Jonathan Salem Baskin's Dim Bulb

Amazon’s Ad Contest

Amazon has announced a competition for customers to create their own 30-second video commercials for the brand.  Two winners will each get $10,000 Amazon.com Gift Cards, and their work will be screened at "a U.S. film festival." 

Forget for a moment that the whole point of a social media campaign like this isn't to create the ads themselves -- in Amazon's case, it has never needed ads of any kind before, and isn't likely going to get particularly good ones from the crowd anyway -- but rather to use the promotion to get the attention of a wider, non-UGC-creating audience. 

So do you think anybody cares about it?  The announcement got picked up in PR-Inside.com, the virtual ghost of the Seattle PI, and the leading source of the best ways to waste marketing dollars, Brandweek.  As of last weekend, there were a whopping 13 posts in the company’s forum on the topic.

I'm surprised that Amazon would do something so dull, but then again, it often does things that are really smart.  While other businesses are "experimenting" with the conversational thing by prompting consumer conversations about conversing, Amazon has been quietly building dialogs based on its core function: recommending and selling books.  Instead of running ads to make the usual brand promises, it has made its browsing and purchasing functionality just shy of perfect (at least compared to the messy, uneven experiences available at bricks-and-mortar retailers).

The branding we get from Amazon is all about doing things at the site, not trying to frame or describe them.  It knows that the conversation aspect of business arises from the conduct of commerce, not parallel or separate from it.  Its site isn't the most beautiful, but it simply works beautifully.  This is directionally relevant knowledge for all brands, not just those that retail online.

Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't lots of opportunities for Amazon to do fun, engaging marketing.  I can think of at least three ways it could have conducted a UGC ad contest that would have been far better grounded in the reality and strength of its brand:

First, why not challenge reader communities to create ads for various genres?  Get mystery fans to produce a spot, and sci-fi readers another.  People usually feel strongly for their favorite sort of books, and are interested in sharing their obsessions with one another.  The resulting commercials could be redundantly similar, or diverge so wildly in content and/or construction that they could come from different companies.  Who'd care?  The point would be to get lots of readers involved, and use that engagement to possible attract potential readers who might get drawn to the Amazon platform by a genre interest vs. a generic one.

Second, why video and the outdated convention of a TV commercial?  It's kind of like the early Ford Motor Co. hosting a competition for the best horse riding.  Considering its aspirations for the Kindle Reader, how about a UGC contest for every historic media distribution tool?  Celebrate its digital book transmission with spots celebrating radio, kinescopes, dauggerotype photos, even print set by linotype?  What about hand-drawn and decorated pages on vellum?  This would position digital at the end of some historical path, and probably produce really interesting stuff.  Make history the topic, not just personal expressions of the company's branding.

Finally, wouldn't the cool challenge be to write something cool and compelling about a company that sells books?

How about those genre fans collaborate on a crowdsourced short story or something? Conversely, it could be a competition to scribble "the perfect sentence."  Think poetry, or a variety of written art forms.  This UGC would be a lot easier to update and share, and lots more people could get involved.  Why not allow every purchaser to contribute (or give shoppers a minimal discount if they pitch in)?

I suspect Amazon's ad contest is the result of them just not being good at doing this sort of nonsense, which is a credit to their business model.  But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to make it work. 

A Grain of Salt

The Wall Street Journal dedicated a special section in yesterday's paper to "The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World," and made five shockingly novel revelations:

1. Don't just talk at consumers
2. Give them a reason to participate
3. Listen to - and join - conversation outside your site
4. Resist the temptation to sell, sell sell
5. Don't control, let it go

I know, I know, i'’s hard to catch your breath after reading such insight!  It took a partnership with MIT's Sloan Management Review, and the keen insights of academics from around the country to reach these (and similarly earth-shattering) conclusions.

In other words, it's hard work getting things so completely wrong.

Marketing experts, whether academic or self-proclaimed, can't resist issuing rules, laws, or predictions, especially this time of year.  It often represents the exact opposite of what everybody else should believe or do, usually due to a combination of factors:

• They wear rose-colored glasses.  There's an a priori assumption that marketing is all about mental states, and it affects everything said experts, er, think.  It also means that they're only looking for branding evidence in communications media.
• They have a sales agenda.  Whether driving kids into classrooms, or clients into contracts, it's hard to have an objective conversation about any phenomenon if the thinking is controlled by people who make money on 1) said phenomenon, and 2) controlling it?
• They're also confused.  Qualitative measures of branding are the proverbial tip of the iceberg to all the behavioral underpinnings of such awareness; like hammer-owners, the experts only see the nails.  When marketing experts are busy sending tweets at one another every nanosecond, it's hard for them to imagine, let alone see, a vastly larger world wherein that's not necessarily what people choose to do.

