Jonathan Salem Baskin's Dim Bulb

Bebo, Anyone?

AOL has sold social networking site Bebo for a fraction of what it paid for the company only two years ago.

Bebo is the third largest social networking site after Facebook and MySpace, which is like RC Cola claiming to be the third largest cola brand after Coke and Pepsi. Bebo has a sliver of the registered users of its larger competitors, and its steadily declining monthly visits make it about as popular as search results for "lawn care." In other words, AOL is lucky to have gotten whatever it did for the thing.

The speed at which Bebo crashed isn't news, as Internet phenomena emerge and disintegrate almost as fast as tweeting about it will allow. It only took a few years for the smart people at eBay to fail at figuring out what to do with Skype, and only a bit longer for the brain trust at News Corp. to crap out MySpace. I find it hilarious that the entrepreneurs who come up with this stuff, like Janus Friis, Chris DeWolfe, the Birches, are considered geniuses when they cash out, and then the world discovers that they have absolutely no idea or aptitude for running more mature businesses (or working within the collaborative environments they and the media celebrate).

Doesn't anybody remember that Steve Jobs had to spend more than a decade wandering the desert before he was ready to reclaim the helm of his "start up?" None of this is distant history, and yet there's not been one story on how or why tech startups keep getting oversold, then underperform, and ultimately resold for peanuts. I think it's why there’s no rhetorical gasp in any of the coverage on Bebo's selling price. We expect it.

AOL's experience mirrors this kabuki drama somewhat, in that it was the Facebook or Google of the first Internet revolution. Remember when it was the email service ("got mail?") and those ubiquitous CDs in the mail constantly reminded us that it wanted to be our portal to the web? AOL was so amazingly wonderful that it merged with Time Warner in 200 for $350 billion and promised to remake the media business in the image of the Internet. It was spun off 10 years later at a value of $5 billion or so.

So AOL was the Bebo of the last decade. Funny how history repeats.

AOL's plan now is to remake itself into a set of media channels for original content (the broadcast networks tried that, and so did Bud TV). I'm sure there are beautiful slide presentations describing how it'll work...consumers will seek "content," AOL will monitor their clicks for targeting said content and then sell it to advertisers to better tee-up advertising, yadda yadda. I'm a bit suspicious of such plans, since people never do what they're supposed to do, and technology-based answers never quite address the questions that really matter.

I wonder if the slide template has changed since it promoted its last mondo giganto plans for media world domination. Of course it has. AOL spent oodles on a new logo and brand image.

What about Bebo, though? A hedge fund owns it and must have its own pretty slide presentation on what they'll do with it. My guess is the plan will center on cutting deals with third-parties to exploit whomever is unlucky enough to still be a Bebo member. Maybe they'll add some cool but purposeless techno gizmo, as long as it helps it make its money back ASAP and/or spin off the deal to yet another buyer who buys into the hype about social networking.

What COULD Bebo do?

• Go for broke. After all, it already is. The world doesn't need another social networking site (Orkut, Meebo, High5, and a host of other services are busy vying for the scraps), so what would happen if the new team got in a room to discuss what would be totally unexpected, shocking, counter-intuitive or anti-hype? Could it announce such intentions publicly and get people involved in helping find answers (i.e. a social solution to a social problem)?

• Explore authenticity. The monetization models for every other social networking site rely on (or end up at) exploiting their members for advertisers. No amount of authenticating can make brand pages or sponsored tweets authentic. I wonder what an alternate model might look like...one that relied on a credible, reliable, commercial-free environment? Who knows if it's even possible, or if its members would care (see prior point for a way to find out).

• Resist the impulse to crapify. Remember how junky MySpace got after it was bought? Its new owners wanted to get as much revenue out of it as possible, and it showed. Bebo doesn't look bad right now; actually, it doesn't really look like anything, and its member interaction is a little dicey (I joined over a year ago just to own my name, and since then I've received seven invites from scantily-clad women and six emails from women who all seem to live somewhere in Asia). Could it assert some higher standard for look-and-feel and experience? Would it matter to anyone?

The definition of "social network" is exploding around us, as it should be obvious that email, VOIP telephony, online auctions, mobile phone numbers, and any other tool that lets people connect is a conversational tool, by definition and by practice. In and of itself, an online site that provides those connections is so yesterday's news. Bebo could figure out a new role for itself, or at least fail gloriously by trying. 

Wait, I've got it! 

Why not make its last gasp into a documentary movie, set of learning materials for business schools, and an online real-time entertainment portal? I bet that could earn back its measly $10 million purchase price, and then some...

The Social Shibboleth

The jury is still out on social media as a marketing tool. There, I said it, heretical as it might be. To say otherwise is to be blindly optimistic or, worse, stupid.

Causality

We've all either presented or endured the same script on social media: a few slides declaring that one-way communication is over and that consumers want more; graphs that show people using social media technologies; mention of "disruptive technologies" and shifts in media consumption; a few examples of how famous brands have been treated in the social space; and that damn slide with all the social tech logos on it, which is usually the backdrop for the new business pitch. 

The problem is that the logic is facetious. 

Word is leaking out that there’s no causal connection between social phenomena and real-world results. Remember that "United Breaks Guitars" YouTube hit in 2009 (you can see “American Breaks Bikes” here)? United reported its best business results later that quarter. The outcry from the Motrin Moms over some stupid viral spots in 2008 didn't make a dent in product sales. Nestle, Domino's, even Pampers have encountered similar online firestorms that didn't impact business performance. On the political front, a leading Iranian journalist has said that tweets didn't influence the election aftermath, debunking the branding of "The Twitter Revolution."   

