We don’t have much of an advertising budget here at StepRep. To the extent that there’s a marketing department, I’m it. So I’m always jealous of other companies that can afford to shoot promotional videos with paid actors, real lights, decent sound, and so on.
But then sometimes you see the videos that these other companies choose to invest their energies in, and it makes you wonder.
Behold, Microsoft’s preparations for the Windows 7 Launch Party!
Perfect. It really can’t be improved upon. Unless…just maybe…
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.
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.
Over at the StepRep blog, Jeff has a link to an interesting news item: Twitter has made a small change to its profile pages which might make a big difference in future Google results.
I should start by saying: I don’t really “get” Twitter. I suppose I might come around. I’m one of those cats who won’t eat his food when it’s served in a new bowl. I resisted joining Facebook for almost a year, to the exasperation of my friends. Then I joined, and now I…well, I still don’t really “get” Facebook, actually. I think it’s clunky and poorly organised. And I really didn’t need to reconnect with that old high school acquaintance who now spends his days SuperPoking everyone he ever met. But thanks to Facebook, I have enjoyed some rousing games of online Scrabble, and at least my friends don’t crack jokes about what an old man I am any more.
It’s funny. Twitter is getting a reputation as a place where loud-mouthed narcissists blab about watching TV and cutting their toenails. As you’ll recall, when blogging first emerged as a fad a couple years ago, it got the same rap. But in spite of all the bad press, I embraced blogging easily while I’ve resisted Twitter.
Why? It’s simple. Twitter demands brevity. I’m a windy writer. I exhale in complete paragraphs. If I have something to say, it probably can’t be said using less than five hundred words. A hundred and forty characters? What can you say in a hundred and forty characters? It takes me a hundred and forty characters just to furrow my brow in preparation for writing.
Trying to sell me on Twitter is like trying to sell a fat guy a Smart Car. He might be able to squeeze himself behind the steering wheel, but he’ll never be comfortable. He needs a minivan or an SUV – something that leaves room for him to fan out his flab.
I need a blog to fan out my flab.
I’m not dissing Twitter, any more than I’m dissing Smart Cars. If you’re comfortable with that 140-character limit, great. If you can find ways to be interesting within that limit, better still: you’re a far more disciplined writer than I am. As Blaise Pascal said, apologising for the length of one of his letters: “I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter.”
Perhaps I could compress this blog post to 140 characters. But I’m too busy.
There’s an old saying and I don’t know where it came from and I’ll probably quote it wrong. It’s a piece of advice about how to structure speeches. It goes something like this:
First, tell them what you’re going to tell them.
Then, tell them.
Then, tell them what you’ve told them.
You could paraphrase the above as: always assume your audience isn’t paying attention.
I think it’s pretty good advice, whether you’re giving a speech or marketing a product. Even when they’re looking right at you, people’s thoughts are often far, far away – as far away as Mars is from Earth. If you send out just one probe, it might get lost in space, or burn up in the atmosphere, or crash in the mountains. Better to send out two or three probes and hope one makes it to the surface safely.
Sadly, a marketing career based on repetition, repetition, and more repetition can get a little…well, repetitive. As one of those fancy-schmancy tea-drinking corduroy-wearing “creative” types, I get bored with writing assignments that merely require me to rearrange last week’s sales pitch. Haven’t I explained StepRep often enough? Can’t I move on to something different?
This week I’ve had a few “rearrangement” assignments sitting on my desk, and I’ve been having a hard time getting into them. I’ve been trying to come up with a different angle. A friend of mine called up and left me a voicemail where he outlined an analogy he thought I could use. I’ve paraphrased him quite a bit, but here’s what my friend had to say:
Remember the popular girl in high school? It didn’t matter what she did – it didn’t matter how boring her life was – people couldn’t stop talking about her. Maybe she broke up with her boyfriend, or crashed her car. Maybe she just chipped a nail. Somehow, whatever she did, no matter how mundane, word got around. She was at the center of the conversation. People flocked around her.
Meanwhile, the uncool kids wandered the corridors, feeling invisible and isolated. Their tastes were a little more obscure – they were into opera, or poetry, or model trains. Without hangers-on to gossip about them and spread the word about what they were doing, it was difficult for the opera buffs and the poets and the model train enthusiasts to connect with one another.
