Brands Saying Bae Distills Flawed Social Media Stategy

Not Your Bae

If you aren't following @BrandsSayingBae on Twitter yet, you probably will shortly.

The self-explanatory account finds corporate social media accounts using the slang term "bae" and tweets images of the use with short sarcastic commentary.

Olive Garden, a subsidiary of Darden Restaurants, Inc., really gets me. pic.twitter.com/gVX0TKBvxT
— Brands Saying Bae (@BrandsSayingBae) December 28, 2014

By simply holding up a mirror to the practice of established mainstream brands using slang, @BrandsSayingBae manages to skewer the strategy as a flawed attempt for achieving relevance.

I Hate Triggers: When Not to Automate Your Social Media

This past week, the New England Patriots of the National Football League were embarrassed when an automated social media campaign prominently tweeted the racist Twitter handle of their one millionth follower.

If you are interested in the details, Deadspin caught a screen capture of the now deleted tweet and imagery.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to automate marketing. It is what allows many thousands of emails to go out to customers at an affordable CPM. It is what can allow a small team to monitor many social media channels around the clock.

The issue here is that an automated campaign sent out unvetted content. That is the no-no, and something an automated campaign should never do.

How to Prepare for Location Services

Buzz is building again for location-based services (LBS) with the emergence of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, in particular in the form of the Apple iBeacon. Added to technology such as ultra-wide band and WiFi tracking, LBE continues to make it inevitable that location will be an important part of the digital marketing mix.

Even if you do not have this technology in place now, you can lay prepare today for LBS. Having the ground ready means when you need to make the case for LBS implementation (or respond to the demand for it from the C-suite) you will get there faster. Here's how.

How to Identify Your Brand Locally Beyond Sports

Previously I wrote on the problems with tying branding efforts to local sports. What it comes down to is over-reliance on one area of local interest.

So to go beyond that, think about other ways your local audience spends their time and what local means to them.

Here are some areas outside sports where your marketing efforts can broaden your audience.

Parks and Rec

Getting involved with local community services can entangle with politics. Certain programs or initiatives may be pet projects and have local or larger ramifications.

Parks tend to nullify this. There may be debate about how much to spend on parks (or how to name them) but their very existence is rarely a hot potato, and they have usually been in existence for some time.

So why not identify with them? Sports teams have their own marketing machines, and plenty of eyes on them. City parks do not have national sponsors, and they feel more a part of the neighborhood. The micro-neighborhood.

So get to know the parks in the area and use them in your local affiliation. A recent example here in Baltimore is a new skatepark, and local businesses have stepped up with sponsorship (as seen in the cover art for this article).

If you have a brick & mortar presence, there may be a dog run, bike path, or hiking trail closer to you than you realize. Open Google Maps, type in your address, and take a look.

Advantages of identifying with parks:

• Hyper local
• Parks appeal to families
• Outgoing people use parks
• Sponsorship opportunities are affordable and foster direct goodwill (rather than the indirect goodwill from working with sports franchises)

Charities and Community Organizations

Being familiar with local charities and local community groups is again a way to create good will directly. It may be more political than parks, though, so understand what if any connotations there may be for working with an organization.

Where I grew up in Philadelphia, the Mummers were a source of local community organization through their annual New Year's Day parade and did their share of fundraising.

But there are many who associate the Mummers with a less tolerant, less inclusive Philadelphia. Do your homework before endorsing any group. This goes double for the ease with which a blind re-tweet can happen.

Artists

I mean artists and art broadly. Wherever you are, and whatever the discipline, there are people creating and sharing and trying to make a living from their art.

This includes bands, DJs, painters, sculptors, comedians, and acting troupes. There is established culture (museums and concert halls) and counter culture (fringe festivals), pop culture and the avant-garde.

With that diversity, it should be easy to sit down, think about your own brand, your own target market, and what kind of artists you should be working with and referencing in social media.

This works for anyone. My grandfather is a retired plumber. If you are thinking about hot water heaters and leaky pipes, that would seem to be as far from fine art as possible.

But if I had to produce a social media campaign for him today, I would happily incorporate local pottery artisans and talk up the beauty of custom hand-painted and locally-fired tiles and what it could do to make a bathroom or kitchen remodeling job personal and unique.

You can make a connection to local artists. And with the exception of all but a few that have broken through to mass popularity, they are all looking for partners and opportunities to spread the word about their own work.

Schools

Schools once again are hyper-local, and people identify with them strongly (one reason why the sports teams associated with colleges are able to succeed commercially). This is true at all levels, so think about what part of the educational spectrum would tie-in best with your product or service.

Then find the schools that match your geographical presence and reach out.

