I signed myself up to do a presentation at the annual Direct Marketing Association conference called “How Twitter Killed Direct Marketing Copy (Just Kidding)”.  The idea is to show great examples and tips of how classic marketing techniques still work in new media, while also giving old-school copywriters some juice and inspiration as they attack assignments in the unfamiliar and slippery turf of Facebook, Twitter and their ilk.

Click the pic to spread Otis' influence!

The conference is in early October in San Francisco, but my Powerpoint is due August 20 for “peer review” (WTF?) so it’s time to think about what I am actually going to talk about. One thing that’s definitely going to be there is Fast Company’s recently launched “Influence Project”.

Fast Company asked SF agency Mekanism for a pitch on how to make itself more successful through viral marketing. The ideas were brilliant and you can read about them all at http://www.fastcompany.com/finalists as well as download the actual presentation which is a great piece of work any creative practitioner can learn from. The chosen concept was what would eventually become the Influence Project.

The idea is that you register on Fast Company’s website, and get a special “influencer URL”. (Mine is http://fcinf.com/v/bf8c )Then promote that link by whatever method you choose. The more clicks you get (with bonus points if you get other people to join the contest), the more influential you are. The winner will be featured on the cover of the November issue as the most influential person in the world… but wait, there’s more.

The concept would have brilliant if it stopped at one winner. Maybe it would be Lady Gaga, or maybe an intrepid dark horse American Idol-style. However, in this contest EVERYBODY is a winner. Pictures of all entrants will be featured on the cover, with the size proportionate to amount of influence. If you’re too small for a dot of ink, you can still find yourself on the Fast Company website where there will be special magnifier tools and lots of cool analytics.

How this ties back to marketing is explained by the problem description in the Mekanism product brief: “Fast Company is the best thing that too few people read.” And the solution is to get people to interact with the website and hopefully stay around for other content as well as, of course, read that November issue.

To try this out, go to http://fcinf.com/v/bf8c then wait a long time for the server to load. Vote for me by clicking the “Spread Otis’ influence further” button or register yourself by clicking “Discover YOUR influence”.  Email me after you do either or both, and I’ll send you a complimentary copy of the DMA preso after the conference.

Robert Scoble had an example at one of the SXSW panels on how the “check-ins” we were all getting from Gowalla and Foursquare (“Jim Wood has just checked in at the Blogger’s Lounge”) could be made useful, instead of annoying.

Suppose he wants a recommendation for a barbecue place in Austin. He’s going to browse among his thousands of contacts for the handful of people who have completed the Gowalla BBQ hunt, requiring them to check in at six different BBQ spots. He can assume they know more about BBQ than 99% of the rest of us, based purely on their activity stream.

Of course, we don’t know if these reviewers have good taste in barbecue, but there are  tools for that as well. It’s what is done on Amazon and Yelp, where reviewers gain authority based on how active they are and how useful their reviews are to others. Combine an authority ranking system with check-ins and you’re getting some pretty good info, all auto-generated.

The biggest user of check-ins will soon be Facebook, the 800 pound gorilla that nobody at SXSW wants to talk about even though they reccently surpassed Google as the #1 Internet destination on the Web in terms of daily visits. Facebook users are already conditioned to share their activity streams with their friends anecdotally, and Gowalla and Twitter are adding links to make those streams geographically meaningful (Gowalla through geolocation, Twitter through its newly added “location” feature). You’ll know how popular your local Starbucks is with your friends and how often your best friends can be found there.

And wouldn’t it be great to add to this a coolness factor, what the smart and savvy kids are recommending? Well, that’s what Yelp is for. How about adding a Yelp tab at the top of your Facebook page where, after you visit a place, you can Yelp it? How about assigning reward points for the frequency of Yelp reviews; wouldn’t that be at least as satisfying as feeding the animals in Farmville?

Facebook also gains a bunch of new users (plus many already on Facebook who will become much more active) and a sales force trained in micro-targeting local businesses. It’s just too good a fit not to happen.

Your CEO/boss/client wants to have a blog (or maybe just be on Twitter), and that’s a fine idea.  An informal but authoritative voice for the company is a great way to engage customers, especially if it’s on an otherwise dry corporate website. Unfortunately, your boss’ blog posts are REALLY DULL… or, worse, sound like best of breed innovative corporate b.s. What to do?

I asked this question of the panel in the fabulous “Marketing Goes Social” panel at today’s South by Southwest Interactive. And got some great answers. Here they are as quick as I could transcribe them. As you’ll see, most are clever gambits to get an egoistic executive to take an objective view of their work. DMS=David Meerman Scott. NB=USAF Capt. Nathan Broshear. MB=customer service specialist Melanie Baker.

