Every once in a while I’ll get an email from my father drawing my attention to some online advertising campaign that he thinks I’ll find interesting. I imagine it’s his way of encouraging me: “Hey, son, it’s not only your crazy company trying to promote itself on YouTube – real businesses are doing it too!”
Thus was I recently directed to FedEx’s new YouTube campaign starring Fred Willard (whom you know from movies like Waiting For Guffman and Best In Show, and of course as the CEO of Buy N Large). Willard stars in a series of mock infomercials (directed by Bob Odenkirk, of Mr. Show fame) called 1-2-3 Succeed!
They’re pretty funny.
Despite being covered in the business section of the New York Times, the campaign hasn’t exactly caught fire. As of Tuesday evening, none of the videos has been viewed more than 10,000 times. These are Spokesmonster-like numbers; it’s nice to know I’m competing on the same plane (if not quite at the same salary) as Odenkirk and Willard. But despite the slow start, I hope the ads are a success. Not for FedEx’s sake, but for the sake of the advertising biz.
I’m not saying the future of the advertising industry rests on the success or failure of this one campaign. I just think they’re good ads, and I’d like to see more like them. But take a look at some of the comments on FedEx’s YouTube page:
[T]his type of humor is low-brow and incompatible with the sophistication that consumers expect from FedEx.
Throw it away and start over. Not funny or informative. Worst FedEx ad campaign ever….
This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. The marketing group at FedEx that put this out should be on the chopping block. Dumb, stupid, boring, and won’t bring any customers to FedEx so is therefore a waste of money. I think I threw up a bit in my mouth these are so bad.
…Not that it’s hard to find YouTube commenters to say mean things about your video. But the early response reminds me of other innocuous ad campaigns that backfired – like those Microsoft ads with Jerry Seinfeld that everyone hated so much. Or this reviled Motrin ad from last year. Why is it that when advertisers try to be a little inventive, they often enrage as many customers as they amuse? Meanwhile, there’s no penalty for being dull and predictable. We don’t even notice the boring ads – they pass through our buzzing brains like busboys through a fashionable restaurant, eyes down, trying not to draw attention to themselves. Every once in a while one of the busboys dares to give us a smile, and we respond by lashing him with our walking sticks.
I can understand why people dislike Microsoft, and I can therefore understand how those people might dislike the Seinfeld Microsoft ads. What’s strange to me is that those same people seemed to dislike the Seinfeld ads much more intensely than they did all of the far more banal ads that came before and after it. You’d think Microsoft would have gotten some credit for trying something different, but it seems that people resented the attempt much more than they resented the ad itself.
“How dare you try to entertain us,” they said. “Go on about your unseemly business, just don’t make us look at you.”
We citizens of the mass-consumer age have a fraught relationship with the advertising industry. It surrounds us – we swim in it like the ocean – and maybe these ads frustrate us not because we really think they’re that bad, but simply because we notice them at all – and for a few seconds they remind us how far we are from dry land.
The last time we saw the Spokesmonster he was knuckle-walking off into the sunset, his life having been perfected by StepRep. Now it’s MyFrontSteps that needs a promotional push, so our beloved mascot has been forced to cancel his retirement plans.
(Watch for a cameo by MyFrontSteps CEO Brendan King!)
Over at the StepRep Blog, I sing of the many wonders of the brand new StepRep homepage. (Or are we calling it the “dashboard”? I’m not sure if we’ve decided yet. To my mind it’s definitely more homepagey than dashboardy, but I’m ready to be convinced.)
It’s a pretty big change. Most of our previous updates have been off in the margins where they could be easily ignored. This one’s hard to miss. Go check it out.
At the MyFrontSteps Blog we unveiled four new cartoons. Robert Scoble, Vanessa Fox, Alice Myerhoff of Inman News, and Jennifer Pahlka of Web 2.0 Expo answered the question, “What have you done to make your house a home?”
Meanwhile, over on the StepRep Blog, I talked about the latest Facebook-related updates to the product. We’ve got a new way of integrating StepRep with your Facebook account, and a new way to interact with potential customers from our Facebook app, Homebook.
This is turning into quite the little blog network around here. Along with our sister site the StepRep Blog, we’ve recently added the MyFrontSteps Blog, which would be – I don’t know, a crazy old aunt?
Search Engine Optimization Journal points me to an interesting post by Jeff Sexton at Grokdotcom. Jeff is talking about how negative reviews on your website can actually improve your reputation:
It all boils down to credibility. Customer reviews simply have more credibility than your sales copy, so they inspire more confidence in the buyer. And negative reviews lend credibility to the review process itself, standing as visible proof that the reviews are not edited.
