I actually remember my Dad getting his first car phone. It was the size of a small winnebago. I was 15 or so (this was 1979 or 1980 – you may now do the math to calculate my age), and I couldn’t imagine why he would need a phone in his car. Then one day we were driving in the car, one of his customers called in a panic wanting to know if he could fill an order for some equipment, and he closed a deal right there while we were driving. It was very cool. And we had mail, of course. Slow, yet dependable, mail.

Then voicemail and fax machines came along. I was living in Chicago, working at the global HQ for a large multi-national. Our team was from all over the world. I remember standing by the fax machine with a colleague from South Africa who was faxing his timesheet and expense report back to his home office in Johannesburg. We were marveling that it would only take about 3 weeks for his expense reports to be processed and the funds deposited into his account that he could then access with one of his new “ATM Machine” cards. It had previously taken about 3 weeks just to mail the expense report to anywhere in Africa. Cool doesn’t even come close to the awe we had.

Then email came along. I was living in London in the late 80s and early 90s, working for a large technology firm that was headquartered here in the States. A system from Wang was installed that allowed us to communicate internally to anyone in the UK office (thousand or so people) or any office anywhere in the world (20 thousand or so). Suddenly, we could send messages and communicate with our colleagues across the world. And all we had to do was wait until they were back at their desk either later that day, or the next day depending on where they were in the world. Oh, and we all had ‘mobile’ phones. Once again, very cool.

Then this whole Internet thing happened. It’s the late 90s, I’m back in South Florida working for a Web dev agency, and we grew the agency to 250 people, offices in Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta, Birmingham, New York. Email as we know it today was in full swing. And we had instant messaging! We could have conversations with our colleagues and clients in real time. Phones, Email, fax machines, instant messaging, cell phones (remember when the StarTac came out?). We were wired, and we were cool.

Which brings us to today. We now have iPhones and Blackberrys. Fax machines are rarely used anymore – I don’t think I even list it on my business card. We have emails galore (I have 3 that I check on an ongoing basis throughout the day – I have 2 others that I check about every week or so). The emails are forwarded to our mobiles. We have instant messaging (I have 2 different systems – iChat at work internally, and AIM for everyone else). We also have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendfeed, and a host of other platforms for communicating with each other, colleagues, clients. Each of these has combinations of email and instant messaging functionality. And let’s not forget texting (SMS and MMS).

Don’t check Twitter for a day, and you’ve missed out on so much of what’s going on, that it will impact your career. Well, it seems that way, at least.

So for me, this amounts to:

1. Work Email – Ongoing monitoring
2. Personal Email #1 – Given only to friends (people) – Ongoing monitoring
3. Personal Email #2 – Used for non-friends, and also to sign up for anything online – Ongoing monitoring
4. Personal Email #3 – Older version of #2, but gets so much spam I needed to create another email (#2) – checked about once a week
5. Personal Email #4 – Created to be able to access Yahoo groups when they were somewhat popular.
6. iChat Account – Ongoing monitoring while in the office
7. AIM Account – Ongoing monitoring
8. Facebook – Ongoing monitoring. Facebook has its own email and instant messaging capability. That would be the fifth email, and third IM account.
9. LinkedIn – Ongoing monitoring. Again with the ability to do email (#6). No instant messaging, as of yet.
10. Twitter – Ongoing monitoring. Depending on how you look at it, between 1 and 3 different IMs to follow, when you count regular tweets, @replies, and direct messages?
11. Office phone (who uses those anymore).
12. Mobile Phone, which is a Blackberry. Have this with me all the time. And of course, get notifications from the emails, from Facebook, from Twitter, from LinkedIn, and even from AIM. It sits on my desk, and buzzes all day long, everytime I get a message on one of these platforms.
13. Texting.
14. Voicemail – I have 2, one in my office, and one on my mobile, of course. And there’s one at home, but I don’t really count that one for some reason.
15. Personal Blog (this one, with a mirror) – ability for conversations in the comments.
16. Work Blog – ditto.

And I’m sure I’m leaving something out. Is it just me? Am I the only one? Do you also have this many ‘touchpoints?’ It’s impossible to disconnect. Try and disconnect for even a weekend, and you will never catch up. I don’t know about you, but I’m going crazy trying to keep it all together. I’m not so sure how cool this is anymore.

I once read a description of the life of a Victorian era, senior level British civil servant. He would spend his days creating handwritten letters to his counterparts across the world, in Europe, India, and Africa. Decisions on even minor matters would take weeks, serious decisions would take months as the letters went back and forth. He would take long lunches with colleagues, and be home by 5 PM for dinner and would spend evenings at his club. He would take 2 months off for vacation, spending his time painting landscapes in Tuscany each year. During this time, he would get 1 packet of letters that he would respond to.

A nice life, imho.

Well, gotta go. I have to make sure that this post is linked to on my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, and then tweet it on Twitter. Cross post it to the other blogs, Digg it, and tell everyone how del.icio.us it is. I also need to Furl it and Spurl it.

Oh, and please comment, so we can continue the conversation. Cool?

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The beauty of this campaign, for me, though, is that Miller isn’t even buying a true SuperBowl ad from NBC. They are buying a bunch of 1 second ads on the top 25 NBC affiliates for the ‘local’ rates during the SuperBowl. So while Anheuser-Busch is spending around $18MM for their ‘true’ Superbowl ads, Miller isn’t spending anywhere near that.