• Private schools and larger institutions are likely to have a capital fund or other fundraising arm that  you can contact about how to work together
• Public institutions are more likely to have an outside interest group, such as a PTA, that does events or other activities
• High school and college alumni associations are excellent points of contact 

Food

I'm in Baltimore. Quick - what food comes to mind?

I'll bet blue crabs or crab cakes was the first thing that came to mind. And indeed locals will associate and identify with that.

But if you do a little more research, like driving around town a little bit, you're going to find fried fish and chicken, and pit beef, to be much more common part of local taverns and take out places, and every bit as local.

Talk about crabs and you are working with the obvious here. Talk about chicken box, Western fries, and a half and half, and you show you have done your homework.

In summation, that is what local identification is all about. Going a little deeper, and beyond the obvious.

That means going beyond the obvious, and that means including topics other than local sports. I hope this post has given you some ideas how to do it.

6 Drawbacks of Tying Local Marketing to Local Sports

Local sports would seem to appeal to a broad audience and be ideal for building a local following. But there are drawbacks.

Union Brewing is a local craft brewery in the Baltimore City limits. They know the local market and how to connect, naming one of their first beers "Balt Alt" and building a strong following in a short amount of time.

When they started shipping beer in summer of 2012 they also offered brewery tours on Saturdays and opened a taproom for sampling. I was there within the first couple of weeks, along with about half a dozen others.

I have seen the crowds grow at these tours over time, and one of the first early attendance boosts was when Union Brewing gave away a purple t-shirt in the middle of the Ravens Superbowl run in early 2013 (a good example of guerrilla marketing, too, a topic for another time).  It went so well they repeated with another give away during the same run.

Adam Silver Just Put on a Clinic in Crisis Management

In reacting to the leaked audio tape of NBA franchise owner Donald Sterling seemingly making inflammatory racist remarks, NBA commissioner Adam Silver put forth a textbook example of how to manage a crisis in general, and a public relations nightmare specifically.

Let us examine how well Mr. Silver did his job to lead, protect the image of the NBA, and address the situation.

Parikh on Misleading Data Visualization

Ravi Parikh of Heap Analytics wrote a nice piece today on lying with data visualization.
 
It is a solid piece showing three ways that data can be misleading when depicted visually, including one absolute whopper of reversing the Y-axis to make an increase in homicide look like a decrease.

I also think the false composition pie chart was informative, as I have not seen that in the past.

Although he alludes to it with the title of his post, I wish Parikh would have mentioned the classic "How to Lie with Statistics" by Darrell Huff (Norton, 1954). 

Although 60 years old, Huff's book is still worth reading for anyone involved in Marketing or Public Relations. Chapter 5, "The Gee-Whiz Graph" (as illustrated by Irving Geis and shown here) is a break down on Parikh's first example, removing the origin for the Y axis.

And the sixth chapter, on how 2 dimensional images can exaggerate linear differences, is also an example that continues to be used to manipulate.

Thanks, Ravi, for the insight, and for giving me an excuse to pull this gem off the bookshelf today.

PayPal Boss Right to Be Ticked Off

The title of this article at Venture Beat today, "PayPal chief reams employees: Use our app or quit", seems designed as link bait. Is there really surprise in an industry publication that a CEO would want employees to use its own products?  On reading the article, though, it seems author Jordan Novet believes PayPal CEO David Marcus is out of line.

If so I could not disagree more.

Please click through to their article and read for yourself, but I will try to summarize here before expressing my thoughts.

7 Things Your Email Subscription Form Must Do

I should probably start this list with a baseline "must do", which is establish an email subscription form on your Web site.

Email is still the preferred way that consumers want to hear from brands (research work done by ExactTarget) and the only way to get permission is to ask. So build that form.

Keeping up with the Joneses, Garcias, and Wongs - Three Ways to Keep your Multilingual Site up to Date

J. Freedom du Lac had an excellent article today in the Washington Post on Maryland Live!'s efforts to market to Asian players. In the article, Mr. du Lac mentions that the Maryland Live! Web site is translated into Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Being the inquisitive person that I am I had to take a look. I noticed some things that show just how difficult
multicultural marketing can be.

Movable Ink: 65% of US email opened 1st on Mobile Device

If you needed any other reminder to make sure your email is at least mobile aware, the latest from Movable Ink should serve.

According to the Movable Ink 2013 Q4 Consumer Preference report, in the US market 65% of email is first opened on a mobile device.

How to make sure your email is at least mobile aware?

Review of "Big Data" by Viktor Meyer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier

"Big Data - A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think" is a thought provoking take on the increasing use of large pools of accumulated data for predictive analytics.