Of course, if all your reviews are bad, then reputation management is the least of your problems: there’s probably something seriously wrong with your product or service.
But Jeff makes a pretty good case that if you sweep bad reviews under the rug you’ll do more harm than good, and he gives an example from his own online shopping experience. Bad reviews just wind up migrating to other sectors of the web where searchers will still find them and where you’ll lose your power to respond. Anyway his post is worth a read.
He got me thinking about my own experiences with bad reviews, and how I’ve chosen to deal with them. Now, I’m not a Persuasion Architect like Jeff Sexton (though like him, I’ve had the privilege of making up my own silly job title: Cartoonist-in-Chief), so bear in mind that these are the ramblings of an amateur.
Seems to me there are three kinds of negative reviews:
Case 1: You’ve genuinely screwed up and the reviewer is calling you on it.
Case 2: You haven’t really screwed up, but because of miscommunication or misunderstanding, the reviewer thinks you have.
Case 3: The reviewer is just a jerk.
In all three cases, you may be strongly tempted to just delete the review and pretend it never happened. But if you do, you’re missing an opportunity.
In Case 1, you deserved the bad review. Hopefully you’ll learn from it and do a better job next time. In any event, here’s a chance to demonstrate how on-the-ball you are. Leave a follow-up comment. Explain how you goofed and why it won’t happen again. Offer to make good. A bad review with a timely follow-up is almost as good as a good review, for the reason Jeff Sexton mentioned: credibility. A good review could be from anyone, but only the most paranoid visitor would accuse you of making up bad reviews and sticking them on your site.
In Case 2, you haven’t really screwed up, but because of confusion or bad information the reviewer thinks you have. Most likely this communication breakdown is due to clumsiness on your part: bad site design, fuzzy writing, a failure to make your product or service clear to outsiders. Then again, maybe your reviewer just isn’t very bright. Either way, now’s your chance to clear up the misunderstanding. Your follow-up comment will simultaneously demonstrate your attentiveness and help other confused visitors see the light.
In Case 3, someone is just yankin’ your chain. Don’t let it be yanked. Again, the follow-up comment is a valuable tool: blatant falsehoods can be corrected, insults can be deflected with good humour. (Outright slanders can just be ignored.) The goal here is simple: to demonstrate that you’re the bigger person and get visitors on your side.
Again, I’m not a Persuasion Architect; I’m just an average schmuck with his own set of biases. My preference is for openness and engagement, and luckily I work for a company that shares those values.
It’s something to think about, though. There’s a lot of hostility floating around the internet – for every honest, thoughtful, constructively-critical review on the web, there are a hundred imbecilic bleats. I suppose it has a lot to do with users being able to remain anonymous; there’s little incentive to restrain their worst impulses. Perhaps the growth of online communities like MyFrontSteps, communities with social context – where if you act like a jerk, all your real-world friends will see it – will help mitigate some of this rudeness. In the meantime, what’s the best way to deal with this culture of negativity?
We’ve had a few enquiries from attentive viewers of the Spokesmonster cartoons. “Hey,” they say, “in one of the cartoons you promised we’d be able to add the StepRep widget to our Facebook profiles. When’s that happenin’, ya slackers?”
Well, the development team is working on a way to push stories from StepRep into your Facebook account. We’ll let you know the minute that happens. But in the meantime, there’s a cheat you might like to try.
If you go to the Facebook application directory and do a search for “RSS”, you’ll find a whole whack of apps with names like RSS-Connect, Simply RSS, and Blog RSS Feed Reader (to name only the first three that come up). These apps allow you to add an RSS feed to your Facebook profile.
Now, back in StepRep, go to the Widget Settings screen and right-click and copy the location of the little link that says RSS Feed. Carry that address over to Facebook and paste it into whichever one of the RSS apps you’ve chosen to install, and voila, there’s your StepRep widget, right smack on your Facebook profile. Your friends can see the stories you’ve chosen to promote, and you can stop blaming that clown who made the cartoon for getting a little ahead of himself.
By the way, we’re not endorsing any of these RSS apps, so if this trick doesn’t work for you, don’t come running to us.
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In other news, we now own the domain steprep.com. Previously some wretched cyber-squatter had taken residence there, but we finally convinced him to drag his smelly sleeping bag off our doorstep.
