Garlic Festival & Borderfest: Making People Matter

Ed Struzik, an IBM guy by day and a Gilroy Garlic Festival 2008 President, is an awesome speaker. He mingled with the audience, encouraged questions throughout his presentation, and virtually demanded we interact with him. The festival is 16 years old, far outlasting the typical festival life cycle of 3-5 years, as told to us earlier today by Dan McConnell. One of the key ingredients, one that was not in place in the beginning, is the combination of support for and accountability by the volunteers and the sponsors.

Imagine, a waiting list to volunteer at the festival. In my world, that is nearly unheard of! Imagine, being a primary fundraising event for nonprofit organizations, and turning away a $25,000 sponsorship from Gillette.

Yet those very restrictions are part of what guide the event. It comes from valuing several components:

• The time and energy of the volunteers
• The time and energy of the volunteer organizers
• The money and attention of the sponsors
• The time and attention of the attendees

Volunteer Secrets
Ed presented this quadrant of attributes that helps them manage their volunteers by matching them with the best fitting tasks and by weeding out those who really aren't up to the task, this year.

Typical Sponsorship
Last year, Calphalon paid $15,000 to provide the pans for two cooking demo's and branded shopping bags at the merchandise booth. Calphalon also included a 10% coupon to the nearby kitchen outlet store, Result: They saw a four-fold increase in foot traffic and sales "went through the roof."

Joe Vera, CEO of Borderfest, says his event does not pay for any city services; instead they have built a strong partnership with the local community. They have over 1000 volunteers, many who come back year after year. "We give them ownership."

• They feature a different country every year. WOrk in advance with the local schools to develop a curriculum so the kids learn in advance, then experience it in person, and, telling their parents and aunties and uncles too.
• Volunteers go to training twice a year. "We want the volunteers to hear the same things we are hearing as we plan the event."
• Signage is very controlled and specific, so we keep the experience for the attendees in sync with the brand.
• Got to be creative and do things differently. "I'm always traveling with a camera to take pictures of ideas that we can implement."
• Give back to the community: $5.2 million impact on the community this year.

Joe's made his presentation available on line here. Awesome Joe! Mahalo.

Targeted, Downloadable Video Commands Highest Value

From this recent post over at Web Video Report 080327, it's clear to see that having targeted audiences and offering downloadable media both command higher rates than general audience and embedded media - a direct reflection of their higher value to both consumers of the content as well as to show sponsors.

Most of these companies reported CPM rates for a wide range of pre/mid/post roll video, host shout outs, overlays, etc. Goodnight Burbank's numbers are for product placement per episode.

What was not discussed is the relationship to an online community, aka social network associated with each show. These user communities only increase the value, as they don't just consume the media, they keep talking about it over in the community - which presents added opportunities for banner advertising and special offers.

SHOW/SITE	RATES	PAST ADVERTISERS
blip.tv	$10-$100+	Unilever, Dewars, Comedy Central, HBO, GoDaddy, Adobe
TV Guide	$25-$30	ATT/Cingular Wireless, Kraft
CNN	$25+	Orbitz, Lending Tree, Chrysler, Apple, Chevrolet, Netflix, Sears, Toyota
Goodnight Burbank	$3K-$8K	HBO
Mania TV	$10-$30	GM, Honda, Toyota, Verizon, AT&T, NBC, ABC, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Old Spice, L'Oreal, Sony, Nike, Coke, Citibank, XBox, Best Buy, HBO, Victoria Secret, WWE
Revision3 / Diggnation	$60-$80	Virgin Atlantic, Adagio Teas, Body by Venus, Sony, Microsoft, FX Networks, Adobe
For Your Imagination	$20-$60	Graco, BabyBjorn, TJMaxx

CNN and TV Guide feature general audiences and embeddded video. The other sites feature targeted shows and allow users to subscribe to their shows for viewing on the device of their choice, at the time of their choice. Many of the independently produced shows also have social networks or websites that encourage ongoing group discussion.

Customers are Messy

I am at the SXSW Interactive conference listening to Forrester analyst Charlene Li talking about Social Revolutionaries. She just described how some companies act like they have the perfect customer as a porcelain figurine in the sales and marketing department. They want to sell to this "ideal person" and psychologically resist or ignore real customer data and experiences.

It reminds me of my first business 20 years ago when I owned an exercise club and traveled the world training instructors and setting up health and fitness programs. Most people wanted to teach the most fun classes, to have the most advanced equipment, to work out really hard - because those were the things that drew them into the business.

But there are relatively few people who share that level of interest in health or fitness ability.

To have more customers (and a stronger bottom line as well as bottom) meant to open your arms and embrace the less than perfect bodies. My default message was:

Bring me your bad backs, your bulging bellies, your weak knees, your aching feet, your stressed out minds, and your defeated spirits. I will walk with you side by side and help you rebuild your energy, enjoy your body, and enliven your mind.