The authors are Viktor Meyer-Schönberger, professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University,  and Kenneth Cukier, data editor for The Economist.

As such, regular readers of The Economist will recognize some of the early examples cited in the book, such as the Farecast business modeled on predictive ability for airfare price changes and Google search predicting the spread of flu. Do not let that put you off picking up the book and continuing to read it.

The authors do a good job of first defining Big Data as the "ability ...to harness information in novel ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value." It is not just about having large databases. Those have existed already.

Disney to Suck Up Data Exhaust

John Foreman, chief data scientist at email service provider (ESP) Mail Chimp, has written a nice Gigaom on Disney's Big Data efforts.
piece at

For years, Disney has done things to make trips convenient in exchange for money. They abolished individiual ride tickets (I still remember E-tickets from our first family trip to Orlando - that seriously dates me) in exchange for daily passes.

In one large family trip that we took to the park many years ago, we used the "Golden Key" credit cards that gave us access to any food option in the park in exchange for paying the food cost for the trip up front.

Disney is now on board with the concept that the convenience is worth more than the money directly.
 
By creating a new, chic, high-tech accessory of a rubberized visitor band enabled with RFID, Disney can also track everything you do in the park.

John Foreman does a nice job comparing and contrasting with other efforts to track consumer behavior, and the comment thread explores more of the underlying technology.

I have just finished reading "Big Data" by Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, and this is a way for Disney to produce and use what they call "data exhaust". You aren't just using entering the park, paying for a cup of coffee, and using Fast Pass to get on a ride. You are telling Disney how long you spent on Main Street before leaving, what other shops you entered, and what route you took to get to your first ride. You let them know how long you spent together and when you separated from the family.

Do you have access to this level of detail in data as a marketer? You may already even if you don't realize it. My favorite example of this is my supermarket hand held bar scanner.

Giant offers scanners at the entrance that allow me to build up my order as I go, rather than wait until self checkout at the end to scan goods.

The immediate appeal to Giant and marketers seems to be the ability to do real-time marketing and make me offers as I shop.

However, in addition to the same list of goods tied to my loyalty card that they would get at any checkout is a big bonus: a chronology of how long I spend in the store, and how I move around. That is data exhaust.

Will they make use of it? At some point they will if they are not already but they need to plan ahead for it. Most basically, knowing where items are stocked in the store or having passive scanners to track the device is necessary to tie my scanning to location would be important.

What data exhaust are your customers producing? Do you know how to use it? Disney is already on it.

Intuit Turbo Tax "The Year of the You" Commercial FTW

I love the new Intuit TurboTax commercials (60 and 90 second versions) that have been running during the NFL playoffs here in the U.S.

Clearly an appeal to ego, it manages to dismiss fears of doing your own taxes by placing it in the context of financial experiences like buying a house or getting a new job as well as strong emotional ones like marriage and child birth.

The John C. Reilly narration is professional and folksy at the same time.

Though the spot is meant for traditional broadcast media, the Intuit team has made it available on their YouTube page.

The Biggest Mistake Marketers Make with Pinterest

Pinterest experienced expansive growth in 2013 reaching 70 million registered users in July, and grew in importance to marketers (for example, see this article on growth in referrals to publishers).

With limited resources, your marketing team can be forgiven for not creating and maintaining an active presence on Pinterest. There simply might not be enough time to curate pinboards and to find and follow influencers there when resources might be used on other more predominant channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Regular participation on Pinterest may not be part of the daily plan.

However, do not take that as a pass for completely ignoring Pinterest, especially when it comes to incoming Web traffic.

Marketers cannot be given a pass when they lose an inbound lead that originates from Pinterest.

Whenever a Pinterest user pins an image from the Web, the URL of the page that hosted that image is stored along with the pin. Repins preserve that information. And whenever someone else finds that pin, whether from their home feed or in a search, the image continues to link back to the original URL.

For a retailer with a catalog item that debuted this week, that URL is almost certainly going to be active. But for older content, it becomes more and more likely that the URL will not be active.

As an example, looking for kids clothes I found this on Pinterest. It might make a nice gift for my nephew, so I clicked through the image to Hot Topic, the online retailer that offered the shirt, only to find:

A Toast for Jon Taffer's "Raise the Bar"

Jon Taffer is star of the popular reality TV series Bar Rescue. Although the initial draw for many might be the way Jon Taffer dresses down bar owners and employees alike, prolonged interest in the show is sustained by his clear understanding of the bar industry and broader management concepts, and his ability to turn businesses around.

As a result his newly published book "Raise the Bar", though clearly focused on the bar business, has plenty to offer as a general business book.