Yet it's these very people who presume to lecture the rest of us at industry events and conferences.  And we can look at the sales collapse this holiday season -- or the plunge in corporate reputation, dissolution of trust in brands, and the evaporation of premium pricing -- and still listen to this stuff without laughing?

Here are the real secrets:

1. Don't just talk at consumers -- Do things.  Behaviors are the drivers of awareness, intention, referral, or any other quality we ascribe to mental states about brands.
2. Give them a reason to participate -- But not to simply participate in/with your branding.  People don't want to talk about ads, or turn the web into a glorified suggestion box.  2.0 activities don't describe marketing, they are the marketing itself.
3. Listen to - and join - conversation outside your site -- Really?  And say what?  By definition, "conversation" implies different viewpoints, and third-party sites are only as credible as they are independent.  How about making the stuff you write on your sites more honest and direct?  
4. Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell -- Wrong.  Everything you produce should have utility, relevance, value, and meaning for your target consumers; if this isn't the textbook definition of selling, then it should be.  Are we really supposed to expect to distract consumers into purchase?
5. Don't control, let it go -- Only there's no "it" to let go of.  And you should actually try very hard to control the conversation, in that your relationship with would-be consumers should have some overarching direction, flow, and context.  You can't guarantee everything'll fit it, but "letting go" is only exciting to people who have no responsibility for what happens next.

Good luck with the other lists (there are lots of them out there already).  My advice is to take them all with a grain of salt, if that.

I'm Your Number One Fan

I’m at the Forrester Marketing Conference in Los Angeles, which kicked off with a spiel about a woman in Cincinnati who pretty much dedicated her life to Ikea.

After regularly driving hundreds of miles to shop at the closest locations, she took it upon herself to campaign for a store closer by.  Well, that, and a whole lot more:

• She started a web site to note the most excruciatingly small details about the store
• Regularly contacted journalists
• Corresponded actively and often with Ikea
• Made her license plate "IKEA,"
• Invented and drew a patron saint for the brand (see below), and
• When the store finally came to her city, camped out in the parking lot for the privilege of being among the first to walk into it

She's Ikea's Number One Fan.

So what did the company do when she applied for a job at the new store?

It ignored her.  And I'm not so sure that I would have advised doing anything different.

Her example was intended to illustrate the new consumer behaviors (and expectations) of engagement.  It's a valid point -- and the focus on this two-day event -- but by evidencing such egregiously aggressive involvement with the Ikea brand, it suggested the complexity of this emerging marketing model.

Businesses have always had to contend with crazy people.  Back when I worked with Victoria's Secret, there were always a few people who wouldn't get off the call center phones.  Ever.  Ditto for some of the repeat walks-ins/loiter-arounds we'd get at Blockbuster stores now and then.  Our response was to find ways to un-invite them from being customers.

The Internet can serve to do the opposite: it amplifies and extends this behavior.  Now, these people are called influencers, or opinion leaders.  And we're supposed to engage with them.

But, and intending no insult to Ikea Lady, they're still kinda wacky, aren't they?  At a minimum, they're not the basis for a consumer marketing strategy. 

For every rabidly vocal advocate or detractor of your business, there are many, many more consumers who aren't really interested in engaging with your brand beyond buying and using whatever it is that you sell. 

It's not likely that they're getting influenced much by zealots, who are usually content with ranting at one another.  Your average consumers are definitely going online for information about your business that might impact their purchase decisions, but I question whether much of that content is coming from people like the woman who swore her eternal soul to Ikea.

That's not to say that it's unimportant to understand what crazy people think, or how they might impact your business.  And the groundswell approach that Forrester has pioneered suggests that online communities and networks have an ecology that is mutually-dependent, and in which your business is described and judged without you having much control over those outcomes. 

So the ways that your customers are influencing one another are vitally important to factor into your communications strategy.  Forrester is onto something here, and it's great that there's an event focused on it (and attendance seems amazingly healthy, which is a testament to the hunger for this information among marketers). 

I just think that engagement needs to have a purpose and, in the case of the rare unmitigated zealot, the answer might not be to embrace him or her in the same way you would a more reasonable customer. 

The business case for engagement is going to have a lot less to do with greasing squeaky wheels than it will with oiling the entire machine.

Instead of finding more ways to engage with consumers, maybe marketers need to find ways to be sure that when consumers engage with/about you that their experiences are, well, engaging. 

That means meaningful.  Relevant.  Useful.

If you're active in that way, you also might choose not to offer a job to someone who wants to sleep in the parking lot of your store.   