What the popular girl had, what the unpopular kids lacked, was brand name recognition. In effect, gossip did for the popular girl what billboards and TV ads do for Coke: made her ubiquitous. If you’ve got an appetite for a soft drink, the word Coke is never far from the front of your mind. Maybe if you stopped to think about it, you’d decide that you’d much prefer a bottle of Boot Hill Sassparilla. But you don’t stop think about it. The waitress asks you what you’d like, and you name the first drink that comes to mind, and Coke is it.
Now, ubiquity is not something that can be acquired on the cheap. Coca-Cola spends a fortune keeping its brand in the public eye. But you probably don’t want to be Coca-Cola. You’re content to be Boot Hill Sassparilla – provided that the people who like sarsaparilla know where to find you.
StepRep can’t make sarsaparilla as famous as Coca-Cola. But if you’re a sarsaparilla maker, you can use StepRep to help ensure that people see your brand when they’re searching for sarsaparilla.
StepRep can’t make poets as popular as cheerleaders. But if you’re a high school poet, you can use StepRep to help build your brand name recognition within that small circle of high school poetry fans.
There! That’s a pitch I haven’t tried before.
I feel refreshed.
–
PS. I tried Boot Hill Sassparilla on a visit to Santa Fe a few years back, and thought it was pretty good. I think it’s local to the southwest – you can’t get it where I live. I hope they’re still making the stuff.
After I posted the most recent Spokesmonster cartoon yesterday, I sent the link around to all my friends and invited their comments. One friend, a StepRep user, emailed back with his thoughts on StepRep and the whole concept of online reputation management, and I thought I’d address his arguments here.
He wrote:
I have not really added anything to my StepRep profile page because … I kinda thought that the system does not really make any sense. If everyone knows that the page is managing your reputation, then they know that it is only showing the good stories about you and leaving out the bad stories. If I wanted to buy something for my house, I want to read all the bad stories about the contractor, not read his “managed” page which only tells me the good things. Why would anyone read a StepRep page when they know it is clearly biased?
The guys at the French website L’Atelier raised a similar point when they reviewed StepRep a few months ago. And it’s a good question, a question we’re going to have to learn to confront if we want the site to keep growing.
Here’s how I’d respond to my friend:
“Bad stories” only tell you so much.
Your argument is kind of like saying, “Why would anyone ever go to the Air Canada website? Air Canada isn’t going to share all the bad stories about flight delays and grumpy flight attendants.” But “bad stories” aren’t the only things consumers are looking for online.
If someone is trying to decide whether to hire you as (say) a contractor, one of the things that person might look at is a site that offers unbiased reviews. But once he’s decided to hire you, the unbiased reviews aren’t going to give him your phone number, or link to your blog and your Facebook page, or link to stories that have appeared about you in the local press, or show who you’ve worked for in the past, or link to photos of the actual work you’ve done. Your StepRep profile page will do all that.
Building a reputation based on trust.
Down the line, as the StepRep / MyFrontSteps community grows, your StepRep profile will also give visitors valuable information about your reputation: they’ll be able to see which consumers have endorsed you or linked to you as a “trusted service provider”. If visitors are MyFrontSteps users themselves, they’ll be able to use the StepRep Directory to find the service providers that their friends trust and recommend. This is a far more valuable piece of information than some anonymous whine left on a discussion board somewhere.
Influencing search engine results.
Of course consumers won’t treat your StepRep profile page as if it’s the only source of information about your business. They’ll look at other sites that come up when they Google your name. But here’s where StepRep comes in handy. Because StepRep was designed to be very attractive to search robots, the links leading from your widget and profile page to the stories you’ve marked as “good” will influence search engines to give more weight to those stories.
The results probably won’t be dramatic. StepRep’s influence might be just enough to nudge positive stories a little higher in the search results, where people are more likely to see them.
(PS. MyFrontSteps’ Jeff Tomlin had a great post a while back about how Google ranks pages. Reading it will help to explain how the StepRep profile page and widget work.)
Making yourself a little more Google-friendly.
In the second Spokesmonster cartoon, where we talked about online reputation management, maybe we made it seem like the objective was only to chase away criticism and negative reviews. And sometimes that’s part of it. But there’s another objective which is likely to resonate for many folks who run small businesses – folks who might not have much of an online presence right now. And that’s simply helping searchers to find you when they Google your name.
