Otis Maxwell is a copywriter who likes to mouth off on marketing, technology, food and sundry topics.

So I am going again to South by Southwest Interactive, and glad of it. As I mentioned last year, this is the conference where everybody has something interesting to share and everyone is interested in what YOU are doing. The days (and nights) are packed and it’s frustrating if you happen to miss out on anything because of logistical problems. Here are a few tips from a last year first timer:

• If you have a car, you can park for free along one of the frontage roads near the freeway below the convention center. It’s a 10 minute walk from there, probably faster than paying for parking and waiting in line to get in/out of the garage.
• The check-in process was horrendous last year and I hear there is 40% more registration this year. It’s a mystery to me why you should register in advance and still have to wait for an hour or more to get your badge. Bring a fully charged iPhone (hopefully the ATT network is not overloaded like LY) and strike up a conversation with your line mates.
• Don’t get too wedded to the program list online. Many of these descriptions are off the wall and written months in advance. Plus, you may not get in some popular sessions. If you do see something you really like, get there early and grab a seat… near the aisle in case you are disappointed.
• The conference center is shaped like a U with no direct access from one end of the U to the other. You may end up walking 10 minutes or more between sessions so look at the map and factor that into your planning. Sessions in double rooms (eg 18AB) are organizer picks for those likely to be popular, as are those held in ballrooms. “Core conversations” are generally moderated audience participation and if the topic isn’t of passionate interest you may not be happy there. The sessions in the Hilton are very developer focused even if the title may sound somewhat general.
• The parties really do have free food, booze and music but GET THERE EARLY… as soon as the doors open is not a bad idea. Late comers will stand in long lines and find many of the freebies gone.

Any more tips? Comment here or to @otisregrets, or just look me up when you get to the show. Let’s ride!

Go look at the reviews for a popular item on Amazon.com. Compare the volume of people voting on the “most helpful favorable review” and the “most helpful critical review”. In most cases, the number of “helpful” votes on the “favorable” reviews will swamp the “critical” numbers. My hypothesis:  people reading these reviews mostly want to support their own positive impression because they’ve already decided to buy the item.

Some time ago, I accepted an invitation to be a “Vine” reviewer on Amazon. This honor came to me because I had written a couple of reviews on the site that got a high number of “helpful” ratings. Now I get a monthly email offering me some products for free as long as I agree to review them. This is not a boondoggle: if you regard your time as worth anywhere close to minimum wage, the hours you spend in reviewing the items are going to be far more than the value of the goods received.

But here’s the thing. Most of my Vine reviews have been negative and POSSIBLY as a result I’m getting less attractive Vine offers now. I have no ideas how this algorithm works. Maybe Amazon merchants are subsidizing this effort in some way? I’m certainly not suggesting that there has been any pressure to give a positive review but maybe Amazon is able to say “we’ll offer your product to a certain number of our top reviewers, they’ll likely review it favorably because they’re getting it for free etc.” In any case the net result is that fewer people are giving me a “helpful” nod now and I’m less well-rated as a reviewer since I started to write more negative reviews.

I love peer reviews and am a frequent contributor to Yelp, as well as Amazon. I read and use these reviews in my own buying decisions. If I want to know how to do some trick with a kitchen gadget that came with a poor instruction manual, I can bet that an Amazon reviewer will have filled in the gaps. But Amazon and other social media outlets need to make sure they provide a venue for intelligent negative opinions to express themselves, even if those reviews are not beloved by the readership. Maybe a helpful negative review gets extra weight, if it’s of a certain length and not a rant?

I did a workshop last week for the DMA on social media. It was called “I’m on Twitter and Facebook, now what? How to REALLY put social media to work for your business.” The premise is that a lot of businesses jumped into social media marketing in 2009 without really thinking through what it was all about, and 2010 is the year they’ll now get analytic and practical about it.

In fact, I found that a lot of attendees are using social media, especially Twitter, to promote their businesses. They are tweeting offers, news related to their products, and links of interest to their market. Yet few of these marketers said they regularly use Twitter themselves. I think you need to walk the walk: you can’t effectively use the medium unless you invest time in participating in the user experience by being a user.

Meanwhile, almost nobody including me was paying proper attention to Facebook. This is dangerously short sighted. Facebook is amazingly successful, approaching 400 active million users of whom 50% sign on every day. A single Facebook application, Farmville, has more users than Twitter. But Facebook seems so consumer focused that many of the business marketers in the room can’t take it seriously.

