media," really bullshit -- it's just another type of media, people -- is a "brand" with somehow special meaning.

Brands are artificial constructs we use to understand a complex world. Our environment is too nuanced for us to spend an hour judging the logical merits, pros and cons of every decision in our minds, so we resort to archetypes to quickly form, file away, and recall our opinions. Saber-toothed tiger, bad, ooga, run. Hot member of opposite sex in leopard skin, good, ooga, mate. So we rebel at "death panels" supposedly lurking in complex health bills, too long to read or understand, because someone has branded them for us.

Branding is a mental shortcut we need to survive because there is too much information to process. Branding exists because we need simple compartments to file our judgments in.

Branding will always be with us because the world is too complex to manage without it. Technology won't change it. And for those in social media who believe their fad is the new thing that makes branding obsolete, why, they're just promoting their own brand.

Image: Gradient Photo