Miller is also getting a good buzz on (pun somewhat intended). People are talking about it. (Over 3,000 blog posts about it according to Technorati).

It’s a great campaign, and I love the way they marketed ‘around’ AB, got some word of mouth going on, and are spending less than their competition. There’s also a Youtube channel and a Facebook page, but both of these probably need a little more PR from Miller, as the traffic doesn’t seem to be that high.

I recently had a startup come into the office saying that they are going to raise all kinds of money, and that they want their ad to be in the Superbowl in 2010. They actually have what seems to be a solid, competitive product, in a growing industry. They may just make it. I tried to convince them that the $3 million dollars they were going to spend on 30 seconds in the SuperBowl would be much better spent on creating a true interactive marketing plan using search, email, viral, social media. For that much money, you can create an amazing campaign that will truly drive the business, be trackable, and drill down to a true ROI on their investment. Oh well, they have their sights set on the big game, with a one-shot campaign. I guess I’ll wait and see if they can raise the $$ they are looking for. Maybe the VCs will get them to see reality.

The greatest campaign I’ve ever heard of which hardly cost the advertiser anything, killed the competition and totally drove the business: New pizza shop in Australia had a very limited budget, so what did they do. They ran a series of inexpensive radio ads, asking listeners to rip out all of the pizzeria ads in the yellow pages, bring them in, and receive a free pizza with a sticker with their phone number. Well they basically put their competitors out of business, as theirs was the only phone number everyone had from that point. And the budget was all of $700. Love it! As a marketer, this is the type of campaign we should all be trying to bring to our clients.

It’s not always about doing the big, obvious thing.

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Love these little webapps, that do nothing but be totally creative and allow a few moments of escapism.

If you do Obamicon yourself, post a comment with the link. Would love to see what everyone else does.

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You can zoom from this:

To this:

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I was thinking about that a couple of weeks ago, and felt that while these are incredibly valid programs, there are so many ‘traditional’ techniques that could be implemented, and if they were would have tangible benefits. So I created a list of 100+ items, from very simple techniques that could be implemented in a day, and others that would take a little bit of planning and work. the idea is that before one implements these newfangled social media programs and start inviting people over, clean up your house/existing marketing programs.

We are releasing them one business day at a time on our blog, Livefeed. We’ve categorized them into areas such as SEM, SEO, Analytics, Blogging, PR, Email, Research. So far, we’ve release the first 15, and to give you an idea of what they are:

#1 Create a blog, it’s not for everyone, but it may be perfect for you

#2 Keyword rich press releases, why they are important

#3 Long tail keywords: a smart SEM strategy

#4 Anchor Text: Easy to do Right

#5 Track ROI Across All Channels (online and offline)

#6 Market to search engines with an XML sitemap

#7 Build your email database with a co-reg campaign

#8 Diversify your search engine marketing

#9 The more keywords the merrier

#10 Paid inclusion is always a sure thing

#11 Put your website on the map with DMOZ

#12 A spider simulator helps you market to search engines

#13 Promote your URL: Put it on everything

#14 Increase web visits by buying your own branded keywords

#15 Customer surveys

I will be posting updates every now and then, or you can check them out each day on Livefeed.

If you have any ideas of some topics, comment and let me know. Thx!

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Well, here goes. My first fully mobile post. This will open up entire new vistas of never being disconnected for me. I’m sure my family will be thrilled that I can now blog while at dinner, the movies, or when on the road (but hopefully not driving).

As far as ads go, a little risque, maybe. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a terrible ad, but then again, maybe I’m not the target demographic for it. And I’m certainly no prude.

But then again, with FB’s targeting capabilities, it should probably have not been shown to me at all. So, all in all, it was a bad execution, and also failed on the placement.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that Facebook took down all profile pictures last week that showed women breastfeeding, whether or not there was exposed breast. There was quite a bit of uproar over this, both within and outside of FB. Either ban all (semi) nudity, or don’t. But don’t allow ads to run like the one above

In my opinion, this is friggin ridiculous. I mean, FB is a private company, so they can do what they want. Their platform has become THE social platform on the Web. I don’t know what the statistics are, but I would think that maybe 50% of its members are women? Just seems like a huge PR opportunity missed by Facebook. How different would it have been if FB had reversed their decision to not allow breastfeeding pix, and then had donated some $$ to a related charity. That would have made the news, even more so than their original ban did. Totally missed opportunity.

As an aside, the divine Miss J breastfed all 3 of our kids until they pretty much weaned themselves, and I thought it was absolutely wonderful. And much, much less expensive than formula .

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I explained to him that it all depends, of course. What was it that he was trying to do? He asked me, ‘What do you mean, what am I trying to do?”

Like a lot of people out ‘there’ he was under the assumption that social media is an end unto itself. This thing that we are calling social media is just one (or many) channels available to reaching customers. And that like all marketing campaigns that would use any channel, two things that you have to understand are what are the goals for the campaign, and based on those goals, what channels are the best for reaching the customers.

Basically, what are you trying to do, and who are you trying to do it to. Based on those, go and find those people.

So before embarking on any social media campaign, truly understand is it a branding campaign, is it direct response, or maybe even customer service. By understanding what you are trying to accomplish, you will make the appropriate decisions about what social media platforms you use, and how you use them.

Technorati Tags:
social media, purpose of social media campaigns

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