You wouldn't know this from the social advocates, though. Online behavior -- tweets, Facebook friends, posts, bespoke campaigns, even complicated graphs of word frequency and sharing maps -- is either held up as having absolute worth, or compared to things like stock value or some vague measures of brand, reputation, or sentiment. I agree that there must be connections but I've yet to see any made that were 1) causal, beyond the distribution of discounts, and/or 2) lasting, any more than any blip in the news cycle might have prompted a generation ago. Again, the importance of conversation is indisputable, but throwing out the objective realities of causality and established business practices (and metrics) doesn't get us closer to cracking the code.  

Social apologists might as well correlate online activity with sunspots or phases of the moon. There's got to be a better way.

Lemmings

There are three broad arguments for brands to "do social media," and none of them make much sense:

• The Lemming Theory -- This is perhaps the most common argument, and it's beautiful because it's self-referencing: Company X did so-and-so which generated all of these posts or clicks that have inherent value and meaning, so you need to do it, too. The analysis of actual business impact, or any tracking on longer-term influence, can't be covered in the brief news stories that promote these activities (or are conveniently absent in the new business pitch slides), so there's no way to counter the argument. Plus, most CEOs have read the same stories and assumed they're true and actionable. Various studies on social media expenditures come out to regularly remind them that they're not doing enough. It's a neat closed loop. 

• The Up Is Down Theory -- Social media and digital marketing generally come with an extensive body of numbers, ratios, and tools with with to track and measure them. Oddly enough, the metrics used to track traditional marketing spends were more direct and honest...even if the processes they measured were somewhat less efficient. GRPs on TV spots connected to sales in a way that no amount of YouTube chatter can deliver; worse, the substance of most social media campaigns can't involve communicating actual selling points (by definition) so many metrics thereof are vaguely useful while appearing digitally immediate. Click-to-buy is incontrovertibly valuable. The rest of it is still up for debate.

• The Change Everything Theory -- The latest and perhaps most extreme version of social media theory is that businesses need to change entirely -- open up, turn inside out, flatten, whatever -- to realize the true benefits of social technology. We heard something very similar near the turn of the last Century when supply chain software and online markets were going to rewrite the very precepts of business conduct. They didn't. Technology can make things better, faster, and hopefully cheaper, but all those promises of a New World 10 years ago resulted in a different version of the Old World. Why should we believe that things are different now?

Perhaps there are two easy questions to ask of social media theories: first, why are there so many of them and, second, why are so many people able to come up with "how to do" or "top ten" lists? It's as if anyone with a PC and WebEx account is an expert. Contrast that with the latest thinking on, say, effective use of billboards, or the refined science of television advertising. Is there so much less prognostication on those tools because it's harder to get away with propagating nonsense?

Social media aren't science or selling strategies as much as philosophy or theology. That makes it hard to truly analyze it, since you have to be a member of the church to qualify to ask questions. 

Misunderstanding

It's indisputable that people spend time using social tools (yours truly included) and that we're spending less time with particular media channels and more time with a variety of them, both produced and UGC. But it's a gigantic, unsupportable leap to conclude that 1) anybody using these media want to hear from brands in any way whatsoever, or that 2) finding fun ways to occupy or waste their time would have any benefit for brands anyway. I fear we sometimes purposely mischaracterize three fundamental facts of social media experience:

• It's fun as long as it's free -- The biggest draw for Facebook, YouTube, or any other social platforms is that they're free, so even the slightest benefit has value. Once that equation gets a number on the cost side -- enduring ads, requiring information, disseminating propaganda -- the math no longer adds up. That's why so many clicks and friend phenomena yield no tangible real-world effects; it's just not part of the deal. "Free" is a synonym for "valueless."

• It's derivative -- For all the talk about the disruptive novelty of social technologies, conversation is nothing new; discussing the news of the day is old behavior, so it's no surprise that the vast majority of blog content is secondary commentary on primary news sources. In other words, social doesn't replace traditional media other than become an intermediary between it and its profits. VCs fund that replacement, so there's a financial model here that may not be sustainable.

• It's as biased as any other media -- We now know that The Crowd is no more honest or unbiased than the authorities we've abandoned for it. Worse, it’s often worse. Bloggers are often journalists without any standards, and the power of online pressure groups (or angry individuals) to gain attention is less a testament to their authority and more the result of a low threshold for activism. No surprise that recent research suggests that trust in these media has sharply declined.

I get the fact that digerati like to talk to one another about how much they're talking to one another, but for the rest of us the ultimate purpose(s) for social technologies aren't so clear. Advocacy and boosterism doesn't take the place of thoughtful analysis. 

Opportunity

I keep thinking that we're going to wake up and start asking intelligent questions instead of finding ways to declare our smarts. Social technology is not a marketing tool, it’s a technology in search of purpose. Consumers have applied it to their needs to share information and entertain one another. Companies have yet to figure out what to do with it.

Douglas Rushkoff gave a great speech on the unrealized opportunity for businesses a few months ago, and I strongly encourage you to check it out. My distillation, in a sentence:

Social technology means your company is participating in a real-time narrative of its behavior and those of your communities that results in your brand.

It's a powerful idea that you’re not going to get from most of the vendors who are promoting social marketing campaigns. But I firmly believe that social media aren’t something you do but rather a contextual fact that just is. Your brand was always social; we just have the tools now to understand and track it. This reality opens up amazing opportunities for branding that involve every aspect of the business, not just the creative energies of the marketing department and its agencies. Brands as narrative of reality vs. storytelling a fantasy means understanding the inputs and outcomes of conversations has far more importance than the minutiae of the chatter.

I know, I know. I don't have enough Twitter followers to have an opinion. My Facebook page isn't exciting enough, or I just don't "get" the fact that social technologies have an immense payoff someday, somehow. It's far more convenient to ignore the facts and lecture businesses on what they should do in spite of their legitimate issues…even though the ideas of narrative, real-time, reality, and truth are so amazingly full of potential.

