Famine City

How well do you know me? Txt, email, phone, dm, Twitter... Home phone?

It was so casual. So easy. You needed to contact people and you'd call them at home. Maybe, and only if it was an emergency, you'd contact someone at work. With all of the ways to contact someone, what's the right way to reach out and "touch" someone (remember that old, AT&T ad)? I started conducting some informal research on the topic. What's the right way to reach out and touch someone? In a non-harassing way, of course. Here are my results: 

1. Txt- this is the starting point. Everyone tends to agree with a casual txt message is the right way to start the conversation or reaching out to someone, given you know them. However, just because you have my digits doesn't mean that you should call. Appropriate for business only for co-workers or established relationships. Don't txt me if you don't know me. 
2. Twitter/IM- I know these are not the same thing, but you can DM someone on Twitter, right? Pretty much the same as an IM in my book in terms of the direct message. This is the second rung of reaching out. This is a form of communication that I do not use with my professional contacts (yet). 
3. Facebook me - send me a note on Facebook, or find me when I'm on Facebook and IM me. This contact method falls into the same category as Twitter, don't use this method unless you really know me, meaning that we've had a conversation in which we communicated something meaningful, like our shared love for bourbon. 
4. Email- send me an email. This is pretty much the standard issue of contacting someone, business or personal. This is the most appropriate for business or personal realtionships. 
5. Mobile phone- my cell phone is the first number that I give to people. When I'm asked what my home phone number is, I actually have to look it up in my phone or dial it (after almost ten years). This falls into work, home, play, whatever. It's the first number that I hand out and if you know me, you can then txt me. 
6. Contact me through my friends - ask my wife or one of my friends to ask me to give you a call. My social network is pretty tight, word gets around quick here in the 'Nati. You better know me if you expect a call back from this source. 
7. Home phone- you probably really don't know me or I owe you money if you're trying to contact me this way. My home phone is pretty much relegated to bill payment and/or account related information. In other words, you don't know me and I probably won't call you back. It seems the only important calls I get here are the ones at 5:45am telling me my kid's school is being called off for the threat of snow or Hoxworth Blood Center. I have some popular O-Positive going on apparently. 
8. All other forms of contact, from FedEx to snail mail. You really don't know me or just want to sell me something. FYI- I shred your documents and attempted to get off your mailing list. Somehow you made it through. You and/or your company is probably not remotely close to being on my radar.     
9. Voicemail in all forms are pretty much non-committal. I don't listen to voicemails. I'll return your call promptly, but I won't listen to voicemail unless I am explicitly awaiting your dial.  

Contacting someone used to be so simple. It simply isn't that easy anymore. It reminds me of the Seinfeld where the Keith Hernandez did level jumping on the friendship by asking Jerry to help him move too soon into their friendship. There are rules as to which contact method that you use. Whether they are explicit or implied, better figure them out or people, like me, may not return the communication.  

follow me on twitter @marty_b
  

Work meet personality

At times, we’re a branded voice. At times, we’re a voice of brands. Yet still, on occasion we’re a solo voice. This post is about a band of voices, my work team @bridgeworldwide. Bridge Worldwide, my employer, won a Cannes Cyber Lion Gold for Pringles Can Hands banner ad last week. It’s a banner ad. Yup, it’s a DAMN good banner ad. While I appreciate the award and love the banner, what stands out to me is the team that helped create the piece and their personality. Their personality made it into their work and it is delighting lots of people.

If you are a creative at an agency, you probably know what I'm about to say, but if you’re not familiar with a creative/advertising agency and thinking about getting in the industry, read on.  Creative work is hard. It’s time consuming, takes a specialized talent and dedication to a craft, like painting, art or music. You have to put thousands of hours to be just mediocre. Rarely do phenoms exist anywhere in life. Most are a product of hard, diligent effort and creative-types fall into this category. Everyday creative-types put their heart and soul into something that probably will not make it out of the trash can. They are probably in a career where they never saw themselves in the first place. Now let’s get a little deeper. Their work gets judged with ferocity at an agency—too much this, not enough that, doesn’t meet brief, not sure it’s on strategy, not feeling it. Most people hate criticism in any form and creatives put their work through the ringer daily. It simply isn’t easy work.

