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.

Tweet This Post

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.

Tweet This Post

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

Tweet This Post

Editing Engineers

I had a frustrating meeting the other day with a very engineery startup. They are making some of the coolest stuff I have seen in a while. I just couldn’t convince them they need an editor to help make their technology more understandable… accessible… market-friendly.

I won’t say who they were… but I do run into this a lot. The way many companies describe themselves makes it really tough to go from seeing how cool their stuff is to figuring out what problems it will solve. Mostly because the examples they give are so incredibly technical and theoretical. Editing the examples will make a huge difference.

Sometimes it reminds me of my first job after college. I was a reporter for a community newspaper. I had an actual editor who taught me a lot. But perhaps my most important editor was the guy who ran IT. He was transitioning several newsrooms from an ancient publishing system to a new one using PCs and standard desktop publishing software. Because I had worked during college in the desktop publishing department at a Copymat (helping people format their resumes etc.) the IT head recruited me to help sell his new system internally. He asked me to create examples of the graphics that were possible with the software for a presentation he was to give to the board of directors. I excitedly created a slew of squiggly lines and shapes and patterns. No go. The IT head said “nice squiggly lines, but this will have no relevance to the board.. we need to show clear examples of how the technology can save the company money, make the company more nimble and efficient…” I was geeking out.

The IT guy (an engineer, BTW) was editing me.

One ironic thing about my recent frustrating meeting is that the CEO is a huge (gushing!) Apple fan. A fan of their technology.  He seems to miss that they are a great company ALSO because they are brilliant communicators.  Look at the picture of the Mac at the top of this post. An engineering-only company might have written what engineers are trained to write when they create a new program: “hello world”

Somebody edited the engineer.

Removing one word made the computer friendly, human, approachable.

BTW… here’s another post about how important one word can be. It also happens to be about Apple. And if you’re into the idea of editing, here are a couple more posts: Where Blood Tasted of Blood and Honey of Honey and Less is More.

Tweet This Post

Booktips: Outliers, The Story of Success

Culture impacts communications in the cockpit... And culture can change. Photo by "alaskan dude" via creative commons

The problem with writing about this book is that I have to remember how to spell success. OK. No little red dotted lines under the word. Two c’s, two s’s. Phew.

I really dug Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (thanks to my mother-in-law for giving it to me). I’d skimmed Gladwell’s Tipping Point and Blink but really got into this one. No skimming. Actual reading.

Outliers: The Story of Success

Gladwell’s premise is that success comes not just from within ourselves.. our grit, determination, hard work, talent, etc… but also from a gift, often hidden, unseen and unappreciated.

The gift of circumstance.

Gladwell gives loads of great examples. When we were born in history (some clearly statistically significant percentage of the wealthiest people EVER were born within a few years of each other); when we were born in a year (some equally significant percentage of Canadian pro hockey players are born within a few days of each other) … etc.

The culture we come from is one such circumstance. And as an example Gladwell tells of certain of plane crashes and how culture impacted communications in the cockpit and led to the crashes.

In one, a Columbian jetliner crashes in New York after running out of  fuel — seemingly (from cockpit transcripts) because the person radioing with the airport was too deferential and indirect in his language with air traffic controllers. He just kind of hinted that they basically had no fuel left.. while air traffic control put them in a long holding pattern.

Some of Gladwell’s circumstances are unchangeable… we’re born when we’re born. That’s the deal.

But others, like how crew communicate in a cockpit can be changed. He write a lot about Korean Airlines and its radical shift from having a high number of crashes to becoming an extremely safe airline  — after a new executive actively worked on changing the culture in the company and how people communicated in the cockpit.

The book is definately worth a read … it has a section at Gladwell’s website.

