Investing in “Je Ne Sais Quoi” … It Pays To Be (Perceived as) Cool.

Check out this screengrab of the website of Rentokil Initial. I circled one of their news items. It is THEY who are announcing that they will be using a vendor’s product (in this case Google Apps). Often vendors fight just to even be allowed to mention that somebody is using their product… but when a customer perceives that an association with a vendor brings them something… even if it is a certain “je ne sais quoi” … that makes the vendor’s life a lot easier, more efficient… and makes marketing a lot cheaper. The implication is it’s worth investing in a little “je ne sais quoi”. It pays to be (perceived as) cool… or cutting edge.. or i don’t know, something!

Vendor's Dream

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A Book Publisher Feels the Web

Check out this nice little video promoting the kids book group at HarperCollins—and highlighting some of their titles. It’s a nice example of an old-line old media company dipping their toes into emerging media — and using content in smart ways to market themselves. This doesn’t feel like a top-down corporate thing… most likely some young’uns who feel the web in their daily lives had an idea to make a video and put it on YouTube. (If this is a pro job by a  guerilla marketing specialist, I don’t know about it). I felt the ending to be a little anticlimactic … but let’s hope this is just the beginning. More commentary after you watch.

I’m sure the people in the video are not joking when they say most people asked whether they had nothing better to do. And I believe their answer: “no.” Print publishing marketers are notoriously old school, even as digital media threatens them as marketers and in the core of their business. Even if the people who made this video had something better to do in the immediate term (like, I don’t know, file an expense report) I’d argue that this sort of activity is more important than almost anything. The ability to pique interest in a products/brands/companies is hard. Really hard. It gets harder over time. And it gets almost impossible when the old ways of doing it are disrupted by new ways — and the people in charge, like the slowly boiling frog, have no clue until it is too late.

Thanks to 100 Scope Notes … where I first saw the video. BTW, if you guys make another.. keep up the opera. Nice.

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Google Ties it Together: Billboards That Change Daily, Twitter (Of Course) … Plus Paper and Thumbtacks

Here’s an ad/marketing campaign from Google worth studying. It’s for their Google Apps product. Apps, for those of you who haven’t tried it, are the web-based version (basically) of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office.*

I feel the messaging on the campaign that I’ve seen so far could be tighter, clearer. But it’s certainly OK. What’s is really smart about this campaign is that is  nicely integrated (fancy marketing speak for “tying various elements and media together”). It uses traditional billboards in strategic locations… but does something interesting with it to generate attention (the billboard will change every day for a month) …

… it leverages Twitter as a viral distribution platform

… plus (via this website) Google is attempting to leverage paper and thumbtacks as a viral distribution platform The site calls on converts to do “internal marketing” on their behalf with things like flyers for tacking up on cubicles. Here’s one:

The "spread the word" website allows converts to print these and paste 'em up

* Of course ubiquity is a fickle beast— my kids (a sample of the future population) use Google Apps (email, word processing, chat, etc.) almost exclusively for their school work. Although… my eldest son, who just got a netbook for his birthday, IS asking for PowerPoint on it.

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Making Lemonade

I have been on vacation and, um, not exactly blogging. You might call this a “transition” blog post… a way to get my mind from sun and chill … back onto work.

One place we stayed on our trip was a youth hostel in Lisbon– a funky (the good funky) spot that felt a bit more like a boutique hotel than a youth hostel. I have not been in a youth hostel in a loooong time. My wife pointed out it was a “look into the past for the parents and a look into the future for the kids”.

Anyway… the hostel is very tall.. and no elevator. And we were on the very tippy top floor. LOTS of steep stairs.

Instead of apologizing for this, the hostel turned it into a positive … using fun words to keep you going and feeling welcome.  For example:

calories per stair

encouraging

top floor (BTW, 1 Euro beers are a real positive too!)

The tallness is part of their identity … they seem to love it and make guests love it too.  The hostel, if you’re interested, is Good Night Hostel.

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Undifferentiated

begging to differ

My renewed credit card arrived recently so I called to activate it. And I spoke with a human being. Credit card companies, among others, have become good over the last few years at leveraging their time on the phone with people.  They attempt to up-sell and cross-sell. They also do research into their customers which makes them smarter.