How long can the social shibboleth endure?

[Illustration: It's a print by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) who created an extraordinary curiosity cabinet, which was a precursor to today's museums. I've had the print on my computer for a while and believe it's in the public domain.]

An Advertising Reformation?

I may be looking too hard for hopeful signs but I think we may be at the threshold of a reformation in advertising, which will mean larger changes in the communications world overall. Here are two of them and why I think they’re important (and somewhat related):

First, there may be a growing recognition that advertising isn't inherently bad. An Institute for Advertising Ethics was announced this week by the American Advertising Foundation (whatever that is) and the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute, with the purpose, in my words, to rescue advertisers from themselves. 

Ads aren't bad by definition and no consumer wakes up hating them; rather, we marketers have perfected our ability to fill them with half-truths, empty promises, and irrelevant humor. The corporate world spends many billions each year to buy the privilege to tell people things...and then tell them little or nothing that matters. 

And then we wonder why they don't trust advertising, or why corporate reputations are at all-time lows. I’ve never understood this doublethink affliction of ours. The ethics body might be a start of treatment that is long overdue:

• Imagine if ads were backed by objective, verifiable standards that didn't make allowances for claims that were generally true but affirmed the specific integrity of every statement? BP would have never gotten away with a decade of claiming it was "beyond petroleum" and winning awards for its creative parsing of the facts. What if ads were true?

• What if ads were somehow rated (and then perhaps encouraged via better pricing) by measure of their substance and/or utility? I have no idea how to come up with the criteria but the fact that so many of the commercials on TV these days are useless and not terribly funny doesn't help the industry whatsoever.

• How about some binding declaration of consistency and transparency? Again, the devil's in the details but every time a McDonald's logo appears next to those Olympics rings helps to destroy the credibility of every advertiser. 

Second, there may be a burgeoning sense that social media aren't intrinsically good, or that social technologies aren't a viable replacement for advertising. Every communicator knows that businesses and their stakeholder groups have always been engaged in conversations of one form or another. The idea is nothing new; rather, what's happened over the past few decades is that companies have delegitimized their traditional tools for contributing to those conversations (see point above). Social media technologies are simply less overtly illegitimate than advertising. 

Or not:

• Consumers are slowly waking up to the fact that bloggers are no more unbiased or insightful than the corporate voices and journalists they purported to replace (trust in them is declining precipitously, and research shows that they mostly regurgitate publicly available info vs. creating net-new stuff anyway).

• The "up is the new down" thinking required to embrace social media strategies is losing favor with clients, as evidenced by how many advocates are now talking about making real money instead of ROI, social currency, or whatever other nonsense measures they've been promoting over the past decade. Stand-alone social campaigns are getting folded into broader strategies which themselves are the conversations.

• The technology argument is reaching its dinosaur-like end, which is that social media needs to be used to reorganize entire companies and rewrite every business process. Er, sure. That's like saying the way to replace your favorite comfy chair in the living room is to redecorate your house. Then move it. And then flip it inside out. I know a few big name brands that have stopped letting technologists tell them how to do marketing. Some experience actually selling vs. starting endlessly purposeless conversations is looking good these days.

I'm being optimistic, of course. 

Talk of revolutions and paradigm shifts and the next top ten ways to do social is to many still as intoxicating as it is easy and irresponsible. A number of CMOs are still living in abject fear of losing their jobs, so they're going to copy whatever gets headlines because they hope it'll give them plausible deniability. Since there've never been any rules by which to measure or judge branding, it's impossible to conclude that even the nuttiest social media campaigns are failing.

Unless you consider sales the ultimate measure, which is what and why advertising and marketing communications came about in the first place.

Maybe a reformation is what’s ahead of us? Instead of throwing out one set of bad, ineffective behaviors for another one, perhaps the industry is on the verge of rediscovering its purpose and original claims to legitimacy? A reformation would be a return to basics...an affirmation of truths that are then strengthened and delivered in new, better ways. An advertising reformation would focus on putting the horse back in front of the proverbial cart.

I don't know if the Institute for Advertising Ethics will help lead this charge. Committees aren't known for boldness, and some of the announced studies about what consumers want are outright laughable (the challenge isn't complicated at least in terms of identifying the problem). There are also lots of very smart, creative, and forceful advocates still arguing for more spending and patience with social media. Maybe the marketing leadership inside companies needs more time lost in the desert before they come to their senses.

But I am convinced that the reformation will come. I am a believer.

(Image: UC Calgary. I believe the print is in the public domain)

Smoking Pot in a Fishbowl

The Harvard Business Review has posted yet another blog post waxing poetic on the magic of social media marketing that substitutes the comments of cheerleaders for even a hint of editorial responsibility or factual accuracy. Letting it get away with running such nonsense would be like shrugging at an Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on the truthiness of the Piltdown Man. 

Read the blog for yourself, but my take is that it claims two points: 

• Brands should use social media promotions to build "trust" among consumers

• Such online trust aggregates into "banks" matter to businesses

These claims are regularly presented as de facto givens by social media advocates. The argument seems straightforward enough: consumers like to spend time on social media, and their chatter (primarily on the big name technology platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) has influences on brands that are both immediate and lasting. Positive activity benefits business while negative activity hurts them, so 21st Century brand reputations are built via friending clicks, votes, comments and other online behaviors. If your company doesn't fund campaigns to manipulate them, and programs to monitor said actions, you're behind the curve. 

It's just not true. 

The HBR story asserts the connection between online behavior and offline reality with the United Breaks Guitars example, in which a disgruntled United Airlines passenger posted what became the most-viewed YouTube of 2009. The clip generated zillions of online comments that riffed on the horribleness of the brand. The only problem is that United reported its first upbeat quarter after the video achieved its notoriety. For all of the "u suk" comments on its Facebook page there was no commensurate decline in bookings. It still got away with charging the same prices. It wasn't business as usual, for sure. Business got better. 