The other thing is that, while Twitter is easy to play around with, Facebook is very rigid in what you can and can’t do. Twitter is the PC (or maybe the Unix workstation), Facebook is the Mac. It’s their way or the highway. But the “page” tools (used to build what used to be a “fan page”) and Ad Manager are so easy to use it is a low time investment to try them out.

Nielsen reported that 13% of 2010 Winter Olympics viewers were online while watching the competitions, and of those 40% were “Facebooking”. That is a term I first heard during the Super Bowl when the hostess of the party we attended was disappointed my wife hadn’t brought her laptop so they could Facebook with their friends about what snacks were being served, how boring the game was etc. Of course your could do this on Twitter but why? On Facebook you’re among a cozy circle of friends and there’s no 140 cc limit.

The PowerPoint of my DMA workshop is available here. Look at it in slide view mode, because almost every image is a clickable hyperlink.

As a copywriter, I get goosebumps from promos like the “Amish Miracle Fireplace” full page ad which has been running of late. This is the Ronco/Popiel school of long form copy I pored over when I was learning my trade. (In fact, I once interviewed at the Ronco offices in North Hollywood. I recall they had the various examples of their direct marketing prowess… the Veg-o-Matic, Pocket Fisherman and more… lined up on a shelf like Teddy Roosevelt’s African hunting trophies). As a cub copywriter I felt these ads were more audacious than deceptive… they were so entertaining in their own right that no one should feel cheated if they didn’t get their money’s worth.

Ad for Amish Miracle Fireplace, from consumeraffairs.com

The Amish Miracle Fireplace copywriter would have old Sam Popiel sitting up in his grave and saluting. The miracle is the heater being promoted in the ad, which puts out a high level of radiant heat for such a tiny object and will be yours FREE as long as you buy a wooden box/mantle to house it, which is the part made by the Amish. A little sleuthing gets to how the marketer makes money: At $300 plus shipping, the price of the box is much more than the apparent value of the “free” heater. But still. So many marketing touchpoints here: thrift, American tradition, pride of ownership in something that makes your hope more cozy, who wouldn’t want one at the bargain price of free?

Unfortunately, the folks at consumeraffairs.com have burst our bubble. Their article is a miraculous bit of digging, and along the way they respond to such consumer queries as “I thought Amish people didn’t use electricity” and “I thought Amish people didn’t allow themselves to be photographed.” They also tell us why such endorsements as UL-approved and the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval are essentially meaningless. And they point out that a device that produces the same level of electric heat (while sending your utility bill through the roof, by the way) can be bought at Target for $20.

The vice president of the company that makes the heater is interviewed in the article, and he is delightfully unrepentant. The “miracle”, he explains, is actually the imitation flames that are displayed on the front screen of the heater.  “These heaters are being called a miracle because they have what’s being called the ‘Fireless Flame’ patented technology that gives you the peaceful flicker of a real fire but without any flames, fumes, smells, ashes or mess. The patented ‘Fireless Flame’ looks so real it amazes everybody,” says David Baker, of Heat Surge in Canton, OH. I happened to have spent a weekend in Canton last fall and I wish I had had the presence of mind to check out this miracle for myself.

A friend and colleague made me fret this morning. He visited my blog and happened to read one of my posts about Toyota where I talked about “my recent issues” with a link to another article. He naturally assumed these “issues” were related to my own branding or marketing problems, since that’s what he reads me for, and was surprised to find an article about an automotive company.

I brought this on myself, more or less intentionally, by taking what is mostly a marketing blog and turning it occasionally into a bully pulpit for my rants on other “issues”. Though I have to say that the original Prius battery failure post has become the second-most read post ever on Otisregrets. And that my food posts draw a small but loyal readership who come for nothing but the food. So I guess I will be keeping it up.

The name of this blog is a bigger problem. “Otis Regrets” has been around a long time, since 2004 when it began as a venue where students in my copywriting class could exchange ideas outside of class. The thought of making it SEO-friendly was far from my mind… what was a search engine anyway? But I’ve since become painfully aware that “Otis Regrets” is buried by queries for “Miss Otis Regrets” and you’re not likely to stumble upon this blog by name unless you’re also looking for Otis Maxwell.

