Unified Studies - Portland Social Media, Web Design, and Web development

Advertising as Failure - Jeff Jarvis

Jarvis writes (and videos) on Buzzmachine of the notion of advertising as failure.

He says in part: "the ideal relationship a company should have with its customer is that it produces a great product the customer loves and talks about and thus sells; there is no need for advertising there."

True enough, and this is naturally where the concept of social media and listening come into play, as everyone knows now. Customer evangelists spreading the word, company listens and responds to concerns and problems, a two way conversation.

I think this begs one small question...isn't advertising sometimes used to get a product in front of some consumers, not always because the product is a failure that needs to be propped up by advertising?

New companies should consider the "too small to fail" approach when launching. Launch as small as you can, so you can be as nimble as possible, so you can change your strategy on the fly if need be...or change your PRODUCT on the fly if need be. It's the companies with giant burn rates that have to advertise their way into the consumer's heart. Combining the too small to fail approach, with the conversational tools available, and a targeted media and advertising spend to "grease the wheels" of beginning the conversation might be a good hybrid approach.

Spymaster, twitter and user-driven innovation

The backlash took less than one day to set in on @Spymaster.

Spy vs. Spy

Although there are plenty of ways for the twitter user to filter out the spymaster tweets (as described in the comments from the above Techcrunch article)...lots of folks are talking about how Twitter needs to do something about it. I think I am siding with the "twitter doesn't need to do anything" crowd. I think it should rely on the client/developers to see what problems arise and deal with them, and let twitter remain the "platform"...one thing spymaster is doing is getting users and developers to look at the infrastructure and ecosystem  to try to puzzle out solutions...or point to ones that already exist.

Many of the most useful twitter "features" came from the users...@replies, hashtags, etc. This is a (sorta) pivotal moment for Twitter when they will need to decide whether this ("this" meaning spymaster being perceived as spam, and as a degradation of the twitter experience) is actually a problem or not. I think this falls into the user-driven innovation pile, and this will inevitably influence the evolution of Twitter...we can't say yet if that's a bad thing, and some would argue that evolution is neither good nor bad, it just is. I think spymaster is a very very clever use of twitter, and the first of an onslaught of social games I am sure.

But, the bottom line is, (I think) users (and I include developers in that term) will figure the best way out of this "problem". People say "zombies" ruined Facebook. I have had a relatively zombie and poke-free Facebook existence, and I expect my twitter experience won't be ruined by a few spies.

Non-profits, social media, and cause marketing.

Wow...here is a pretty comprehensive breakdown of a social media campaign, run by Scott Henderson of MediaSauce for Share Our Strength. The best part is the post-op he does, identifying where mistakes might have been made...no campaign is perfect.

Cause Marketing or Cause Me to Puke Marketing

Any non-profit looking to jump into the cause marketing pool, should read and learn. From Beth Kanter's excellent blog.