CopyDiva

Rohit Bhargava shares his experiences as one of the 25 — and his take on its effectiveness - plus, there’s some good conversation in the comments as well:

Influential Marketing Blog: Unpacking The “Pepsi 25″ Social Media Rebranding Campaign.

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Yesterday, I coined a new term that I hope will make it into Webster’s . As is the case whenever you’ve got a technology, new terms come into play.

Twitterspam doesn’t quite cover what I mean, so, my new term is:

Micro-verbose: (adjective): 1. Tweeting repeatedly over a short period of time. 2. Tweeting sentence after sentence to complete a thought that’s much better suited for a blog post, Facebook note, or other social updating service that has no character limit; 3. Tweeting play-by-plays of sports matches, particularly soccer and hockey matches, to the sheer annoyance of the people who follow you.

How do you use, interact with, and communicate with social computing/social media tools? Lately, I have spent some time thinking about the way I use specific social computing tools and why others bore me, or why I simply have no interest in others. Certainly not a science, as these are my observations about my personal usage, but I do think that perhaps it bears some useful information, particularly about motivations, necessities, distractions, connections, and other words ending in -ion.

Blogging: Writing and Reading

The ol’ stalwart blogging. Yes, I blog, but certainly not an A-lister - more like a D-lister or lower. My blog isn’t bringing in money, nor is it set up to do that. I blog about mostly business topics that interest me. I am not really a personal blogger, except for the occasional anecdote. I blog for this blog, guest blog on occasion, and blog where I work.
As far as reading blogs, I subscribe to a number of blogs via Google Reader, but I have to say I rarely read them. Having worked at a social media measurement company, I am spoiled, and so I don’t like sifting through blog posts I don’t care about. So, I use Filtrbox to streamline my reading. I have a few filters set up, and I sift through those when I have time to peruse posts that are of interest. I am less interested in who is doing the writing, because there are plenty of unknown bloggers that write good, interesting, thought-provoking posts.

Generally speaking, I find a lot of interesting and relevant things to read through people I follow on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Micro-blogging or update services

Twitter: I use Twitter for updates that are both personal and business-oriented as well. I follow friends, business associates and interesting and important people in the social media space, and I am followed by similar folks. I don’t necessarily follow everyone who follows me. Early on, I did, but I found that some people were micro-verbose (meaning, they would tweet 6 or 7 tweets in a row, which is really annoying). So, I have reduced somewhat the number of people I follow, but am always adding new people as well.

How I access Twitter: I never login to Twitter’s web page to tweet, only to read profiles. I use Twirl as my desktop tweeting app (its also my friendfeed app). I don’t like having to visit web pages to update messaging, it takes too long and makes it even more disruptive than it needs to be.

What I hate about Twitter use: It’s bad enough when someone you’re talking to gets a phone call or email, but by far the rudest interrupter is getting tweets delivered to your phone. TURN IT OFF. I can certainly envision a helpful aspect to getting tweets to your phone — getting updates in an emergency, for example, or getting organized with a large group you are traveling with. But, I have to say, the tweets I get seem really not important enough to interrupt me when I am away from a computer.

FriendFeed: This very helpful aggregator of social tools, from Digg and Technorati to Plurk and Twitter to LinkedIn. After plugging in all my accounts, I have no reason to visit the FriendFeed site, except to find people to follow, which makes it very easy to interact with, at a low commitment level, which I prefer.

In part 2, I will discuss many other micro-blogging or update services, plus social networks.

What do you do to retain customer loyalty? In today’s world, where there’s always a cheaper place to buy something, or a cheaper version of what you’re selling, it can be really difficult to create any connection with customers. But, as anyone in sales and marketing knows, its more efficient and costs less to keep customers than to find new ones. Building relationships with customers (ie, exceeding their expectations) is an important and often lost art in business.