Tweet This Post

Now You Have a Friend in the Diamond Business on Facebook (Not)

I’m kind of blown away by something… the number of brands that talk about the concept of friendship in their branding…

… and who don’t play this up (at all!!) in social networks.

photo by swamibu, via creative commons

Some examples…

If you have ever lived in a market where the jewelery retailer Shane Co. operates (some 14 U.S. states) you have likely heard the voice of Tom Shane. Shane & Co. have been ubiquitous radio ad buyers for a long long time and their slogan is likely therefore seared into the memories of a large percentage of the population.

Their slogan, said at the end of each ad in Shane’s down home soothing voice is “Now You Have a Friend in the Diamond Business.”

Can you think of a company with a more natural opportunity to create a presence in social networks as a form of community building, of marketing, of advertising?  And yet It’s not possible to be Tom Shane’s friend on Facebook. It is possible to be a fan of Shane & Co. on Facebook now. But there is no mention of or attempt to play with the fact that they have been offering up his friendship for years while now there is an entire generation smack in their demographic that is “friending” online.

F.R.I.E.N.D.S. the TV show has close to two million fans on their Facebook page. Also… no creative attempt to merge into the cultural lexicon of social media.  Sure the show’s in syndication but still people are making real $ off it and need to promote it.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has, for years, been saying “Friends Don’t Let Friend’s Drive Drunk”… a key audience for them are Facebook users.  A real opportunity here.

Cox Communications: “Now You Have a Friend in the Digital Age”. Again… nothing.

Fly the Friendly Skies. United Airlines. They still use this slogan at times, created by Leo Burnett in 1966 (the year I was born, btw) Nothing.

into the friendly skies.. photo by gradstudent 2007 via creative commons

hmmmmm

Tweet This Post

Untoward

Strollers.. photo credit "skeddy in NYC" via Flickr and Creative Commons

Did you see the Op-Ed bit in the NY Times a couple of days ago about forward-facing baby strollers vs.  the other kind — apparently called “toward-facing” strollers?  The piece highlighted the author’s research into whether parents talk to their kids less when the young ones face forward (vs. toward their parents) — therefore possibly slowing childrens’ language/communications development. It was an interesting article, a nice kind of Gladwellian view on the long- and wide-range impacts of seemingly little things.

Me.. personally.. I liked the idea of my kids facing forward to the world and soaking it all in. My view is they learned a lot about communicating by seeing others interacting. Lord knows they probably would have gotten pretty sick of staring at my face for all those hours in the stroller.  Plus there were many times when we’d stop, I’d turn the stroller toward me in a cafe and we’d get a coffee. (Well, I’d get the coffee… I’d get them something else.) And we’d talk.

UPDATE: lots of letters to editor at Times here.. and a funny graphic too

Tweet This Post

The Captain Was Sober Today

Photo Credit Mike Baird via Creative Commons/Flickr

I really enjoy reading many of Paul Kedrosky’s blog posts at Infectious Greed.  He writes about the economy and finance.

He had a post yesterday called  “The Pelosi Graph” in which he critiques the graph/chart circling the web that is meant to show how drastic U.S. job losses are now compared to the two most recent recessions. He presents an alternative graph that is a bit more informative and bit less polemical — because it provides greater context (chiefly percentage vs. absolute data).

The point for communicators, of course, is that charts can be designed to emphasize or de-emphasize certain facts and make certain points. It’s not about truth, but about what parts of the truth somebody is trying to emphasize.

Graphs can be just like language in this way. This old and famous story gives an extreme example.

“The first mate on a ship decided to celebrate an occasion with a “little” stowed away rum. Unfortunately he got drunk and was still drunk the next morning. The captain saw him drunk and when the first mate was sober, showed him the following entry in the ship’s log: “The first mate was drunk today.” “Captain please don’t let that stay in the log”, the mate said. “This could add months or years to my becoming a captain myself.” “Is it true?” asked the captain, already knowing the answer. “Yes, its true” the mate said. “Then if it is true it has to go in the log. That’s the rule. If its true it goes into the log, end of discussion” said the captain sternly. Weeks later, it was the first mate’s turn to make the log entries. The first mate wrote: “The ship seems in good shape. The captain was sober today.”

Tweet This Post