This meant I could not do some of my favorite moves: why should I impose that on my customers? It meant having unglamorous people in my club - but these people were far more loyal because I paid attention to them.

Way back then Reebok was ripping a new shoe line "aerobic shoes" and growing enormously, while the Nike board had the following discussion:

Board Member 1: Reebok is selling these aerobic shoes like mad. Should we get into that business?

Board Member 2: What the hell do we want to have anything to do with a bunch of fat women kicking their legs in the air?

Two years later Nike could no longer resist the urge to make money off these fat women and men. They realized there was room to support elite runners and Michael Jordan's along with the masses of people wanting to be healthier and wear a functional shoe as well..

The fact that your customers are making mashup videos about you on YouTube, talking about you on their blogs, and using your products in strange ways, IS THE GOOD NEWS. There is magic and millions in those messes, if you are willing to set aside your own prejudices about who should be using your stuff.

[Read more]

Clinton & Obama: A lesson of losing control of your brand

Many of my colleagues (Mitch Joel, Shel Holtz, Valeria Maltoni) and I frequently speak to members of PRSA, IABC, and advertising agencies explaining as best we can how consumers now own the brand. Good will increasingly cannot be bought and the political season is giving us striking examples of the mechanics of how "web 2.0" - "new media" - "social media" (choose your buzz) have changed the landscape of both business communication and brand marketing.

Frank Rich has this in today's New York Times editorial page:

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to "who knows how many" Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the Yes We Can Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)

Ed. Note: Video inserted at the end of this post to save you a click-thru.

I have two points to make. First is to note the extreme shift in balance of power as to who controls your brand. Hillary is trying, some would say desperately, to control her brand and essentially trick people into voting for her. She (along with Bill presumably) are convinced they are the best for the country. The country, increasingly, is demonstrative otherwise. She can spend money and stage "staged" events with planted questioners, but we have learned as consumers of media as well as of products, when someone is "faking it up." (My favorite way to describe the traditional art of advertising's dark side.)

Second, one of the best measurements of how well your brand is being received, is the way that people play with it. Are they promoting you or are they disparaging you? It is not that hard to tell these days.

The great opportunity for business is that we can learn from the political season. We can observe how losing control can be tragic, comedic, and/or a fast trip from relative obscurity to leader of the pack.

Footnote Observations

1. It is still early on the date of publication of Frank Rich's editorial (cited above) and there are over 500 comments already posted. People have opinions and they want to share them.
2. My mom, a lifelong Republican, said she would consider voting for Obama before McCain because, "Obama has class." In this age of communication transparency, things like class definitely can shine through all the traditional mud-slinging.

HAF - Links from Roxanne’s Presentation

This post is a summary of the conversation we had at the Hawaii Advertising Federation Conference. Please feel free to join in. Tip: Lots of links here, so right-click or control-click to open them in a new window.

Advertising online is fraught with challenges. Most web savvy consumers have learned to tune them out, as people are increasingly displeased with advertising in general. A large part is due to ads getting noisier and more ubiquitous. I was on a US Air flight recently and when it came time for drinks, and the tray tops came down covered in ads, I heard three different people complain out loud. People are tired of the intrusiveness and one-way-ness of most ad messaging. They want to have conversations that are two-way. The nice way to put this, is that advertising is due for an upgrade.

Since my expertise in online, the underlying theme today was to convey how the internet is a foreign country. It has it's own practices, many of which are the opposite of their offline counterparts. The pace is faster, the look and feel is less polished in most cases, the interactivity is high, and there is a good chance someone is talking about you whether you know it or not. You may use email, Google, and have your own website. (That's web 1.0). To be a successful traveler, you've got to leave the Holiday Inn in this foreign country and go out to meet the vocal locals. (That's web 2.0.) The social web is filled opportunities and pitfalls for advertisers.

A Few of Our Group Metrics

• Most of the 70 or so people in the room had read a blog before.
• Less than 10 had left a comment on a blog.
• 2 had written in a blog.
• About 10 belonged to LinkedIn.
• 1 person was on Twitter.

Benefits and Buzzwords
Your power comes from joining the conversation. At it's most basic form, by adding a comment, you create a valued in-bound link back to your web site. You also add your point of view. You can in many cases claim thought leadership for your company, for your industry, for your customers, for your vendors. Read my post on how and when to leave blog comments.

Remember relationship marketing? The tools and apps (applications) of web 2.0 are relationship marketing on steroids. People stay longer on sites that allow them to do something other than read some text or look at a some pictures. On blogs and socnets (social networks) people click through to more pages. That translates into longer session times and more page views which are a resource you can sell, or sell ads on. And the relationships you build with your visitors? Priceless.