So here’s the lesson or moral for today. When you put up your website, transferring a meatspace or bricks-and-mortar personal or business brand to the web, you hopefully heeded the advice to provide useful content, not puffery. But it may not have occurred to you that your very brand needed a new look. The web was just one conduit by which people are going to look for you and identify you. Now we’ve got Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, maybe Yelp, and all the Namez, Plaxos, etc etc that are going to link to these larger communities and referral services.

Think, as an example, about how your Facebook identity might show up in the newsfeed of someone who is a friend of your own friend or fan, but so far has no idea who you are.  The brand needs to do some heavy lifting here. The new reader (who is a valuable referral because you’re connected through a friend) has to get an immediate positive idea of who you are and what you do. Traditional branding, even a traditional elevator pitch, takes too long.

The quality of your content… the news or activity that was quoted… has to do its part. But what about the brand itself? If it isn’t pulling its weight in terms of building instant appropriate comprehension, maybe it’s time for a change. I know I am thinking about this for my own brand, how about you?

In spite of my own recent issues, I had thought Toyota was doing the best it could with its massive recall. James Lentz, president of Toyota USA sales, was all over the press shows last weekend with the two key statements considered essential in the post-Tylenol era: “we screwed up and are sorry” and, “we care about our customers and are very concerned.” (Tylenol took a similar open, earnest tack when someone poisoned some of its bottles in the late 1980s and, coupled with an intensive “get to the bottom of this” campaign [they never did, but they were obviously trying]  it saved a brand everyone was writing off. For how NOT to handle a PR disaster see “Woods, Tiger”.)

But today I read this Reuters article that points out Akio Toyoda, the REAL president of Toyota, has said not one single word on the recall problem. And that another Toyota executive blamed the problem on (presumably inferior) U.S. made parts, chosen out of a charitable desire to help struggling American economy! Meanwhile the recall expands to the Prius (different problem, but nobody’s tracking the details any more) and Twitter #Prius traffic, which I’d been following because of my own recent posts, goes from sleepy to through the roof.

Concidentally, my original post about my dead Prius battery has become one of the most-read articles ever on this blog. Lots of new readers are discovering it linked to articles on the Toyota recall as they lick their chops for other Toyota schadenfreude. Speaking of which, my request for some financial relief led to timely response and some nice talks with friendly people in the Toyota Customer Experience Center, but a firm turn-down. I was frankly surprised at that.

My casual research suggested a hybrid battery failure at 70K miles was extremely unusual if not unprecedented. It would seem like a good investment to fix an anomalous problem and placate a good customer who’s been evangelizing your product. Instead, here I am writing another post about problems at Toyota. How is that good for their brand?

I wasn’t too incensed about the dead battery on my Prius, just surprised, but after a bit of research I’m getting my dander up. Turns out, according to this article in the Toyota Pressroom blog, that the Prius battery has a 10 year warranty… EXCEPT for the first three model years that have only an 8 year warranty. (Mine died at 8 years and 8 months.) In other words, the earlier adopters who put their faith in Toyota and spread the word and built the Prius brand potentially get a $3700 repair invoice while later adopters would get a free replacement for the same problem.

I predict there is a bit of trouble ahead for Toyota if more owners see their batteries go south* and discover the company isn’t going to replace them. This is a classic example (getting back to marketing which is what this blog is supposed to be about) of taking your best customers for granted and treating them worse than your marginal customers.

Speaking of marketing, there are some other not-to-do’s worth learning from the Toyota Pressroom post. They acknowledge that “battery replacement in a Prius is neither as simple nor as inexpensive as replacing the battery in a conventional car.” That’s disingenuous because the massive and complex hybrid battery has no basis for comparison to the battery in a conventional car; in fact the Prius ALSO has a “conventional” battery. And they quote a bargain $2,299 for that replacement battery without mentioning that installation and tax at your Toyota dealer are going to add another, oh, $1400.

In a day when anyone can and does have access to your press releases, glossing over the pesky details is not a good idea. What exactly is this article trying to accomplish?  How could anybody who actually has a battery problem not feel pissed? And how could any news source that picks it up, then later discovers the truth, avoid feeling duped?

* Fortunately for other early Prius owners, mine may be a fairly rare occurrence. According to the Driving Sports blog only 306 Prius batteries had failed as of 6/09, out of 750,000 installed. “The life of the battery pack is generally about the same as the life of the vehicle,” said Toyota’s Jeremiah Shown. Well, that’s good to know.

Ok, now I’ll stop. No more about Toyota. I promise. Maybe.