As I reviewed our award winning work, I was (obviously) proud. I knew exactly which wittism was written by who, and could see individual contributions come to life in the banner—meanwhile in the name of our client, Pringles. Even the most cynical fark readers had some great comments about the piece. Again, at the end of the day, what I see are the personalities of the people that I work with, unabashed, comical, amusing and clever.

It’s interesting to me that so often we seem to lose our personality in our work. We lose ourselves in our work. Even though it’s always for the client, it’s us. It’s our personality they are paying for. Our uniqueness. Our individual viewpoint on the world we live in. It’s not so often when I’m able to see that much of our own personality come to life in the name of the brand and I like it. This banner ad serves as a proud reminder that there can be an intersection of the two.  Congrats to our team at Bridge Worldwide.

follow me on twitter @marty_b
#pringles
#canhands

MTV = Reality TV Programming | YouTube = Music Videos

MTV is a shadow of it's former self. It's morphed from a once music television station to something else called reality television-where nothing is real and everything reeks of fake-authenticity. If you're looking for music videos, go to YouTube. I recently posted how YouTube is preserving music history, but equally important, YouTube has overtaken MTV as the best place to locate your favorite music video(s).

Want to remember what MTV used to be like? Insert irony here. 

Below are some of the top all time videos, take notice that over 2/3 of the top 15 videos are related to music. It makes perfect sense this no longer belongs to MTV. People used to congregate around the TV to watch the top ten list to see a video at a specific time. Recall there were actual premieres of videos? Remember Michael Jackson's Thriller? I would love to see how many times the Thriller video would have been watched if YouTube had been around--not to mention 25 years later it has over 37-million views. Were YouTube around then, Thriller would be the first video to hit a billion views.  We're a now society and MTV just can't deliver it in the old format, nor do they (even) try. 

I don't watch MTV or one of their subsequent channels.They used to be the middle ware between music, music videos and their audience. We're a right now culture. MTV doesn't have a right to own the audience any longer where you wait for videos. However, I do think they jumped ship pretty quickly. At last memory, the last time I remember an actual music video on MTV when channel surfing is somewhere around 1996. You can call it forward thinking or you can call it the adoption of Jerry Springer mentality: Create the lowest common denominator of programming and watch viewers flock. While I recognize they had to change their model for a lot of reasons, MTV today reminds me of watching Jefferson Airplane morph into Jefferson Starship--you just don't recognize it any longer. 

follow me on twitter @marty_b

Mobile technology winner: LBS (location based services)

I'm a big fan of mobile devices and technology. Outside of pure interest it's also my career as a tech guy at an advertising/interactive agency. Simply put, I'm an enthusiast in my personal and professional life. One of the questions that I get most often is this: "which (mobile) thing is going to stick?" If I were a bettting person, I'd say location based services are here to stay. In fact, this technology is exploding. 

LBS defined (Wikipedia): A location-based service (LBS) is an information and entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device. 

I started giving this some thought over the past weekend. My family and I were driving to Lake Cumberland for some much needed respite. As I was driving, I was noticing during our drive to see who was using a GPS device in other vehicles. Overall, through about 100 cars and counting, I was about 35%. That's not hard science, but directional enough for my purposes and in case you're wondering, yup, I'm a dork. So overall, I will say that GPS and location aware devices have began creating the connection between location and service for consumers over the past number of years. My TomTom is filled with tons of useful information aside from maps, but it's in a passive way. In other words, it's providing much information simply based on location. I think this is important as just a few years ago, people may have believed even that was too big brother'ish. In other words, I believe the influx of smart phones and GPS only hasten our acceptance as consumers being OK with our devices knowing where we are. That was perhaps the most important hurdle to cross. 

After the initial penetration or hurdle of users being aware that you're tracking has occurred, the challenge is value back to the consumer--there isn't a shortage on our location based needs right now. There are tons of these apps growing everyday, ranging from G-Park (locating your parked car) to Virtual Graffiti via Graffitio, all immediately available from the App Store. Simply said, we've broken the seal seal on location based technologies. There's nowhere to go but up in my mind and if I'm going to place my bets people are going to adopt this technology by leaps and bounds because off direct value they provide in our lives. You can often replace many of the things your GPS did with a phone, though I believe dedicated devices serve a need much more efficiently. 