Accepting comments on your site allows people to tell you what they love, what's not working so you can fixit sooner than later, ideas for new products and services, and most importantly they build trust with you. If you talk back in the comments, it shows you pay more than lip service to the concept of listening. When it comes time to buy, they will come to you first, because you have already established a relationship and possibly market leadership too. All the while you are getting free market research data, if you think of it that way.

And regardless of whether or not you (as the company) are engaged in online conversations, your brand is being discussed, debated, celebrated and parodied online. This brand democratization can be ripe with opportunity as well as fraught with bloopers. Your odds are better the more you are engaged. Here's a "link to the YouTube Mac vs PC" ads, the real ones and the spoofs, some of which Jason Sperling showed to us at lunch today.

Social Networks
Thanks for joining our "analog" social network! Now that you've had practice creating a profile and sharing a few details about yourself with someone you did not previously know, you are ready to go out an join an online social network. Try one under a personal screen name to get some more practice before you start doing this on behalf of your company. And check out Mitch Joel's blog on personal branding to get tips on how to benefit from your participation.

Free Blogging Services: (Set one up and play with it for personal use)
WordPress
Blogger
iWeb - if you're on a Mac (It's part of the iLife software package)

Sites I mentioned:
CNN - Click on "From the Blogs" link below an article to see recent, related blog posts
Honolulu Advertiser - find a news item and look for "Reader Comments"
Technorati - indexes millions of blogs; look for blogs here and claim your blog here once you have one
LifeHacker - popular blog with tips for managing your life
Chris Brogan - Look at the "MyBlogLog": in the orange-bounded box in left column to see recent readers (we left a comment on the Mac Book Air post)
My Sister's Site - pets and kids in southern california
My Mom's Site - Blanche's Art Show

Business Examples:
Mary Schmidt - marketer who grew her service business with a blog
Association for Downloadable Media - Association for Downloadable Media; multi-author association blog
MightyJ Music - local girl band who gets bookings by having a video blog; doubled site traffic after an appearance on Beach Walks with Rox, as compared to zero traffic increase after appearing on local morning television in Honolulu
Legal discussion of Hasbro/Mattel - Scrabble and Scrabulous discussion of Hasbro/Mattel/Scrabulous trademark infringement
Discussion of Ford Black Mustang Fan Club issues

Social Network (SocNet) Sites:
LinkedIn
MySpace.com
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Viddler

Please leave a comment and tell me what you liked, didn't like, and anything I may have missed! I am working on some additional training programs targeted for agencies and business communicators to learn how to use the social web effectively. Let me know if you're interested.

Mahalo nui for inviting me. I had a blast - and hope we can continue learning together.

Rent or Buy? How Does a Company Decide to Use New Media

I just tripped across the Custom Content Conference being held this March in New Orleans. It is targeted at brand managers and ad folks who may be considering creating their own serialized web content or new media/social media channels. I thought I'd mention a few of the companies who have already ventured in to this arena, and hopefully you may have some more to add to the list.

Whole Foods has been doing this for about a year with both audio and video podcasts, all of which are produced using in-house talent. Scott Simons, Regional Marketing Director, hosts the Secret Ingredient show. There has been discussion on the Yahoo Videoblogging List about this show and the opportunities to also integrate both freelance-produced content as well as user-generated content. Word on the street is that Whole Food is not interested, preferring to control the show in-house. It's a full service blog-based site, with comments accepted and RSS. Visitors can manually download the flash version of the episode, though that is not playable on most MP3 devices.

American Express last year launched LX.tv which is a combination traditional web site and video blog, using the "new" part of the media and not so much the "social" part of the media. It is Flash-based, which makes the site a bit slow for my tastes, but does allow the designers to create a very rich, urban mood and feel. They use freelance contributors and the episodes focus on restaurants (AMEX merchants) and celebrity/social life. You can get an RSS feed, and in their grab the embed code for each episode, but the flash programming makes that part very cumbersome and the interface is elusive unless you know what the little icons represent. Viewer comments are not accepted.

Starwood Hotels launched The Lobby as a text blog in 2006. It also hires freelance contributors around the world, sharing local life stories and virtually always ending with a link to a hotel or hotel service found in the region. They have started including YouTube-hosted videos made by their contributors. I really like the widget they have in addition to traditional RSS options.

We are in production with a Fortune 100 company to develop a branded show that is educational in nature. Naturally, the goal is to drive sales for this particular service, but the company believes (and so do we) that creating original branded content that is useful and entertaining using new media (aka your own internet TV station) is a terrific, largely untapped opportunity at this time.

There are many other examples of companies who are doing direct ad sponsorships of independently-produced shows. I discussed the Ford - Amanda Across America collaboration in this post with follow-up in this post. Earthlink was an early sponsor of the Washington Post video podcasts and pharmaceutical companies are pursing this as well.