So using this case to claim a causal connection between online behavior and offline reality is about as scientific as giving Twitter feeds responsibility for making the Sun rise and set. The HBR essayist makes the alternate case of Southwest Airlines offending a customer and receiving supportive tweets in its defense, but I still come to the same conclusion. 

Who cares?

Apologists excuse away this lack of any meaningful connection with vague references to long-term brand and reputation, which is a rationale for making marketing decisions that has been hotly debated (and regularly discredited) since the days of bouffant hairdos and broadcast TV. Or they'll reference some abstract, almost genetic change in the very makeup of humankind that makes the otherwise meaningless chatter somehow matter. The discussion of "trust" as defined by a litany of online comments over time must purposefully choose correlation in lieu of causality, ignore established measures of financial value, and presume that the nanosecond it takes to click on something is the same thing as reasoned, meaningful engagement.

Going the next step and claiming that there’s such a thing as a "bank" on these social platforms would be laughable if the essayist weren't a former Harvard Business School professor. You can't apply any quality we'd normally associate with the word to what happens online -- reliability, consistency of process and measurement, even objective existence -- any more than we could ever use it to understand the value of brands over time (i.e. good luck withdrawing any of that brand equity on which you've been told to spend money for years). 

It's as if we're letting a goldfish describe the parameters of the world by looking at the curved boundary of its fishbowl.

Worse, the fish is high...or at least you have to be smoking something to buy into the cases the HBR essayist cites as ways brands can build trust. He loves what Pepsi and Coke have done via marketing programs with charitable tie-ins: Pepsi took a chunk of its budget that it had perennially wasted on Super Bowl TV commercials and created "Project Refresh," which awards grants to applicants with do-good projects who are voted most deserving, and Coke gave a buck to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America for every virtual gift friends sent to friends on Facebook.

Marketers have long exploited charities as both a selling tool and symbolic apology for whatever bad their businesses have done in the world. Fast food companies give money to fight the poor eating and obesity their products encourage. Cosmetics companies directly support women’s causes the same time their products indirectly tell them they’re not good enough. "Buy our stuff and we’ll give to charity X" has always been a viable sales prompt on top of any promised functional benefits.

But trust? Bank? Huh?

I'm all for companies giving money back to communities, so there's nothing inherently wrong with what the soda pop companies are doing. Most brands do at least something in this regard. There's just little that's particularly right about the actions as marketing strategies. Pepsi doesn’t "own" good works projects (nobody does, except maybe Habitats for Humanity) and the chasm is utterly vast between Project Refresh and selling more cases of carbonated sugar water. Ditto for Coke's Facebook giveaway, irrespective of how many friends it has on its Facebook page. To call these interactions "relationships" is like saying you know a celebrity because you saw her picture in a magazine. The picture is probably worth more than the promotional clicks, actually.

The only thing consumers can trust with certainty is that these companies are trying to find novel ways to sell things without admitting as much. There's nothing trustworthy in that. Perhaps that's why corporate reputations are at all-time lows in spite of the social media brilliance celebrated by the HBR blogger.

I guess what bothers me most about this article in particular and the subject generally is that companies need to change the way they communicate, not just with consumers but with all of their constituent audiences. The lack of trust in what brands say has been the primary driver of consumer reliance on one another (or on the anonymous Crowd), and I believe that the decline of faith in our private and public institutions has been very much a self-inflicted wound. Today's social media technologies aren't inherently better ways to communicate than any other...they're just less bad than the traditional approaches of ads, press releases, mainstream media analyses, etc. We don't need new rules as much as we should reacquaint ourselves with all of the old rules we choose to violate.

Reputation matters, duh, but you can't get good business strategy out of bad or sloppy analysis. Why is so much of the blather about social media in such a dire hurry to claim legitimacy (perhaps because most of the expert authors are in the business of selling services to deliver said rush). The HBR story could have just as easily studied why there's absolutely no good reason why low-involvement, high volume consumer brands like Coke and Pepsi are even wasting time or budgets "doing social" in the first place.

Here's what I wish the HBR story told us:

• The tools to build credibility, authority, and trust in the marketplace have absolutely nothing to do with marketing tricks, but rather with how, where, when, why, and with whom companies actually operate...in the real world, doing real things. 

• The location of reliable and financially-relevant trust isn't in the online cloud but in the functional reality of business practices. 

• The function of social media is to share, narrate, and improve the reality of business operations, not serve as a virtual stand-in or distraction from it.

• We really and truly don't know how to do any of this yet, and it needs the attention of experts on culture, behavior, history, and business reality vs. more riffs from inspired advocates. 

The Harvard Business Review should know better. Instead it's just passing the bong.

(Image: "The Rake's Progress, Plate VIII - The Rake in a Madhouse," engraving published 1735, J. Dicks, London; I believe this is a work in the public domain) 

Political Parties Are Archaic Social Media Platforms

Tuesday's election results are being consistently characterized as the result of "anti-DC, anti-establishment" anger. Two winners from opposite political parties, Joe Sestak and Rand Paul, were on TV Wednesday morning talking about the need for accountability from politicians and that voters are tired of being ignored.

I think the candidates and pundits have got it wrong, and they're either willing believers or calculating promoters of a myth that bodes ill for the very voters they claim to treasure.

Steampunk Social Media

Political parties aren't mentioned in any of America's founding documents; rather, they emerged once the government had been formed and it had become clear that there needed to be ways to find, inspire, connect, and reward voters. In this sense political parties were the social media of their time because they gave people ways to participate in the ongoing conversation about governing. Forget technology and you can see the parallels between an online chat room and a conversation in a coffeehouse, or a list of principles written in quill pen with a posting typed on a Facebook page.