Borders as a Social Medium

Borders has lost a hunk of its financing, suspended its dividend, and hired Merrill Lynch & Co. to "review its strategic alternatives."

I've got an alternative for them: stop going to the usual suspects for answers.  Enough with the strategic reviews of the book business.  Skip the expected branding nonsense, and start asking different questions, like why couldn't the business be recast as a social medium?

No, not just some chatting experiment prompted by a twentysomething in the marketing department.  Skip creating inane video or other viral contagion.  And turn off the dumb TV monitors they recently announced would be added to the stores.  It's clear the marketers at Borders haven't been allowed to market their way out of a paperback.

I'm talking about a model for the entire business. 

First, can can anybody say "book club?"

• What if buying a book at Borders got you some access to a living community of fellow fans of the author, genre, or subject?
• Perhaps there could be inputs into these communities from authors and critics, thereby increasing the value of the media 
• Participants could accrue points for contributions and/or breadth of involvement, which would dovetail into a loyalty program of some sort. 
• Reading a Borders book could be made a different experience than that of any other retailer (online included), and the experience gets more valuable over time. 
• Let the competitors bemoan the lack of "big books" to drive traffic; anyway, that's like clothing retailers complaining about the weather.  Real communities don't rely on such invented and inconsistent prompts

What about becoming a home for user-created content?

• Everybody and their brother feels inspired and technically-empowered to create extended riffs on their favorite movies, TV shows, and books
• The Internet is awash in these homemade episodes of Star Trek and "what happened then" chapters of The Vampire Lestat.  Borders could become the official, sanctioned home for this copyright-daring content, so buying some packaged media product there would include access to all the other stuff that commands so much time and attention (from would-be customers, thank you very much)
• If authorized (it would take some work to make this happen), these communities could truly thrive, and not exist in fear (or under the radar) of the original content creators.  Borders could bring all of this content together

Couldn't Borders stores get stocked to serve local buyers/specific communities?

• Retailers of all sorts are struggling to invent answers to the question "why do I, Mr. Consumer, need to visit?"
• With detailed purchaser data (Borders should know what books I buy just like Blockbuster remembers all the movies I’ve rented), couldn't stores get allocated media products based on the interests of people who live near them?
• Ditto for one or more of the communities that it formed via social media: perhaps there could be sections within a store, corollated with local tastes, on "leading" titles by genre or subject...voted and reviewed by neighbors (and augmented with "expert" involvement)
• This would allow stores to take deep dives into subject areas of particular interest to local customers.  So forget about putting the same "bestsellers" into every store, displayed the same way.  That’s not branding; it's boring

There'd have to be real business models based on these ideas (or others like them).  It would represent a fundamental reconfiguring of the book store model.  And it could all fail miserably.

But, clearly, that model is broken right now, and no amount of remerchandising, financial wizardry, or hopeful branding is going to fix it.  Dire circumstances require bold action, not just a standard list of actions for which we can all pretty much see an outcome.

Maybe it's time to print a new version of the Borders strategic plan?

Be The Band

Thanks to video games from Aerosmith and Miley Cyrus, you can leave behind your life as a mere music lover, and join the band instead.

Talk about brand engagement.

The news from Aerosmith is that Activision, Inc. will debut a game called "Guitar Hero: Aerosmith," featuring 30 songs from the band.  The Guitar Hero games let people literally play as a part of a band, using a toy instrument to trigger guitar sounds within songs.  The entire franchise has moved a billion dollars of product since its launch in 2005.

Miley's game, Hanna Montana: Spotlight World Tour, works on the Nintendo Wii, which utlizies a little wand to prompt the same sort of on-screen interaction.  The Wii has been so extraordinarily successful that its consoles have been in tight supply since its launch last year.

While .mp3 downloads have been dismantling the packaged-goods CD model on which the music industry is founded, there’s been what I call the American Idol-ification of culture simultaneously underway.

• American Idol features zillions of kids who think that singing in the bathroom shower means that they deserve to be famous.  Anybody can do it, according to the encouragement dispensed regularly from Paula Abdul
• It encourages zillions more to fantasize the same thing, even if they don't make it to the point of embarrassing themselves on-air
• Production technology has advanced so far that it is easy and cheap to make music, whether via Apple's Garageband software, or simply playing one of those Casio keyboards that all but play themselves.  Digital video cameras and editing software give the average teenager the tools once reserved for engineers at the original three U.S. broadcast TV networks, only better
• Distribution technology is also all but free, as well as simple.  Start a blog, and you can distribute your videos or songs for chump change

Say hello to the burgeoning universe of user-generated content.