How do you do that? Well, certainly there are differences in every business, but I think one of the best ways to do it is to exceed expectations in unexpected, memorable ways. Many of these involve encouraging your staff to take that extra step for the customer by empowering them to do things without endless manager approval.
Yesterday, I had a few experiences like this. I went skiing at my favorite mountain, Copper. It’s my favorite for a number of reasons, one of which is this kind of service. So, what do they do? Well, for one thing, they have free parking lots with endlessly running shuttles that take you — for free — to the mountain. They have 3 different shuttles that go to the 3 different mountain bases, so it takes all of 5-10 minutes from when you parked to getting on a chairlift. Which, considering how much lift tickets are, is really nice. At Vail, where ticket prices are outrageous, there’s no free parking, and you have to take an endless walk in your ski gear to get to the mountain. For a day skier, its a crappy way to start and end your day.
Yesterday on the shuttle at Copper, the driver offered discount coupons on rental gear for anyone who might need it. A nice little extra unexpected touch. Then, when I was leaving, the parking lot attendants were washing everyone’s windshields. Why, I asked? Just because. The dude who washed my windshield said the reason they liked working at Copper was because of what they called “The Bro Factor,” the laid back attitude of the company. The Bro Factor is, what seems to me, the authentic approach to customer relationships that Copper takes to develop loyalty from its local customers.
More Bro Factor: Christy’s, where I rent my son’s snowboard gear. He was supposed to go to the mountain with me, but being a teenager, got a better offer that involved hanging out with friends. So, he didn’t use his rental equipment. When I returned it to the store last night and told them he hadn’t used it, the staff person gave me a coupon for a free rental. The reason the equipment wasn’t used had nothing to do with Christy’s, but this staff person felt empowered to do something unexpected. Now Christy’s is just one of a dozen ski rental shops in town, but I go there because of their customer service and because they rent better equipment.

So what’s your Bro Factor?

Over at the Collective Intellect blog, I wrote a piece on targeting, and how social media engagement now means that marketers have a better way to target consumers. This piece was inspired in part by a presentation at the Colorado Business Marketing Association last Wednesday by Matt Preschern from IBM.

Monitoring social media to determine campaign direction works for both the B2B and B2C side, it just manifests differently in terms of the behavioral targeting and tactics:

B2B marketing: For B2B, targeting is more focused on finding out what the key influencers for a specific topic — such as virtualization, or PC security — are talking about in relation to the issues. what are the top themes they are discussing right now? Then you can base a lead generation campaign strategy directly on the issues that are of top concern to the influencers and the people who read them, and nurture those leads through a longer sales cycle by constantly understanding the top issues.
B2C marketing: For B2C, targeting is focused more on sub-groups within an area, such as new runners or skiers within the communities that discuss running and skiing. Or, scrapbookers who are tied in to the crafting communities. What are their issues? What kinds of themes are hot right now? How are the sub-groups interests and concerns different from the total group. In B2C, instead of building out white papers or webinars, you might offer coupons, training techniques or discounts to events.

Sometimes it seems like marketing is moving at warp speed (set your phasers on stun). First there was websites, which so many in the B2B world poo-poo’ed as the latest passing fad. Now, not only are sites ubiquitous but there are so many online activities just waiting for the smart, savvy marketing professional to take advantage of. And, at the same time, play nice in the sandbox of experimental marketing in fresh communications realms. What that means is, don’t blow it to be the first one to try it, understand the environment first.

It is fun to watch, too. Who knew 2 years ago that Second Life would host analyst briefings for the likes of IBM? Yes, that’s right, you too can be a part of a briefing where the guy asking the serious question has a unicorn avatar and three breasty space chicks hanging with him.

At the requisite weekend BBQ, I chatted with my friend Caroline, a relative Internet newbie who is completely enthralled with all things online. I had told her about Pandora Internet Radio, and she was telling someone else about it, which reminded me that I hadn’t listened in a while. So, today, while working, I logged in to Pandora.

Wow, it’s really changed since the last time I saw it.