My dream, please give me a map of your store. Any store. Any mall. Any grocery store. Then allow me to Google what I'm looking for in the store. In fact, let me know which aisles each of my list of stuff is in and I will be your patron for life. I was looking for pearl sugar the other day for Belgian Waffles, no luck. Though three separate people swore to me they had it, I'd rather Google than go on the disgruntled employee hunt. 

Obviously, outside of the iPhone there are far more challenges to getting applications deployed, but developers are smart. They'll figure it out. Meanwhile while everyobe is trying to figure out how QR codes, bluecasting or location based services get rolled out, remember you heard it here, location based services will be a huge industry and has the most upside for all of us. 

follow me on twitter @marty_b

Have the yellow pages been reduced to this?

I am sitting here having my tires looked waiting and reading a book. I look over and notice the magazine rack. It's a normal magazine rack like at the supermarket with the rental magazines, job mags and so forth. Then it caught my eye, the Yellowbook. I remember that as the yellow pages, maybe I'm wrong on the brand. I am dumbfounded that a once valuable home resource is now, well, useless (at least for me). I remember the last one dropped off my house. I took it directly from the porch to the recycle bin. I've replaced it with (guess) Google. Another once useful item rendered useless by a better tool and changing consumer behavior. Wow. Simply astonishing to see what it has been reduced to in our lives.

Follow me on twitter @marty_b - this is a mobile post.

YouTube has changed music history

 In 1988, I started playing the guitar. I remember the exact moment I decided to seriously attempt it. I was thirteen, channel surfing, and then I came across Stevie Ray Vaughan playing a three song set on VH1's Unplugged. Our paths crossed at that very moment and my musical tastes have never been the same.

Today I can revisit or share that moment through the power YouTube. Though I'm an avid fan of Stevie Ray, I would have never known or experienced all of his influences, yet I know them today because of the technology revolution around music. I know and have listened to some of the influences that Stevie borrowed musical phrasing and style from, like Albert King. I listened to Albert King doing Blue's Power on YouTube recently, thinking, "um sounded an awful lot like the intro to SRV's Texas Flood." It's funny how all of those things are interrelated. What is even better is that we have the best way to preserve, see and experience those musical relationships via the interwebs, specifically YouTube. That's why YouTube is now my musical library of choice.

YouTube is preserving history. I have found versions of my favorite songs that I did not know existed. I found a version of Hendrix doing Little Wing from Royal Albert Hall in 1969 that is simply amazing, my favorite version. The recently departed and super talented Jeff Healey can be found doing some hot jazz from the 1930's or you can find some of his blues contributions as well. Like a little country? Find Bartender's Blues, written by James Taylor and performed by George Jones or even better (in my opinion), find Sunday Morning Coming Down by Cash and Kristofferson. Regardless of your musical taste, YouTube democratized contributing to the pages of musical history. In some cases, the videos are simply slide shows, but that's not the important part, the music is and it's there.

It's not just about history, it's about influences. I mentioned it above, but never before in history could you tie the musical influence history together so rapidly. Just look at the blues, you can start at Robert Johnson and see how he influenced Muddy Waters, Albert King, Hendrix, Clapton, SRV and end up with Doyle Bramhall II. It's not just the blues though. You get to experience the artists performing their favorite music and that's my favorite thing about grabbing music on YouTube. There's a version of Valerie, made more known by Amy Winehouse, but written by the Zutons. The acoustic version by Amy is great, just her and a guitarist. However, you get to see the original version in a related link. Never before has a musical genealogy like this been present.

The key is the fans. There were millions and millions of little videos, recordings and fragments of history disbursed throughout the world. The interwebs has provided the methods to collect, aggregate and share. Music companies could do this, but they are too disorganized and the purpose of sharing on their behalf is singular, money. They may have something on tape, but it's simply not worth it for a company to aggregate and release a single for someone that would receive limited sales. The fan is motivated by enjoyment, not dollars. It turns out that is pretty powerful. Fans go to great lengths to share, record and put slideshows to music on YouTube. My kids now get to enjoy some of the musical legacy, commercial and independent that I've enjoyed.