User-generated content is the fancy phrase to label stuff not made by professionals.  The American Idol-ification trend is all about all of us becoming users and creators simultaneously.  So it turns out that the distinctions been "amateur" and "pro" were pretty much circumstantial and otherwise artificial.  Good stuff comes from anyone, anywhere, anytime, or so the theory goes

So, let's see...we have a creative industry -- music, right now, but video is sure to follow -- that has lost its grip on producing readymade "pro" product, and we have a cultural trend that empowers one-time consumers to consider themselves producers instead.

The video games from Miley and Aerosmith merge these trends.

I never wanted to just listen to Aerosmith anyway.  Any self-respecting teenager doesn't listen to music as much as fanastize about it, from making the stuff to living the lifestyle.  And anybody whose ever set foot on stage, whether for a grade school play or to compete in a spelling bee, knows that there's a rush that comes from making something...anything...and not just absorbing it.

I want to be the band, and now I can.  And I don't have to even fool myself into thinking that I can play the guitar.

Could there be a nascent model here for the music industry to pursue?  There are any number of ways to involve consumers as co-creators, or at least make them think they are:

• Alternative versions of songs distributed for fans to choose (charging for each version, of course); communities could vote for mixes, length, even content itself
• Songs missing a track could be sold, along with some rudimentary software that let consumers add the track with the instrument of their choice
• Entire songs could be distributed as discreet tracks, along with some tool that let people mix them to their own tastes
• Every new song could come out "prerecorded" and in "game-enabled" versions, making PlayStation3, Xbox360, and Nintendo's Wii hubs for music experience on an ongoing basis
• Bands could align with particular interface devices, so there'd be an "Aerosmith guitar thingee" that was somehow different from the one available from Fall Out Boy.  Consumers could build dexterity on the devices of their favorite bands/brands, thereby giving them better song experiences
• How about allowing "better" players -- i.e. consumers who are committed to your brand -- to unlock "better" music content on the songs they buy?  If I truly love everything Miley Cyrus releases, and play along with her songs all day long, maybe I could get more tracks, extended versions, etc.
• Different versions/mixes of songs could be licensed and re-sold, each generating income for the creators of the original tracks (i.e. bands)
• Bands could offer music-creating tracks/software, and encourage their fans to write music in the spirit of the originals (a la those Star Trek fans who write and film entirely new episodes of the TV series)

Who needs American Idol if I can take the stage with Aerosmith?  For that matter, who needs CDs?  But if there were some way that all of these media interacted, maybe I'd need all of them?

There's probably a ton of money to be made reworking the music industry into an interactive/game/visual/user-generated/somethingoranother industry.  And brand marketers of consumer products and services could probably learn a lot from what's going on in the entertainment world.  What's simple to interact with because it's digital may very well be but an example of the interaction/engagement that we'll want someday soon with every purchase...

Rock on.

The Cartoon Wears Prada

Fashion house Prada is breaking new ground with multi-media creative content.

Its latest effort is a CGI short called "Trembled Blossom," in which a neutered cartoon  character strolls through an antiseptic forest to acquire a gender (high heels and a dress) and a handbag (a cloven character transforms a fish to make it). 

Prada has sponsored various art projects over the past half-decade or more, debuting wallpapers and photography, along with its textile designs, in its locations that double as performance spaces in the U.S. and Japan. 

This corporate sponsorship of art is in line with a tradition that gave us the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Night Watch, Rodin's Thinker, and most of the classical music ever written.  If it weren't for the rich and powerful paying the poor and powerless to create stuff, there'd be far less art created by starving artists, and many more artists who simply starved.

The challenge and opportunity is to translate this cultural largesse into business benefit.

The easy answer is to say it's branding. 

Connecting brand names to creative content is far from an exact science; in fact, costly experiments from BMW's movie shorts and Budweiser's online programming have failed to yield any return.  There's a thriving industry devoted to getting corporations to spend money on programming as a replacement for ads, as if there's some residual, rub-off sponsorship benefit that could be as effective as a direct sell.

So branding is the absence of any relevant or useful reason to remember a tidbit of creative content?  Yuck.  I'd hate to be the marketer responsible for defending that waste of...er, that expenditure on an experimental vision.   

