See no Evil. Speak No Evil. Hear no Evil.

I have notes on several blog posts I want to write, but for some reason this one moved to the top of my list.  There’s a good, wholesome reason for this — I assure you.   On my way to work this morning, I considered browsing the blog options on my Kindle again.  I finally gave in a few months back and began paying for a couple of blogs to be delivered to my Kindle.  It’s actually very worth the pennies I’m paying.  I had finished reading what I had and thought I’d see if there was anything else I felt like adding.

Then I remembered: Porn.

Apple has taken some criticism for banning porn from the App Store.  I thought it was a pretty silly choice, too.  Let’s be honest porn is the money behind a lot of early innovation, especially anything that  involved home/private consumption of materials.

Now, have you ever checked out the blog listings for Kindle.  I kind of needed to Listerine my eyes out afterwards.   It’s not that I’m a prude.  Well, okay, maybe a little.  But O.M.G.  Not what I was expecting to find under “Lifestyle & Culture” blogs. You just shouldn’t have to put a big NSFW warning on that link.

In the end, it’s simply an information architecture issue.  The blog offerings need an “Adult Materials” type of category.  It’s not  just to keep people like me from not seeing it.  It’s actually good for business.  Some people are clearly looking for this stuff.  Why make them hunt for it?  It’s like on any corporate website where they insist on using some branded or internal jargon term for a content area, and then the only people who know what’s there is the brand managers.  Not really a good idea.

Let’s help people who want to find the content find it, and put clear notices for those who don’t to stay away.

And yes, I just used porn to talk about consumer-centric information architecture.

I’m not sure I know anyone who works in advertising who doesn’t love the show Mad Men. Their season 3 promotion allows you to create your Mad Men avatar! I had to jump right on this. That’s me in the bright blue in the middle.

I noticed that the cartoon versions of Don Draper and Roger Sterling (left) are looking a lot like RTC’s Matt Connor and Jeff Ross. Does that make Barry Kessel the Bertram Cooper of RTC?

Needless to say, I think this promotion is a brilliant use of social media and viral marketing. Check the Twitter avatar of half the people who work in advertising and they have changed over to Mad Men avatars in the past few days. But the question always becomes, how do you prove success on promotions like this. RTC wasn’t involved in this promotion, but here’s what I’d do. Until the show airs, you can’t determine real ROI of increased viewers. So, right now we’d be watching the leading indicators. But what are those leading indicators? Here are a few of the stats we’d be watching:

Stats as of 07/29/2009 for past 7 days:

• URL posted to Twitter 685 times
• URL posted to 112 blogs
• “Mad Men Yourself” mentioned on 84 blogs
• “Mad Men Avatar” mentioned on 65 blogs
• 315 results on Flickr for “mad men yourself”
• Posted to Delicious 224 times

One thing we learn right away is that Twitter fans are Mad Men fans. It’s an interesting piece of data for future promotions. A quick check on my Facebook friends showed more than a few have also utilized and shared their avatars! Names are obscured to protect their privacy.

Lots to learn from this promotion, and lots of fun to be had!

[tags]mad men, mad men yourself, marketing, advertising, social, viral, word of mouth[/tags]

I have nothing I can possibly add to this.

Last week I had the privelege of speaking at a 4As (American Association of Advertising Agencies) meeting of Kansas City advertising agencies executives. They were in NYC for a day of marketing & advertising fun for the Kansas City Council Board of Governors meeting at AAAA headquarters. It was quite a full bill of speakers with topics ranging from trends in media planning to consumer insights, and of course social media.

I decided to take advantage of SlideShare.net to socialize my social media presentation to the folks at AAAA, and anyone else who might be interested.

This is the second or third time I’ve done this presentation, and I’m now inspired to do a part two. So look out for the 5 Myths of Social Media & Marketing (Part II) in the near future. Here are the Ten Myths of Social Media & Marketing, the first five are covered in this presentation:

1. Social computing is a niche activity
2. Only a few people are involved in social computing/media
3. Only millenials are into social media
4. It doesn’t matter if your audience are "inactives"
5. Social computing has hit its peak
6. If you build it they will come
7. Social media is free
8. I should build a community for my brand
9. Social media has no trackable ROI
10. Blogging is done

[tags]social media, presentation, myths, marketing, 4as, aaaa[/tags]

This will be the 4th or 5th time I’ve done this particular presentation to either staff or clients, so I’ve got the shtick pretty down.  I’m also grateful that this is a topic I’m more than well enough versed in that if I need to go off script, I can.  I’m never sure how much people know about social media from a marketing context.  Sometimes the basic presentation is a “duh” for people, so if the information I planned on presenting doesn’t thrill and chill — I can just move into something more compelling for them.