Say you’ve got a fairly common name, like – oh, I don’t know, Michael A. Charles. Googling my name brings up a whole lot of irrelevant results – irrelevant to me, I mean – like the American artist Michael Ray Charles, the Australian blues guitarist Michael Charles, the Houston dentist Michael A. Charles.
By using my StepRep widget and profile page to aggregate and link to all the sites that refer to me – the real Michael A. Charles – I can influence Google so that it’s more likely to put those sites in the first page of results, where more people will see them. And that Aussie guitarist can slink back down to the second page where he belongs.
Does it all seem a little complicated?
As you can see, I’m still figuring out how to make these arguments as brief and punchy as possible. StepRep has a lot of different angles – notice I didn’t even mention quotes and referral fees, which are the subject of the most recent cartoon.
But really the best selling point is that it’s all free. You can set up an account in about two minutes. Try it out, explore the site, maybe add the StepRep widget to your blog or website, see if it makes any difference to your Google results.
Meanwhile I’ll work on polishing my rhetorical skills.
Wait, is this Part III, or Part IV? I’m already losing count.
Anyway, this video helps to explain the third tab in StepRep, the one marked “Referrals and Quotes”. These functions are still a couple months away, but the video should give you a pretty good idea where the product is headed.
It has come to my attention that the single most popular post on this blog was one I made just before Christmas titled Monster evolution.
I couldn’t figure out why, until I tried Googling the phrase, and discovered that there’s a stylish and addictive Flash game by that title. It seems that most of these visitors are more interested in the game than they are in our silly promotional cartoons.
I suppose the polite thing to do would be to go back and change the unintentionally deceptive title of that post. Instead I’m going to exploit the coincidence and use it to draw still more attention to our silly promotional cartoons. Also, I promised to post more of my monster concept sketches but I never got around to it.
By the way, just because I’m posting these pictures, don’t think I’ve deluded myself into believing I know how to draw.
Cagey Camel
(Cagey Camel is the code name VendAsta’s developers used for the second iteration of StepRep. I pictured Cagey as a surly tough in a leather jacket, like Marlon Brando in The Wild One.)
Bartleby the Scrivener
(Obviously Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener isn’t a monster. But I identify with his lazy stubbornness, which is probably why I decided to put him into the cartoon. He looks a little like me.)
The cool thing about StepRep is, you’re just sitting there minding your own business, not thinkin’ about nothin’ – maybe you’re passing the time drawing pictures of monkeys – and an alert pops up in your inbox to tell you that someone out there in cyberland is chattering about you.
Of course, we’re using StepRep to monitor StepRep’s reputation. Which is how we found out that the French technology website L’Atelier had written a story about our beta release.
My French is pretty mal, but from what I can tell the tone is positive. The author expresses a little skepticism in the final paragraph, where he questions the usefulness of the StepRep widget. Seeing only good reviews on a site, he writes, is normal, and it doesn’t inspire the consumer with confidence. One can always use a search engine to seek out other views.
That’s true, of course. The benefit of the StepRep widget is that it allows you to broadcast positive reviews to multiple locations (to your blog, to your website, and soon to your profiles on various social networking sites) with a single click of a button. Rather than merely copy-and-pasting a review into your website from some other source, it provides a link directly to that source, so that the visitor can confirm its authenticity. And by driving search spiders to the stories you select, it will influence search results so that the favourable stories are more likely to rise to the top.
Anyway, it’s nice to be getting a little attention from our European cousins. À bientôt, mes amis français!
We’ve been winding up for the official release of StepRep and it’s been hectic around here. I pass by guys crying in the corridors all the time. And right at the peak of the hecticness, Brendan and Jeff – our CEO and main marketing guy, respectively – have buzzed off to the annual Real Estate Connect conference in New York City. Well, they say they’re at the conference. More likely they just going to Broadway shows and taking long hansom cab rides around Central Park.
I hope Brendan and Jeff are meeting lots of interesting people and having a good time in the States. It should be a little warmer there anyway.
Meanwhile, StepRep Beta is now live. You should try it out. It’s pretty shiny, and getting shinier every day as the techies hunt down and exterminate the remaining bugs. And it looks swank, thanks to the design work of my office buddies Marie-Louise and John (left).
But don’t worry, the monsters are still there to ugly things up a little.
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