I definitely have my preferences, based on years of experience as a consumer (!) and also the past three years of being on the forefront of creating audio and video content for the web. Keep in mind as well that the criteria will vary depending on your audience and your product/service - there is no cookie-cutter solution here. And if things go wrong, as they did on the Edelman-managed video for Walmart, do like Edelman did and learn from the experience. It's not possible to know it all - and that's the reason for us to keep talking. For those of you attending the HAF Conference tomorrow, we'll be discussing this in more detail.

WebClips for Your iPhone

UPDATE: There have been other postings that say making a larger icon, 158x158 for example will produce higher quality results. We haven't found that to be true. BUT, we have standardized on 60x60 for our Webclips icons and until Apple actually produces its own icons for its own website(s), we'll be sticking with the 60x60 size. Thanks to @cdevroe (Colin Devroe) for pointing out the original article that discussed the larger 158x158 format.

There was a new iPhone update today, and Apple is sweetening the scene for those who've resisted hacking their iPhone. One of the coolest new features is the ability to add an icon to the main screen that will take you to a web site of your choice. iPhone will grab a square screen capture of the site and show you the URL under the icon.

Or! You can create a webclip which generates a custom icon for iPhone users. Think of it as a favicon that works with your phone bookmarks.

This feature was released less than 24 hours ago; and I'm happy to brag that our tech guy, Shane Robinson, has already mastered the process and started branding our company web sites. Shane got started with this HowTo from vjarmy:

Create a 57x57 PNG.
Name it "apple-touch-icon.png"
Throw it in the root folder of your website. (Not the root of your server, the root of your web documents.)

More details about iPhone at the Apple Development Center.

Here are the direct paths to our three iPhone WebClips:

How and When to Leave Blog Comments

When we get a new client, we often compare the internet to a foreign country. It truly is its own culture, and building a web site there (aka a storefront) is like setting up business in a foreign country. Even though most of what you do will be in English (for most of my readers - their native language) it is still foreign. We like to think of ourselves as tour guides who will help you not only enjoy your trip, but actually want to enjoy it as a second home!

In that spirit, today's blog post is a little etiquette lesson in how to "act like a local." I (a person with web in my DNA) find it amazing and informative that CC Chapman can get a ton of response from a Podcamp lecture just by asking people to go leave a comment on a blog. It appears that people are confused about how to do this, when to do this, why to do this, and so forth. Just like blogging a lot of people face that daunting question: What on earth will I say? So let me be your friendly tour guide.

Let's make it stupid simple. I like stupid simple. I think hard on complex things most days and being able to "dumb it down" is something I really appreciate!

When to Comment

• Anytime you have an opinion to add to a conversation.
• When you want to promote your products and services (Just don't be crass about it. Add something of value to the conversation.)
• When someone has featured you on their page or site. (If you know about it or your blog software can track inbound links, this is VERY easy). I consider it one of the top ten blogger "miss manners" recommendations. This one is probably the most neglected, yet in my world, the most important.
• Timing can be important, especially if you are tracking A-list bloggers. Our former client, Mary Schmidt took to blogging really well and paid attention to when well-known excellence author Tom Peters would typically post a new blog. Mary made sure she was available to be one of the first commenters. It helped her get noticed and become a key influencer in Mr. Peters popular blog discussions. And yes, it has helped her build her consulting business,

What to Comment

• See above for initial instructions.
• Add your opinion - especially if it is against the flow. Life is not black and white - virtually every conversation is well-served by a range of perspectives.
• Details baby, details. The more specific you can be, the better. Cite examples, give props to others, share your experience. It's all good.

Why to Comment

• Because your point of view is just as relevant as anyone else's.
• Because it is a great way to build your personal or company brand.
• Because it creates inbound links to your site, which helps the search engines rank your site higher.

How to Comment

• There is always a place for your name. You can put anything you want in there! It is what will be displayed on the blog. Some people consider this a personal banding opportunity, and you can say, "Roxanne Darling" or "Nerd Queen" or even enter Rox of beachwalks.tv. Like all things, you can be savvy or you can be obnoxious, and all points in between. As my little 2-year old friend Kaile is learning to do, "make good choices."
• Email: you will be required to enter an email address. If the software is set up correctly, your email address will never be displayed. It is to sort you from the spammers. If you do not enter a URL (see next item) some blog software will show your email. As a precaution, always enter a URL! (if you don't have a web site, you can always link to another web site - a cause you support or CNN or whatever. Best to have your own site of course.)
• URL: Universal Resource Locator, aka your web site address. Be sure to link to individual pages on your web site when that is more appropriate to the discussion at hand. Just navigate to that page on your site, copy the page address, and then enter that into the "URL" field as you are leaving your comment. UPDATE: Consider also linking to you social network pages, like Twitter or your LinkedIn Profile or even your Flickr page if that is your primary home on the web.

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