On this call the woman was doing research and she asked me a simple question: “you’ve been a  card member for a long time, what’s one thing you like about the card?’

A good question.

Radio silence on my end.

It’s a card.

I have it because I have it. There may be a few practical reasons why I have this card vs. any other —- none of which run very deep. But I realized, in my moment of silence, that I have no feelings at all towards the card.

Credit cards are commodities really… like a lot of products.

But they needn’t be. And probably shouldn’t be. If I ran the company and the graph on the answer to the question had a high number of “huh?”s, “I dunno”s and “whatever”s, I’d want to do something about it.

BTW, the card in the matrix above is not my (apparently rather generic) card brand. That’s an actual generic card graphic by kjelle20.

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Digital Threat #4: Shooting Yourself in the Foot

I gave a talk (link in Spanish) in Barcelona the other day in which one of my slides contained the following graphic.

My point was that while the digital era is bursting with opportunities (a number of which I outlined and which I will post here in video form once I get the files back), it’s also filled with THREATS. And that it’s quite possible to get f–ked by digital technology. I outlined three threats:

Threat #1:  There are so many more messages being put in front of customers now—and this is greatly accelerated by digital… so it’s just tougher, by the numbers, to be noticed.

Threat #2: Customers can get hold of a range of “tune-out” technologies so that they never even see your message.

Threat #3: Your competitors might well be getting savvy at leveraging digital to connect with customers … and as they get smarter and smarter at it, well you know where that leaves you

I just recently came across what you might call Threat #4: being kinda lame!

I’ve been loving the creative and competitive energy in the Mac vs. PC wars. Microsoft is really going for it with their strong Laptop Hunters campaign in which they ping Apple on price.

But here’s what I saw the other day when I tried to watch one of Microsoft’s ads online. Click the image for actual-size frustration.

I have a bit of sympathy for Microsoft. They have many competing goals … a number of which play out in this screenshot. One group wants you to buy PCs which means you buy more Microsoft Windows. Yet another group wants you to install their Silverlight software … so you must install it to see the ad. Then you have some third group that decides to conduct a survey on the site with another popup window!

The resultant experience is in NO WAY more than a sum of its parts.

Here are a couple of the videos in the Mac vs PC wars… you decide for yourself whether it’s worth the effort to watch the Microsoft ad: Lauren (Microsoft) vs. Megan (Apple).

BTW, some believe Microsoft shouldn’t be engaging Apple in this game at all. That they should stick to their software.

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I Think I’m Turning Swissonese…

… I think I’m turning Swissonese, I really think so.

There must be something about the Swiss. Brands, it seems, want to be Swiss.

There was a time, I recall, when everybody, it seemed, wanted to the the Patek Philippe of their industry. “We want to be the Patek Philippe of mobile phones” … “of set-top boxes” … of …

You never actually own one

Nowadays it seems to be Davos. I just got an email inviting me to the Davos of Twitter conferences. And it’s not the first time lately that conferences have been refererred to as the Davos of __________.

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Ideas Worth Spreading — to 4.5B More People

The smart people who put on the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference — but who actually are also becoming a very interesting digital media brand —  announced something interesting today. It is now possible to either translate yourself or view translations of any of the many interesting videos (AKA “Ted Talks”) at TED.com. The idea: make the talks useful to the 4.5 billion or so people who don’t speak English. To quote head-TED Chris Anderson:

The TED Open Translation Project will enable thousands of volunteer translators to use subtitles to make TED available to their own communities. To do this the right way has taken a year of preparation. But now we’re ready.

The site is filling up with  what they call “interactive transcripts”. They allow you to click on any word in English or a translated language — and actually make the video of the given talk play from that word on.

This is all very good for making the site and videos people-friendly to many more people. But it’s also very good for TED.com’s search engine friendliness… talks are searchable and findable, increasing the site’s profile on Google and other engines.

BTW, here, per TED, are the languages with the most talks translated in them, as of this posting.

Source: TED.com

Smart. Or, if you like, inteligente, интелигентен, 智能, חָכָם, لبيب, วิทูร

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