Truthfully, this really doesn’t happen often.  The data in the “5 Myths of Social Media and Marketing” presentation I developed really is new to most people.  Marketers, understandably, stick to the tried and true most of the time.  Another factor in my favor is that while they may see the data, they may not really know how to apply it to their clients or marketing plans yet.  And, frankly, most people have lives so they don’t follow this nonsense like I do.   Thank goodness for that or I wouldn’t be nearly as employable.

I’m also hoping to be able to post this presentation deck to SlideShare in the near future.  Been talking to the folks at RTCRM about posting it to the blog, with fairly good results.  Of course, most of the time I’m busy working on client business or pitches — hence the long gaps in my professional blogging here and at RTCRMs blog. I do find time to post to Twitter.  Thank goodness for the low pressure of micro-blogging.

[tags]presentations, blogging, social media, 4as, aaaa, advertising[/tags]

A lot of my clients at RTCRM are pharma companies, so I read quite a few Pharma blogs. They are constantly complaining about the lack of Web 2.0 and social Web elements in Pharma marketing. For example this article from World of DTC Marketing touches on many issues that I encounter when working with clients, but never gets to the true issues that we and our clients are dealing with.

Has this blogger and every other Pharma Marketing blogger never heard about FDA regulations? That’s why Pharma can’t move beyond Web 1.0 — they don’t have the technical & legal processes in place to deal with Adverse Event reporting. They are also extremely, and somewhat understandably, risk adverse. The major issue with Pharma marketing is that the lawyers run the show and too few organizations are educating them or working with them to craft processes to mitigate risk.

Another major issue is risk. Getting truly engaged in the social Web can help put a “human” face on a Pharma company if it’s done well, but it opens companies up to more risk and different kinds of risks than they may be used to dealing with. The other question is should they focus their social Web efforts on consumers or healthcare professionals? Direct to consumer (DTC) advertising is something that pharma companies debate the merits of and a lot of consumers think it’s a bad thing. Pharma is making some really interesting inroads to the social Web with healthcare professionals via sites like Sermo.

One last, very ignored issue, is patient privacy. There is a lot of question about how pharma companies getting involved in social media may be a conflict with HIPPA and other privacy regulations. Zack Rodman wrote two detailed posts about privacy issues on the RTCRM blog. These begin to detail how complicated an issue this can be for pharma companies and pharma marketers.

Believe me, I’d like to see more of my clients move incorporate social computing into their marketing plans, but I want them to do it the right way. Set some organizational foundations, test the waters, and determine if there’s a decent ROI before jumping in head first and having an expensive disaster to clean up.

Please, pharma bloggers, find a new drum beat. How about some constructive suggestions instead of just complaints?

[tags]pharma marketing, DTC marketing, social media marketing, social media, pharma[/tags]

I love when a company actually takes the time to know its customers well enough that they would think of a promotion like this. Jones Soda is a quirky micro-brew soft drink company that makes bizarre soda flavors like Turkey & Gravy for Thanksgiving and Jelly Doughnut for Hannukah. To be fair, they also make more mainstream flavors like Rootbeer and Cola, but I think their limited editions are far more interesting.

But…I digress.

Recently Jones Soda launched a promotion with ICanHasCheezburger to create a new label for their sodas. Beyond this they’ve created the ultimate in Web mashup experience. You can order a 12-pack of Jones Soda with your own customized “LOLcat” label for your soda. Now if you’ve never heard of ICanHasCheezburber or LOL cats, you’ve missed out on one the Web latest and greatest time wasters. Heck, there’s even an LOL Cat translation of the bible now. By the way, LOL cat is a generic term. You can really use any animal for this, hence the Hippo shot above.

Jones Soda cements their “hipster” status by joining forces with the ican crew and clearly knows that this site and the LOLcat experience appeals to their customers. I’ll be really curious to see how they don on sales. Even I’m considering it buying my own custom 12-pack.

[tags]jones soda, lolcat, i can has cheezburger, internet, promotions, marketing[/tags]