What the parties soon realized was that the substance of this ongoing social media conversation they provided had to be about things larger and more abstract than the technicalities of governing because, like the corporate brands that followed, people were more comfortable engaging with broad, easy-to-understand themes. Federalists are monarchists. The Whigs want to shred the Constitution. So political parties become myth machines that continuously teed-up the artificial context in which their members could participate. There was a reality behind it, of course -- patronage jobs, funds for pet projects, and implicit guarantees of lifetime employment for the party faithful -- which strengthened and helped preserve the machines. 

The Myth of No Accountability

Politicians have been always held accountable to two sometimes opposing constituencies: first, the party machines needing their minions to stay true to the themes they promoted and, both secondarily and as an outcome, voters really didn't want their elected officials to do much of anything and certainly not tell them the truths about the complexities of government and their social contract:

• Don't actually fix Social Security if it'll impact the benefits I receive or touch health insurance if my payments will change

• Go fight wars as long as I don't have to hear about them and make sure my children aren't drafted

• I'd prefer incessant bickering about energy as long as the price I pay for gas stays as low as possible

• Tell somebody else they need to act differently or pay more for the problems I see around me, or

• Don't do anything because doing things just makes things worse. 

Politicians have been far more than accountable to these conflicting party and individual voter demands. They’ve been complete slaves. To suggest otherwise (as some of this week's winners have done) is to buy into a boldfaced lie. Americans have been "values voters" since we read postings by candlelight.

New Myth, Same Myth

I think Tuesday's election results reveal two primary themes that are far more complex than anti-Washington rage:

• First, that the political social media machines of the past are breaking down as a combination of technology and cultural triggers threaten to sever voters from the old mechanisms of networking (local party establishments feeding up to a national entity, supported by other real-world organized interests, whether union or corporate). The myths of party identification feel archaic.

• Second, voters seem willing to embrace instead a more fluid, more esoteric myth that is even further divorced from reality or the truths of what it takes to govern. It's broadly thematic like the old party promises but it's far more absolute, allowing for not even the slightest violations represented by compromise or sometimes reason itself. The new myth is the old myth only divorced from reality.

Democrats are socialists bent on government takeover of the economy. Republicans are corporate shills committed to managing our personal lives. Each party is responsible for the difficulty and fear in our lives, and never the twain shall meet...certainly not in the actuality of governing. There'll be no tough choices made on immigration, energy, jobs, or wars. The message to the victorious politicians this week is that they must stay true to the new myth. Speak the truth or take action and you will be held accountable.

Virtual Democracy

Human beings have rich internal lives that infuse their experience of the external world with meaning. This has always been true, however realized, and it applies to our families as it does to economics. Our participation in politics has always been somewhat imaginary in that we imagine who our politicians are, what they stand for, and what it all means. William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley duked it out in the late 1800s based as much on perception as on the reality of the issues, if not more so. Political parties have always been the mechanism that kept such battles grounded; political operators knew that there'd be some consequence to even the highest flights of rhetorical imagination.

Those connections -- and that responsibility -- are being severed and lost today. Voters are embracing new social tools and activities.

The folks behind MoveOn.org and Tea Party meetings aren't themselves going to be held accountable for the platforms they vociferously promote. The "voters" who they (and the media) continually reference is nothing more than a convenient rhetorical term and not a group of people who are willing to hold themselves accountable to understanding nuanced, complicated subjects, any more than they're organized to do anything other than rail against their officials if they dare speak about such subjects with any nuance or acknowledgment of complexity. 

The fundamental link between cause and effect -- i.e. telling the government to do nothing means you can't complain when something you depended on doesn't happen or, conversely, enabling it to do things means you have to understand the risks -- is not encouraged or supported by posting on Facebook pages or yelling in YouTube videos. In fact, we get just the opposite: politicians who are beholden to myths without consequences. Virtual democracy, not a real one.

If anything, this week's elections show us that we need to be really, really careful about what we vote for. I wish more media types and pundits were talking about it in these terms.

(Image: The Lebanon Club, New York Workingmen's Coffeehouse; Harper's Weekly, January 24, 1880; via Southern Labor Archives, www.library.gsu.edu)

In With The Old, Out With The New

Twitter and MySpace each announced programs last week intended to make money by giving advertisers access to their users. The approaches couldn't be more different, and I think they raise more questions about the nature and hopes for monetizing social behavior than they answer.

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets will work kind of like Google’s Adwords: companies will bid to have their 140-character messages appear at the top of relevant searches. Two interesting twists will be that there'll be coordination with its geo-location, so imagine adding the context of place to Tweets ("sale-priced blue sweaters 100 feet from you"), and a quality called "resonance" which will require Promoted Tweets to be forwarded or they'll be dropped. Resonance will also be part of the advertiser's history so brands that get higher averages will get charged less for polluting the Twitter stream.

MySpace's Events is a calendar function that draws on its huge musician base to tee-up local concert info for users. It includes rankings for popular events like baseball games and offers selling opportunities for tickets and schwag. It seem as though the entire service can be bought (Walmart is sponsoring it currently) and I'd imagine there’ll be ads placed on the calendar itself, much like the way MySpace craps out its user interface overall. One intriguing functionality will be the inclusion of event notifications received on Facebook, suggesting that MySpace hopes its Events will become a one-stop planning and marketing platform for its members.

In other words, Twitter is trying to make an old idea look new, and MySpace has a new idea that it'll do its best to make look old.