1. Ask them to sit down and show you how they use the Internet… what sites they visit, whether they’re on Facebook and what their update stream looks like, who they follow on Twitter. This gives them the opportunity to realize the content of interest to them may be very different than what they’re putting out. [DMS]

2. Find ANOTHER blog or site that is very similar to your CEO’s and critique it together. Through this third-party bashing you can make valid points without making the boss defensive. [DMS]

3. Take two highlighters of two different colors and track a printout of your CEO’s blog. Put everything that’s self serving in one color, everything customer focused in the other color. Review it with the CEO. [DMS]

4. Ask them why they want to have a blog in the first place. The person writing should be the one who has the story… in the military that would be a sergeant in the field vs a general officer. In a company it might not be the CEO, especially if they’re writing for their ego gratification. [NB]

5. Show them some of the resources the Air Force has produced on how to intelligently engage with the public through social media. If it’s good enough for our armed forces, it should be good enough for your boss. [that’s mine, but I got a fist pump from NB when I mentioned it.]

6. Ask CEO to tell you what questions people ask about the company. Then suggest blog posts on that. [MB]

Here’s a good strategy for working a conference as unpredictable as South by Southwest Interactive. Give yourself an assignment, e.g. a resource you need to find or a topic you learn about, then refer back to it whenever there’s a choice to be made in your activity flow.

The Silent Majority: Facebook developers at SXSWi

Here are my two. First, I wanted to find out about Facebook and SXSW. Specifically, I wanted to follow up on my hypothesis that while it is a vast online community, people in the geek world don’t want to talk about Facebook because it runs on a proprietary platform. I started by putting up a #Facebook #sxsw hashtag search in TweetDeck and watching the traffic. Yep, not a lot of it. I did run across the Facebook Developer Garage off site event and spent a couple of hours there yesterday. Show of hands requested from the audience: how many of you are Facebook developers? (almost everybody) How many actually use Facebook? (quite a lot fewer.)

We all love Twitter because it’s an erector set, but meanwhile Facebook is Dad’s muscle car (or maybe Mom’s) idling in the driveway. You can’t ignore 400 million users indefinitely. Josh from Gowalla got cheers on the stage and everybody loves Josh/Gowalla and how they now have their Facebook Connect check-in. So what happens in a few months when Facebook introduces its own check-in feature?

Meanwhile, my second assignment was related to the fact that several folks have recently asked me about being a social media consultant for them. I’m not sure it’s a good fit because social media marketing requires constant attention (similar to good P.R.) and as a freelance copywriter I sometimes need to hole up for a couple of days at a time. So I wanted to find folks who actually are social media consultants and are good at it. Through the #facebook #sxsw tag I ran across the the folks at The KBuzz. I went to their mixer to meet them and talked to some of their clients and was impressed. Mallorie Rosenbluth is their Director of Small Business which is what most of my inquires would be; for $1000 they will design a Facebook page for you and do a detailed analysis of your business and your social media opportunities, then provide recommendations which you can execute on your own or through a monthly contract with them.

Check them out. UPDATE: Mallorie contacted me to say that if you use the code OTIS10 they’ll give you 10% off above pricing.

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.

One of my first freelance copywriting clients after I moved to San Francisco was a very smart guy who had been direct response ad manager at Oracle. He based his strategy at his new company on what he had learned and done there, so I learned as well.

Screenshot of Oracle OpenWorld Live feed during the show.

In a day when most tech marketing was fairly dweeby and feature-centric, Oracle took the advantage by brute force. Every day in the lower right corner of the local edition of the WSJ, there was an ad with a bar chart showing how much faster Oracle was than Sybase, then their major competitor because then Oracle was mainly a database company. And I myself considered applying for an ad manager position that was advertised in Adweek. Most classifieds described the job and the qualifications; Oracle simply ran a huge headline that said PREDATOR and follow-on text to indicate that’s how they wanted you to treat the competition.

During and just after the dotcom era, Oracle discovered an even more effective strategy to beat the competition: buy them. First there was Peoplesoft, then BEA, then Siebel (founded by an ex-Oracle marketing guy), now Sun. Today Oracle is a conglomerate and Sybase, its original competitor, has shrunk to 3% market share in its single market.

I was thinking about this history as I walked through Oracle OpenWorld, actually the first time I have attended in spite of my long Oracle history. It’s the only event I know of the many conventions held each year at Moscone that closes a major street so the party tent can be erected there. The result is gridlock throughout downtown San Francisco—classic smash-face marketing because everybody who is stuck in traffic is thinking about Oracle.

The typical OOW attendee is a database administrator (DBA) in a large organization. A key purpose of the conference is to make this typically mild-mannered individual feel like the most important person in the world by identifying with the Oracle juggernaut. I’m writing this post in an absolutely packed ballroom with thumping music and flashing visuals where the faithful are waiting, not for Roger Daltry or Aerosmith (they’ll be at the Customer Appreciation Event tonight) but for CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote.

With such a loyal fan base, using social media for marketing is an obvious choice and the Oracle folks are doing it well. The best example is OpenWorld Live, a website where you can watch a live feed (often with a couple of guys interviewing passers by about how happy they are to be at OOW) and simultaneously keep up with the tweets rolling by with #OOW09 as the hashtag. At the bottom of the page are buttons to take you to the Oracle conversations on Facebook and LinkedIn and even some code in case you want to embed the video on your own site. All Oracle, all the time, even when your laptop is propped up on your lap in the hotel room.