So now if you suffer memory failure, or if you lose all your bookmarks, you won’t have to scratch your head over where to find us. Just type “steprep.com” into your address bar and by the mighty magic of the 301 redirect you’ll be whisked to our home at steprep.myfrontsteps.com.
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Update 3:03 pm – a few minutes after I finished this post, I received word that the development team had just released an update. I talk about the new “My Content” button and “Promote this” checkbox over on the StepRep Blog.
Scoot over to the StepRep Blog to read about the newest subdivision in the MyFrontSteps community – Homebook. (Tagline: “Where your friends live…online.”) Homebook is a place to hang out with your friends and talk about your homes. We’ve just released the app for Facebook and MySpace:
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post called Selling sunrise. The gist of it was that no matter how great your product is, it will live or die based on how well it is marketed. Whether you’re selling soap, or sliced bread, or sunrise – if people don’t understand how your product will improve their lives, they’re not going to use it.
Here’s a good example. After watching the most recent Spokesmonster cartoon, which deals with referral fees (a feature that’s still in development), a guy named Doug made the following comment:
That is a terrible business model. $100 for a referral. As an interior painter I would not pay $10 for a customer referral until I have been paid by that customer.
Doug’s right – $100 for a referral is a lousy deal if you don’t get a guaranteed sale out of it. That’s why with StepRep you don’t pay a dime unless you complete a transaction.
This is hugely important, and I guess the point wasn’t made clearly enough in the cartoon – anyway, not clearly enough for Doug. Let me run through how the referral model will work.
1) You don’t have to offer a referral fee if you don’t want to. You can just use StepRep to monitor and manage your online reputation – for free – and ignore all the extra features.
2) You set the amount of the referral fee. We don’t know how big your business is. You could be peddling fifty-cent shoelaces or million-dollar yachts. Only you know how large a fee you’re prepared to offer.
3) The fee is split 50/50 between the new customer and the referring customer. That’s why I worry that the term “referral fee” might be confusing (and if you have a better phrase, get in touch with me). Really what you’re offering is a referral fee plus a discount.
–and most importantly–
4) You don’t pay a dime unless you make an actual sale. It doesn’t cost you anything to offer a referral fee, and if no-one takes you up on the offer, that’s okay, you can just go on promoting your business the old-fashioned way – radio ads, coupons in the mail, paying some kid to dress up as a giant cheeseburger and stand on the street corner waving.
The referral fees won’t be coming along for another few months. Hopefully by the time this feature is ready, we’ll have a better sense of how to get the idea across to new users. Meanwhile, thanks for the feedback, Doug.
Springtime is here – even in the Canadian prairies. It makes a big difference, waking up to sunshine rather than chilly darkness. This morning my alarm went off at 7:30 and I was glad to see that it was already full daylight outside. I lay in bed for a while and thought about the word “sunrise”.
The sun doesn’t really rise. It stays where it is, and the rotation of the earth causes us to fall out of shadow and into the sun’s light. The word “sunrise” reflects an ancient, intuitive, pre-Copernican conception of how the universe works. But it’s the perfect word. You couldn’t possibly do better.
Let’s say you’re in marketing and your boss asks you to develop a pitch for a new feature. “People on our side of the planet are tired of this constant darkness,” your boss might say. “Electricity bills are through the roof. Plants aren’t growing. We’re always bumping into things. So we’ve decided to rotate the earth once every 24 hours, so that for 12 hours out of every 24, this side of the planet will get direct sunlight.”
“What a great idea!” you say. “What are we calling it?”
“Well,” says your boss, “that’s where you come in.”
So you sit there spinning your globe, trying to come up with a good, concise, marketable description of this new feature.
Hemispheric illumination shift?
Rotational shadow escape?
Sunward earth turning?
Ugh. A PR campaign can probably be built around sunward earth turning to convince people of its benefits. But who’s going to get up at 5 AM to watch it happen?
There are two components to marketing. First, you need to make a complicated new thing seem straightforward and familiar to an audience that probably isn’t paying much attention.
Second, you need to make it – for want of a better word – beautiful.
I’ve been trying, in the Spokesmonster cartoons and on this blog, to get across the benefits of a service that offers a lot of great features – some of them hard to explain in ten words or less. Hopefully I’ve been making a bit of progress. But I still haven’t come across that magic phrase that makes everything clear and beautiful.
Nothing to do but keep trying. Meanwhile, I’m convinced that, like sunrise, StepRep sells itself – once people experience it for themselves.
Reputation Management
Daily Deal Platform
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