I'm particularly unimpressed by the Twitter announcement. "Resonance" when it comes to commercial speech is a hoity-toity name for something far more pedestrian: price promotions. After all, utility is the primary currency on Twitter, in that the messages that get "used" the most (forwarded, shortened, whathaveyou) are those that offer immediate benefit. Titillating gossip is one such example, but I'm not sure that Best Buy is going to want to sponsor Twitpics of Lindsay Lohan's latest stumble. Perhaps global news events are something to which Starbucks could attach its brand (imagine the latest emerging crises brought to you by sponsored microbloggers).

But the business corollary for this utility is coupons or price cuts, which means Twitter's grand monetization plan is to become one giant direct marketing mechanism. 

There's nothing wrong with that -- its biggest successes so far have been in distributing coupons and selling stuff on promotion, so it's just institutionalizing what's already working -- but then Twitter has nothing to do with branding. It's not even an advertising vehicle, per se, as much as it's a neat replacement for classified ads and Sunday newspaper coupon inserts. Forget consumers forwarding interesting news tidbits about business operations; for all the talk of conversation and the impact of the social web, it turns out that Twitter aspires to be the 21st Century’s version of direct mail. Resonance could just as easily be called redemption. 

The MySpace plan is more forward-looking. Up until now the service has mistakenly assumed that it's a media channel not much different than a broadcast network or magazine. This thinking probably came from the good folks at parent company News Corp, who know a little something about making such a model work quite brilliantly. It was just a stupid idea for the interactivity on MySpace because it forced people to get things done almost around/in spite of all the ads that cluttered its pages. The largest motivator for said interaction continues to be the presence of a reported 14 million musicians who post song samples, tour dates, photos, and thereby offer virtual homes for their fans that can be shared and grown. This behavior has survived MySpace's best efforts to ruin it.

So turning it into what's effectively a stand-alone app is really smart by building on established behavior and attempting to make it bigger and better. The monetization part may come through doing so, not from crapping it out as the company has done in the past: if MySpace can prompt and support the activities of its music fans it'll present many opportunities for add-on services (links to UGC, value-add content from musicians, etc.), all of which can be monetized through sponsorship. It might even start distributing coupons and sales promotions ("hey, while you're at the concert you can get a $1 Whopper at the Burger King right around the corner, and here's the map"). This is a potentially powerful approach to creating platforms for brands to deliver greater meaning, relevance, and utility to consumers.

I think the Twitter plan tells us a lot about what worked in the past, while the MySpace gig suggests what's possible in the future. Now, with that said, I think things will shake out like this:

• Twitter will make oodles of money until consumers realize that they're being exploited and brands figure out that the discounts they're forced to offer aren't really making them any more money. Another service that offers the same functionality (or more) only without the ads or any costs will come around and Twitter will fade away. Another group of entrepreneurs will start talking about monetization.

• MySpace Events will become the default calendar for a small group of die-hard music fans but it won't likely gain enough critical mass to grow beyond those rather narrow (thought profitable) confines unless there are other services coming down the pike (or perhaps some big technology platform play, enabling it to leapfrog into becoming the true home for social web experiences). MySpace continues to fade away and is replaced...yadda yadda...see prior bullet point.

In with the old, out with the new. Just like always?

You've Got To Be Kidding

The markets tumbled, retirement savings dissolved, and home values evaporated as every principle and presumption about individual investing was called at least into question, and more likely to account. Now financial services firm Vanguard is promoting the answer: stop investing, and start Vanguarding.

It bought a four-page magazine spread to reveal this crucially useful insight (I saw mine in the latest issue of The New Yorker), and the story unfolds as follows:

• Front page: A photo of a trading floor at some unidentified market, over which a headline reads "Stop just investing."

• Inside two-page spread: A red kite floating against a blue sky, and the headline "Start Vanguarding."

• Back page: A paragraph explaining that Vanguard puts its clients interests first, and that it provides its funds at-cost instead of low-cost. A punchline that reads "Are you investing or are you Vanguarding?" The prerequisite URL and 800 number follow.

I've been writing for some time now about the branding challenges (and opportunities) for financial services firms, as I don't think they can rely on the automatic return of investor credulity. People are are painfully aware that all of the "we've been in the business for 100 years" blather was likely nonsense and possibly a lie. Nobody was looking out for their interests, per se, and it took a mammoth infusion of government money to keep a broken system from collapsing entirely.

So I don't think the problem is that people need to stop investing, but rather for financial services firms to provide meaningful, relevant, and useful information on why they should start again. What's different today than a year ago (in terms of the behaviors of the firms) that warrants investors' trust?

Nothing, according to Vanguard's branding. It's more of the same-old idiocy, or at least it depends on its customers being idiots and believing it. Here are the three core areas in which it fails: 

• Content: The world has shifted on its access and the most important thing Vanguard can tell us is that it wants to turn its name into a verb? Forget that making this leap is not going to happen (they must have realized that it takes lots of real behaviors to accomplish it); what would Vanguard accomplish if it worked? Even though the ad says so little, I walk away from thinking that it didn't tell me anything at all. 

• Context: Hello, Great Recession anyone? No adult alive today isn't at least viscerally aware that something went wrong in the financial world, even if they have otherwise ignored it (see the start of this essay). You can't run an ad like this without acknowledging that fact or, by default, seeming somewhat disconnected from that reality by not doing so. It's like the Vanguard brand exists in some perfect vacuum; maybe the red kite is a symbol for its business, lost high in the sky of its own imagination?

• Consumption: You’d think that the average New Yorker reader skews somewhat higher on income, education, and other demographics that matter to advertisers (not to mention a solid dose of intellectual pretension, etc.). So a glossy four-pager ad spread that says nothing other than trying to turn a proper noun into a verb is going to mean anything to said readers? Worse, if we presume that they have money to invest, would they be the types to make investing decisions based on a glossy, say-nothing ad? Vanguard might as well have left the pages blank.