Commercially, Oracle is pushing a concept called Social CRM. I attended a briefing where Tony Lye, Oracle VP for CRM, talked about the concept of a “Listening Post” which will be incorporated in future releases. His prototype can gather and monitor conversations about Oracle anywhere in cyberspace (Lye though he was the first to do this, which isn’t true) and feed them into a sales and marketing interface such as Salesforce.com where they can be parsed by sales territory or other factor and the sales team can hunt down opportunities or put out fires. You’ll need a big database to do this effectively, and Oracle has one to sell you.

I’m wondering why I and so many others were so ga-ga about Twitter at SXSW earlier this year. Maybe it was the new TweetDeck app that allowed us to chirp back and forth about the session that was happening in front of us in the same room. But anyway, I was expecting Twitter to change my life and it hasn’t.

If you want to make money with Twitter, what marketers are realizing is that it’s a great platform for communicating with your EXISTING customers—the same discovery we all made about email. Example: the Korean taco truck telling followers where it will show up next. A company letting its best customers in on a “secret” sale. And an organization like Zappos which has discovered Twitter is an effective vehicle for internal communications. I guess this isn’t really making money per se… rather, you’re saving money or expanding your base with an efficient means of targeted communication.

Best way to make Twitter relevant in your own life: go through your tweets and ruthlessly unfollow anyone who tweets frequently with info that is not fantastically interesting. If you are disappointed with what you read in Twitter, do this immediately then replace the unfollowed by going to http://wefollow.com/ and following a few media sources or people that seem interesting. Repeat on a regular basis, unfollowing those who aren’t interesting after all. Yes, this is work, which is the antithesis of what Twitter is supposed to be.

Twitter founder Biz Stone calls it “curating” your tweets, as if we all had a roomful of Hundertwassers instead of inane tweets about needing to go to the gym. Okay…

A good writer quickly learns the importance of developing a voice for his or her writing. Readers get more involved when they feel like a real person is writing to them. And over time you know what that voice is for a particular genre or publication and you fall into it like an actor playing a familiar part.

The author of otisregrets, for example, is somewhat professorial, a bit stuffy, yet tries hard to be approachable and takes extra care to explain what he means if it’s not immediately clear. While Otis M writing on Yelp is very different. That author is about 10 years younger and something of a wise guy. He uses catch phrases and occasional puns and enjoys going off on tangents in his reviews.

I know both these writers well and so do my readers. These voices haven’t always been there, as you can see from reading some early posts in either forum. I didn’t set out to be that person, but rather evolved into it over time.

All of which is my preamble to a theory on why I haven’t developed a habit of Tweeting frequently: I can’t find a way to develop a voice in 140 characters (which I try to keep to 120 for retweetability). By the time I say the bare minimum I have to say, I’m close to the limit.

After I realized this I started looking at other people’s tweets to see who had a voice I can recognize. @the_real_shaq has a voice, but he’s one of a kind. (Shaq’s eulogy for former NFL quarterback Steve McNair, who was shot to death yesterday: “Rip steve mcnair Roo roo q dog”) @broylesa has a voice, but she is nearly always writing about food in the Austin area… maybe very specific subject matter is a key.

Everyone else in my tweetstream is sticking to the facts, unless it’s personal. Here’s @heatheranne who works in advertising which is probably why we follow each other: “Trying to get glass out of my now-jammed garbarator. Oh my…” Now that is good writing, a vivid word picture plus a made up word and comment that makes you feel what she is feeling. I am going to go for adjectives and a personal aside next time I tweet and see what happens.

You know I’m a fan of Southwest Airlines and a complainer about AT&T Wireless. But how much are my opinions actually worth to those companies? An former client, Satmetrix, has devised a back-of-the-envelope exercise that shows how to calculate the value of word-of-mouth (WOM, pronounced “wom”.)

Start with the following assumptions:
1. The lifetime value of a customer before considering WOM is $1000.
2. Promoters buy more at higher margins and defect at half the average rate, so their value before WOM is 3 times that of an average customer.
3. Detractors’ lifetime value is half that of the average customer due to complaints, higher service costs, and short tenure.
4. On average, Promoters make 4 positive referrals, 0 negative referrals.
5. On average, Detractors make 0 positive referrals, 3 negative referrals.
6. It takes 6 positive referrals to generate a new customer.
7. Each negative referral neutralizes 4 positives.

Based on these assumptions, you can now calculate the following:
1. What is the full value of a promoter compared to an average customer?
2. What is the full value of a detractor?
3. What is it worth to convert a detractor into a promoter?

The results may be eye-opening, and will certainly show why it’s smart to be good to your customers instead of treating them like crap. If you like this exercise, it’s worth converting the formulas into numbers that are are more reflective of your experience with your own customers. Have fun!