The whole interface received an upgrade, which is nice, but I have to say their ad model is just, well, weird. I initially could not figure out why there was a strange looking pair of legs on the page. Then, I see that I am invited to listen to “Schick Quattro Radio for Women,” or add it to my radio list. Now why would I do that? I mean, do I care that much about what razor I use that it is somehow related to my music choices? This is some weird-ass brand extension idea. I would be extremely curious to see what kind of impact this has.
I did also see the opportunity to listen to radio stations put together by Budweiser, which seems more likely because listening to music somehow seems more related to drinking beer than shaving my legs.

I decided to click through on the Schick ad, and it just got weirder. I was offered a free leg reading –uh, what? Somebody actually got paid to come up with the oddest idea for a viral campaign I think that I have ever seen. And odd here is not good, I can’t actually believe that someone would actually send this to a person, wasting bandwidth in the process. I only did it so I could blog about how weird it is.

With my fake name (Eunice), I selected pictures of what kind of shoes (flip-flops, sneakers, heels), clothes, and toe nails (painted, unpainted, tattooed) to get my leg reading — which it turns out is a really dumb ad for these new razors for women. The lack of imagination and fun value that’s required for a successful viral campaign is not anywhere to be found in this campaign.

But this is really besides the point. Really what I cannot figure out is why I would want to listen to song selections made by Schick. Especially if I am making my own radio stations on Pandora because I think I know what I like.

Today someone told me about We Feel Fine, a very addictive site that basically takes keyword search strings and organizes them by feeling (such as happy, sad, excited, masochistic, etc), then represents them in different ways — text are dots, the colors represent a feeling; squares are pictures — and then lets you decide how you want to view the mass of feelings posted to the Internet. There are six different “movements” to choose from, including just having murmurs, or the sentences where the words appear, come up one after another on the screen. I am in no way doing justice to the very cool UI they have put together. Some of the information isn’t quite right, but still, I had fun today looking at women’s feelings in the city of Baghdad, Iraq today (kind of depressing), and also people in Israel. You can even narrow your search by weather, which is kind of funny too.

So, its cool, and I think it has way more value than Twitter, which I can’t seem to figure out the point of (though maybe it is because my friend list is so lame — no offense, friends). Plus, Twitter seems to be down half the time I think about Twittering. So, its just frustrating.

We Feel Fine is the perfect web lurker experience, kind of like PostSecret but with way more ways to slice the information, and it isn’t edited, like PostSecret is. Anyway, I find it very addictive.

Copywriting, like other creative arts, can sometimes be a difficult task to accomplish. For most people — those who don’t like writing, or those who just don’t have to write for more than basic business needs — copywriting, or any kind of marketing or sales support writing — is an exercise in self-torture. They would rather clean toilets all day to avoid working on the task.

Well, I feel for ya, but that isn’t the trouble I have. My biggest issue is allowing myself the concentrated thinking time to do the writing. Sure, sometimes I need to bang something out quickly, and I can do that because I have that ability to “just get it done.” Or, what I am working on — an article, press release — doesn’t really take too much of that thinking time to put together.

But, when I need to really think about a message, and how a potential customer might read it, it takes time. I need to get out of that place where I’ve got meetings, I’m answering emails, calling people. All those interruptions make that focus place hard to maintain.

The good thing is, once I discipline myself to take that time, the actual writing comes rather quickly. It’s the unplugging that’s harder to do.

Since trying Wordie.org, my interest has waned — or maybe it is just what’s available in the application. I now have four word lists, that, occassionally, when bored, I add to. But there’s something missing. The interaction elements just aren’t set up right for me. I do like that you can do word clouds of your lists to see how often some words end up in other lists.

I came across a few other new word-type online experiments — oneword and onecaption. The idea behind these is to use your instant association with a word (or a photograph) and write what comes to mind. On oneword, what people seem to do is write some random sentences about the word — the site concept didn’t really appeal to me. Onecaption, seemed like a better idea, but it isn’t that compelling — the same picture has been up for days, and the list of captions that people create are in random order. It would be interesting to perhaps vote on them, or have the ability to comment, or something. I thought it could be useful as an activity to stimulate creativity, but there would need to be a new picture or image to write about every day.