The best defense for the ad is the standard claim that other ads in other media say other things, so that the collective impact is a nuanced brand position. All that meaningful, relevant, and useful detail that investors need arrives somewhere else, so it's OK to waste four pages in The New Yorker (and elsewhere) to say nothing at all.

Only nobody does that neat collecting or correlating anymore; brands are far more dependent on reality than any ethereal or idealized positioning that, like the red kite in the ad, floats above the truths revealed by content, context, and consumption. 

April Fool's, only the joke's on Vanguard.

Brands As Sausage Factories

Much has been said about the legislative process that yielded America's health bill this week, and most of the conversation has been about the opinions, expectations, and fears voiced in, well, the conversation. We've just had our first behind-the-scenes glimpse into how the government makes sausage, and we didn't like it one bit. Watching also impeded it getting made, or at least getting it made well.

Just wait until the same thing happens to your brand.

It's inevitable, really. Social media could never remain the purview of playful marketers toying with the clicks of passingly interested consumers. No matter how happily people burn out their retinas engaging with branding, there'll come a time when the technology enables more useful visibility into what goes on operationally within companies.

That insight into how governments function is a possibility that has already been codified into expectation by the healthcare debate. 

The very premise of representative democracy is that we plebians elect folks to do the dirty, messy, imperfectly realized, sometimes nasty, and occasionally outright indefensible business of reaching the consensus necessary for governance. We never wanted to know how it was done though if we did we could always run for office and see it first-hand. Voters used to be content judging the outcomes: if the sausage tasted good, all was well, and if it didn't, that meant it was time to vote in a new slate of cooks.

That premise is forever changed: now we can be certain that the page-count of any future piece of legislation will factor prominently in mainstream media photo ops; individual phrases or numbers will get repeated and magnified out of proportion in the echo chamber of chat; coverage of peoples' reactions, and reactions to those reactions, will serve as a running pseudo-narrative of a process that once got done more effectively behind closed doors. 

Again, I'm not celebrating ignorance of the process but rather suggesting that giving everyone the imaginary sense that they're supposed to be involved doesn't necessarily improve the results. 

Yet we citizens will henceforth expect to be intimately involved in what's going on in government without having to do anything...especially take any responsibility for resolving differences and enabling effective legislation. We'll just get sickened or thrilled watching the sausage get made, and let everyone else know how we feel about it every step of the way. Good luck seeing anything pass through that machine tasting any good.

Stay tuned for the end of representative branding, too.

If recent experience is any guide, we can look forward to circumstances far more chaotic and dire than any expert "give up the brand to the conversation" nonsense even considers, let alone understands. Just imagine if your consumers rejected your silly video creating social promotion and demanded instead to watch, describe, and often misunderstand your business operations. 

Think shareholders meeting, only worse and 24/7:

• Your internal documents used a props
• Pressure groups finding cause to support their worst suspicions
• Detractors as motivated and loud as your evangelists
• Routine internal meetings heckled into chaos
• Your every statement dissected and recast in other, sometimes contradictory words
• Business processes questioned
• Your executives (or any employees) pulled into personality-based conflicts
• A residual belief by the public that they could do your job better than you can

I think consumers would shocked, and some sickened, if they had visibility into some of the more routine activities that occur behind the closed doors to your corporate office (just imagine the reaction to how your marketers study and target their proclivities, for instance, or the way your supply chain folks measure what's minimally acceptable for working conditions at your outsourced factories). Their reactions wouldn't necessarily be fair, or just, or even particularly accurate, but they'd be real...and suffice as fodder to the echo chamber of media that would consume and propagate them. 

Do they really want to know or, more pointedly, do we want them to have such visibility? If consumers become the imaginary "owners" of brands the way they presume to dictate and judge the behaviors of our politicians, it raises fascinating questions about how you'll get anything meaningful done. When your traditional sausage eaters become sausage makers:

• Are commentary and consensus what matter most? This is why we've heard over the past few  years about the importance of online "influencers" (bloggers, for the most part), and the utility of Net Promoter Scores (NPS measures consumers' "likelihood to recommend"). The problem is that this amounts to measuring the size and shape of the shadows on Plato's cave walls; few bloggers do any primary research on what they write about, and the generic crowd tends to produce reviews of things at opposite extremes. So trust in the social sphere is actually declining according to recent studies, and some big sites like YouTube are simply walking away from the presumption that the crowd can say anything more that "this rocks" or "it sucks." If consumers truly want to hear more from one another, they seem to believe less and less of what they're told.

• Can branding expect to change preconceived notions? This is where the idea of storytelling for brands finds new relevance, because people's opinions about your products or services will often be codified long before you ever interact with them (and whatever you do or say won’t really change their beliefs). There could be new utility for brands as stories: not filled with promises of intangible benefits, as we currently see them, but constructed as narratives of behaviors that yield authenticity and purpose. They're already considered as much whether we like it or not (i.e. they're conceived by consumers beyond the pale of our expert communications wizardry), so why not figure out how to redefine our approach? If commentary and consensus emerge apart from what we say (see point above) the idea would be for us to focus on the behaviors that prompt those notions vs. trying to manipulate the conversations that follow. Engagement with meaning. Consistency of effort. Ubiquity of purpose.

• Is the true mechanism of collaboration quid pro quo? Every citizen could claim some legitimate interest in the sausage making in Washington, as it's implicitly presumed they are voters. Is it the same for brands? Are the people talking about your brand always current or potential customers? Of course not. In fact, there's some research suggesting that the most vocal fans and critics are not likely costing or paying you a cent. I made a rhetorical statement in my last Advertising Age column in which I suggested that the true test of the value of a "fixed" customer service issue would be if the customer bought something else on the spot. Some commentators noted the inanity of my proposal but missed the bigger question: shouldn't we somehow link our communication efforts more directly to our selling? I still don't understand why this is such a radical idea.