As I mentioned, I am in the process of prepping our SF house for sale. Lots of realtors advertise with a website that is the street address of the home. Out of pure curiosity, I went my home’s URL… and discovered the domain had already been claimed and parked by one of the realtors I interviewed. NOT the one that got the business, by the way.

A colleague who referred this realtor says they do it as a matter of practice, in order to set up a great presentation. Apparently they were going to set up a website for me and surprise me with it, but I made my decision before they could do this. She says as a marketer she admires their moxie and intent.

I disagree. First of all, there is no need to have a live URL to develop a website. Millions of websites are under development right now using local files on the developer’s desktop which will eventually be ported online. At any rate, the URL was parked, not active. The only thing this accomplishes is to keep another realtor, or me, from getting rights to the domain. (This realtor later said they’d relinquish the domain name at no charge.)

We know that in the early days of the internet there were entrepreneurial cybersquatters who grabbed domain names of recognizable brands such as Panasonic, Hertz and Avon, in hopes of reselling them for a fortune. The Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999 put an end to this practice. But how is grabbing somebody’s meatspace address any different?

I think by rights the domain name that corresponds to a street address belongs to the entity that owns the physical location. Am I all wet here?

This show didn’t have the excitement of June in NYC, which may be due to the fact that the west coast was harder hit by the recession than the Northeast. (Though many of the same vendors exhibit at all the shows in SF, Chicago and NYC, merchants tend to go to the show closest to them.) There were some empty booths, but good floor traffic. Three trends I noted:

Gluten-free candy... who would have thought?

1. Gluten-free everything. People with celiac disease can’t eat gluten, but for most of the rest of us it’s the wheat protein enhanced during kneading that makes rustic bread chewy and delicious. But marketers seemed to have sensed a trend that “free” of anything equates healthy goodness, so there are many booths advertising “gluten-free” products that would never contain gluten in the first place.

2. Pizza. Lots and lots of frozen gourmet pizzas are on hand, designed to be sold at $6 or more for an individual-size pie. Also a lot of flatbreads that are advertising themselves as pizza foundations.

3. Old-timey packaging. There are an increasing number of packagers trying to make their product look like it has been around for 150 years, with accompanying benefits of heritage and nostalgia and old time values, even if it just came to market. Correspondingly, there’s less of the light and bright “lightbox” look (I call it that because the products are designed to look great when lit from below on a shelf) that has been popular in recent years.

I did a taste comparison of high end vodka pasta sauces, which were easy to find on the floor. I’d had the real thing, more or less, at Rao’s in Las Vegas last week, and the ones I tasted (included jarred Rao’s as well as Mario Batali) suffered in comparison less from being preserved than from being dumbed-down in flavor and salt. Marketers, no doubt with lots of consumer research backing them up, have decided that the product’s personality should come from the face on the label, rather than the actual taste.

This show is not blogger-friendly, by the way. I registered as a media “trade affiliate” which I won’t do again. Maybe guessing I am not a serious buyer, some boothers tend to pull back the sample tray as I approach. Or maybe they’re just worried I am going to suitcase them.

Last week our 2001 Prius started acting strangely, and today SF Toyota gave me the bad news. The hybrid battery is shot and a replacement will cost just under $3700, tax included. We’re a year and half 8 months out of warranty, it turns out,  so the repair cost is 100% our responsibility.

Our 2001 Prius in happier times. Photo courtesy sfgate.com.

This is a vehicle that was on the front page of the SF Chronicle in 2001, as a poster child for early adopters of green technology. We’ve bought another Prius since then and I’ve been looking with interest at the lithium-powered next generation coming in 2012. But this changes the equation. If you can expect to pay for a $3700 repair at 70,000 miles, the car suddenly becomes much more expensive as well as less reliable… what happens if the failure occurs elsewhere than in a major city?

I remember the naysayers when we bought it: “the battery’s going to die and it will cost you a fortune.” The reviewers scoffed at this: batteries don’t last forever, but it is unlikely to fail in the driving life of the vehicle. Too bad that’s not true. The $3700 new battery is warranted for 12 months. I guess that tells you something.

News like this could have a chilling effect on hybrid sales, just when we need a nitty-gritty, ready-right-now antidote for energy waste and climate change. (I love seeing the MPG on our 2006 Prius creep over 50, combined with the fact that the car has actually been made less efficient in order to come close to zeroing out the emissions.)

Toyota needs to fix this. I’ll update if they do.