Location shift. I was in St. Louis a number of years ago and starting following the Tony Campanella Band. St. Louis has a great blues scene and he's an active part of it. I was at that show in 1997 and whether it was his immense talent or the libations, I was hooked. Today, I keep up with him through his website and find him on YouTube as well. I've been down to St. Louis at least six or seven times for the purpose of seeing him perform. Never before has enjoying even local bands been so easy to do.

Teaching legacy. If you weed through some of the noise on YouTube, you can find some pretty amazing teaching techniques on YouTube. I saw this guy teaching Hendrix's Voodoo Chile. In another example, there are people teaching classical techniques, like tremolo. There is nothing more that assures legacy than teaching it and the medium is being used to teach new musicians everyday.

We, the fans, are creating a more accurate, compelling and accessible version of music history every day. The interwebs has democratized everyone's ability to contribute, experience and share music, regardless of taste or location. Never before have we been able to experience have we been able to experience musical legacy, history and influence so quickly. This is why YouTube has become my music station of choice.

I invite everyone to critique this post as I'm interested as to how you're musical experience has changed with technology.

~marty follow me on twitter @marty_b

When will colleges go the way of the internet?

Colleges are experiencing the technology changes of the internet, delivering content and courses in new ways, but economic flattening has not occurred (yet). The internet has had an amazing flattening force on the economics of many businesses, but college education has never cost more and I'm wondering why.

The internet has created an environment where the price of information is driven to the cost of about zero. Meanwhile, the statement I often hear is that a degree is worth more than ever today. That’s true and academic institutions are simply raising their prices to levels to reflect the value of worth to the marketplace, not the value academic institutions provide. The tuition at the school I went to is greater than 200% more than what I paid just a bit over 10 years ago. However until there is economic pain, meaning less enrolled students and less government funding, we will not change our ways.

College used to be an area where you were introduced to new knowledge or it was knowledge discovery.  In times past, there were degrees of separation between knowledge and students that colleges served as the connector between. I'm not sure that applies anymore. Have you seen YouTube.com/edu or Ted.com? If you haven’t, I suggest that you take some time and click over to the content. It’s really good stuff. The point is the distance between content creator and end consumer, or learner in this case, has never been more direct. Again, college attendance and cost has never been higher.

The really smart schools are getting the value of their brand to potential suitors and are using the internet as a credentialing mechanism as to the type of education they will receive. Look at MIT, Harvard , UCLA, Carnegie Mellon--they all get it. They all have brand channels on YouTube/Edu. These colleges are building and protecting the brand. If I'm a student or parent, especially a paying parent, they will use the internet as the same vetting mechanism they use it for now before making a purchase. Good for those schools. They get how the world is changing and are changing with it. The sad thing is there are over 4,500 colleges and universities. They are in the minority.

I believe in education, earned a degree and so forth. I'm a life-long learner. However, I simply cannot understand while we've driven the cost of information to zero, the cost of college continues to skyrocket. My full expectation is the a company, like Google (this isn't a prediction, just example), will develop a credentialed program out of internet maintained content that will serve as a flattening force for many public institutions. A change like that, I welcome. 

~marty follow me on twitter @marty_b

     

Thanks to The Circuit

Thanks to the Circuit for letting me do a presentation yesterday about using web analytics to help gauge how your marketing is performing. You can download the presentation here http://tinyurl.com/okedf2. I also want to thank everyone for the follows, feedback and ideas generated from yesterday. Obviously, for web professionals yesterday's presentation could have felt rudimentary. However, I challenged one person afterwards that if these things are so simple that every should be doing it, why isn't everyone doing it?

Thanks again for the attendance and great feedback.

~marty

follow me on twitter @marty_b

Top ten reasons your brand should not be on twitter

It is almost a defacto standard that just about every brand in the world thinks, or perhaps their agency is recommending, that they should be on Twitter. Generally this means that the company or brand is being told they should interact with their consumers via the channel. I'm going to go out on a limb and share the top ten reasons you should not be a brand on Twitter.