I think consumer involvement in brands, however imaginary or fleeting, is inevitable. There's no escaping the fact that at least some of them are going to hate what they see inside the sausage factory...they'll be inconsolable, just as your evangelists will provide their undying allegiance. The resulting conversation will make most social engagement strategies to date seem quaint, if not simply irrelevant. 

I haven't figured out all the angles on this one yet, but I do think it's time we come to terms with the fact that our brand conversations with consumers are about to follow the direction of their conversations with government.

Brands as sausage factories. Yuck.

Squeaky Wheel Marketing

After Pepsi's announcement earlier this week that it would stop selling the full-leaded version of its soda pop in schools around the world, I was quoted in USAToday saying that I'm cynical about its purpose (the company doesn't really sell much in schools globally anyway) and doubtful of the connection to its sales strategy (so we should celebrate its retreat from selling sweet beverages by...buying more sweet beverages?).

The company got praise from a spokesman from a special interest group, however, and credit from an industry expert for "doing the right thing." This got me thinking about the matter some more and I think I finally understand what's going on.

The announcement was truly nonsense; Pepsi might as well have told us that it has sworn off sending evil thought waves at Coke drinkers, or that it had declared a bottling plant a nuclear-free zone. Giving up on a business that it doesn't possess says nothing about the brand. Deciding to shelve its regular mix entirely would have been a statement, only it won't do that unless consumers continue to walk away from it.

Do sugary drinks belong in schools? Of course they do; sugar and caffeine are a veritable food group for kids, and the stuff flows freely at fast food restaurants, gets served in gallon-sized cups at 7-Eleven, and literally falls off the shelves at grocery stores because it's priced so cheaply. Coke responded correctly to the Pepsi news by saying that it deferred to local school boards to decide whether soda pop, hamburgers, or classes convening before 9 am should be banned. Maybe they'll get to that after they limit the exploitation of students by sports apparel marketers.

Pepsi makes soda pop, not cigarettes or guns, so the schools decision doesn't make sense unless you look at who it’s intended to influence: that guy lauding Pepsi's gesture in the USAToday piece, and the special interests for which he speaks.

Welcome to the brave new world of Squeaky Wheel Marketing.

The Internet has enabled an entirely new level of organizing and advocacy, and does a good job of stripping single issues away from the reality of context in which they otherwise exist. Child obesity is one such "issue" and concerned individuals can "get involved" in it via a myriad of virtual ways: click, vote, comment, complain. Their involvement needs to be centered on wrongs that require righting so there must be targets (otherwise known as scapegoats) against which the virtual agitation can be directed. Soda pop in schools -- out of a zillion different contributors to kids getting fat, and nowhere near the top 100 -- somehow became a priority.

Are the folks involved in the child obesity issue now going to drink more Pepsi?  Were they even consumers in the first place? Answering those questions doesn't really matter   because our definition of brands requires that squeaky wheels get fixed...or their noise could scramble the messages we want to get out to everyone else. There's a brand image "out there" that needs to be protected, and the problem is that Internet search and various social media tools has made those threatening squeaks more common and a lot louder. 

Only they're still squeaks. Most brands are committing time and money to track them, reply to them, and otherwise preoccupy marketing with them. I'm sure there were celebrations within the Pepsi communications department because of the press coverage of the announcement, confusing their response to a relatively narrow, single-issue constituency of maybe-sortof-who knows-consumers with doing something constructive.

Pepsi should make business decisions based on what will allow it to sell the most soda pop for the highest prices for as long as humanly possible. If signing off of schools supports that endeavor then I'm all for it; hell, the company should be willing to do anything just shy of breaking the law as far as I'm concerned.

But responding to voices that have been unduly elevated by the technology of the Internet is without integrity and expresses no principle other than that of convenience and dishonesty.

It's bad strategy. And it's squeaky wheel marketing.

There Is No Middle

A presumption common to much of the political news coming out the U.S. these days is that voters have rejected party politics to be "independents," and that these voters represent a vast "middle" from which candidates must draw. Good luck with that.

I'd argue that these voters have instead migrated to various extremes, and that the only thing they may share in common is an unredeemable distrust and impatience with government.

A growing body of voters don't want our leaders to do anything; we elect them so they can oppose and undo what other politicians try to accomplish -- a proverbial Them who, in general, represent the anthesis of whatever it is you hold dear -- and then once they make the mistake of actual involvement in conversation with their peers or, gasp, participate in a piece of legislation that doesn't otherwise dismantle some past bill or function of government, they become part of the problem and are at risk of getting replaced in the next election cycle by a candidate who hasn't sullied his or her reputation by ever having done anything whatsoever.

To characterize the political expectations of these extremists as a "middle" of anything other than chaos is a fantasy invention and easy excuse for cable talk show hosts; I think there's something far deeper going on, and it involves the changing way people (voters or consumers) relate to institutions, whether government or business:

• We seem to be far more interested in what they do wrong than what they do right, and our doubts on their capacity for the latter are matched only by our suspicions of the former.
• Our attachment to symbols fires our passions but can be evermore detached from what we’re willing to do because of them, so our loyalty to leaders and brands can be quite brittle and short-lived.
• We're willing to believe anything and nothing simultaneously, as if the context of reality itself is nothing more than a collection of fluid opinions, making every interpretation of any communication believable at some level.

I thought the Internet was supposed to link everyone into viable communities, and that the ubiquity of information would make ignorance a thing of the past. It has done neither, and we see it proven every day by victorious throw-out-the-bastards political campaigns and social media stunts that deliver a zillion clicks in celebration of bellybutton lint. These experiences have little to do with involving people in effective government or sustainable brands.

There's something more going on here, and I'm not sure it's so good.