1. You are not committed. Like any endeavor where you expect a reward, you must put forth effort. This comes in the form of dollars and time to discover its value to your brand. You must also be comfortable with discomfort. You must also be ready to change your approach quickly. At the very least, you must be willing to commit to a year of time to produce results (in my opinion). If you are wondering, creating a Twitter ID does not mean you are on Twitter.
2. You think of Twitter as a push medium. It's not a banner ad channel (yet). It's a two-way medium. It requires pushing out content and responding to it. You have to appreciate the community and respect the medium. 
3. You're going to create a personality on Twitter. If there isn't someone that personifies your brand within your organization, I think you'll be hard pressed to create an authentic personality for your brand.
4. Your legal department will ding you if you say H2O vs water. Why would that come up? Two extra characters, it's 140 character response mechanism. Be ready for your branded expression in that length. Be ready for misspelling, abbreviations, etc.
5. You have not found out what people are saying today on about your brand. If you aren't listening to what people are saying about your brand on Twitter, start today. Check out Twitter's Search and TwitScoop, create RSS feeds and follow what the community is saying about your brand. Start there and monitor for a couple months. If you can then see a clear way to add value to your consumer's lives, consider it an option.  
6. You don't have a strategy. Seriously, you probably don't. Are you going to use it to communicate stuff that people want to hear? Are you going to use it to handle consumer complaints? As research? Better have a clear idea about what you want to achieve with the channel.  
7. You are unwilling to cross-promote your other endeavors with your Twitter ID. This is is the "let's keep it in the closet" and just see how it turns out approach. I don't think this works so well. Be ready to pepper your existing communication(s) with follow me @yourbrandname.
8. People in your organization are not using Twitter. If your organization isn't using the medium, you probably shouldn't be either.  
9. You are not willing to allow consumers to co-create your brand. Your responses, retorts and consumer interactions are all subject of the user community. Get used to it.  
10. You don't have a sense of humor. If you can't find a sense of humor lodged in your corporate ethos, it's just not going to work. Don't try.   

The genesis of this blog post is simple: people/agencies try to shoehorn Twitter into something it isn't. If you monitor, you can find out if your demographic is present and detail out the next steps. Before you get there, realize Twitter is not a solution for every brand. If you can get past that, you're one step closer to finding a medium you can exploit to your (brand) benefit. 

~marty follow me on twitter @marty_b

Howard Stern schools digital agencies w/ facebook

by Jason

 If you work at a digital agency--especially a big one--a consider yourself warned. By none other than Howard Stern.
 
I’m a proud Howard Stern fan, and wanted to share an insight I got from the show a few weeks back. An incident on the show illustrated exactly what’s wrong with digital agencies that get too big to get out of the way.

He  (the “client”) had a relatively simple request for the folks who run his website (his “digital agency”). He wanted to post a video to his site. He made the request live on the air, and waited.

After a few minutes, his producer claimed “they—the guys who run the site—can’t post a video on the site.” In other words, the “agency” told the “client” that it wasn’t possible to do what he wanted to do with his site.

What did Howard say?

 “Get back to me with a plan?” No.
“Let me know when that’s possible?” No.
“Can you explain why we can’t?” Nope.

He didn’t ask them anything. He solved the problem himself.

His solution? Forget the website, then. Create a Stern Show page on Facebook and post the video. “We’ll have it up in less than 5 minutes.” That would be a CLIENT END-AROUND AN AGENCY BOTTLENECK. That’s what they did.

Now, I have no idea whether his site, HowardStern.com, is run by an agency or an in-house team at Sirius, but the lesson is clear. The ability to post media and solve problems at your own pace in the digital space isn’t enough to make you valuable to your clients. In fact, if your process is bloated and bureaucratic, you end up impeding the client. You're slower than your clients are.

So the question for digital agencies and the people who work at them is…what do you offer your clients that they can’t do themselves with 15 minutes and a Wi-Fi connection?

If you don’t have an answer, you have a huuuuuuge problem.

Oh, and a few days later they joined twitter, so follow @sternshow

Follow me @bender00