The harder answer would be easier to explain and perhaps more meaningful, though, if the question is truly to create real business benefit through branding: what qualities would content need to exhibit in order to work for the business?   Let's ponder Prada:

• Make it real art.  "Trembled Blossom" is a lame excuse for an art short.  The imagery is derivative of 30 year-old Moebius cartoons, at best, with a slight dose of Peter Max graphics (or Styx's "The Grand Illusion" album cover) thrown in for good measure.  To make four minutes of animation so stunningly boring is an accomplishment, of sorts, but it certainly isn't art.  If Prada customers knew that the company was truly breaking new, meaningful cultural ground, the effort would be far more credible than being merely a marketing ploy.  Maybe it could choose a medium -- maybe one somewhat related to fashion design? -- and quite literally own the latest and best creativity, as the Medicis of old might have done?
• Make it unique.  The world doesn't need another funny viral short.  Your company certainly doesn't need to fund it.  And there are enough self-styled artists in our world of self-styled everything to make so much of the stuff we hear, watch, or read seem like infinite variations on some very finite creative ideas.  I think the content worth sponsoring would have to be truly different -- not just another "personal vision" -- and thus be nearly ownable by a business, or a brand
• Make it exclusive.  So if you're creating something important, and it's really unique, it has value; now the challenge is what to do with it.  Again, there's still the nagging issue of the content having no thematic or relevant claim to a corporate purpose so, for instance, why not make its distribution valuable...make it true value added content for the people with whom you want to forge a relationship?  Remember that lots of the static art and music created over the past few centuries was often created for small audiences, sometimes single families.  Maybe the idea here is to skip the unlimited exposure-as-awareness fantasy of Internet distribution, and replace it with a focused sharing-as-recognition reality of direct distribution?

We're going to see a lot more content passed-off as branding over the next few years.  Smart people work overtime to make the case that brands gain something from being juxtaposed with content that has no redeeming economic or cultural purpose: it's called repurposing content for a reason.

But if the content isn't relevant or useful to your customers --- i.e., it's not part of an economic transaction, since they don't buy it, nor does it contribute to other things that they purchase from you -- then make it culturally valuable. 

Make it real art, make it unique, and make it exclusive.

Hats off to Prada for trying to do something interesting. 

 

Divining Value in Viral Marketing

A company called Competitrack has had the bright bulb idea to track and rank viral marketing, although the usefulness of its results seems as amorphous as the stuff it's trying to measure.

The premise of viral marketing is duh obvious: ideas that get shared by people are usually worth it -- they're credible because they're entertaining, important, or somehow relevant to the sharer and sharee -- and thus get traded more often than ideas promulgated with clearer, though more generic commercial intent.

Selling via this premise therefore requires that companies try not to sell anything, or at least don't do so overtly.  This has spawned word-of-mouth marketing, or "WOM," which involves hiring or otherwise compensating individuals to deliver marketing messages to people they know, meet in bars, or blab to on Internet chat. 

It also supports the belief that the mere presence of a brand name or product image in any media has marketing value, whether in a video shot in someone's basement, a blog written in Pig Latin (backslang), or overheard as a complaint uttered on a crowded bus.

It sure would make sense to track such stuff, if only to nail down how much sense it truly makes for marketers.  The Competitrack product is a start, but it mimics the indeterminacy of its subject matter.

The service defines "viral" as anything attracts or engages an audience while supporting a brand or product message, although such support might be "quite subtle, sometimes even indiscernable."

Humm.  I guess not so indiscernable that they can't see it. 

Yet if there's no selling message, and sometimes no overt mention of brand or product benefit whatsoever (or even a negative reference), how is it marketing?  What is Competitrack tracking?

In this era of new rules of communication, I suspect the laws of physics still apply.  Action.  Reaction.  Commerce is all about realizing these transactional moments (selling stuff to people), whether we're hoping to sell sailing ships or nanochips.  The rest of the departments in business have to operate in, and measure, their relevance to this reality.

Viral marketing seemed committed to the conceit that businesses should look away from this reality, choosing to focus on the appearance of brand mentions in the universe that are so squishy big, vague, and ever-changing, that any connections back to the here-and-now (or to the bottom line) are ever-more distant, if they're possible at all. 

There's no inherent value in engaging with the brand, is there?  That potentiality becomes real only when it's made tangible by consumer or customer behavior.  Marketing want to prompt those moments, not just talk about them.

Once Competitrack or somebody else figures out how to measure that, then we'll have the divining tools to figure out if and then how viral marketing is anything more than a catchy, portent-filled waste of time.

Laws for a New Frontier

IBM has broken new ground with its 7-page Virtual Worlds Guidelines for IBM Employees, and deserves as much credit for raising important questions as it does for trying to answer them.

The document outlines how it hopes its employees will behave when they're trolling through Second Life, Entropia, or any number of what it says are 100+ virtual worlds constituting something it calls the 3D Internet.

For those of you who aren't techies, or providing room and board to a teenager, virtual worlds are online services that let people interact – with the worlds, and with each other – as characters that walk, fly, shop, and pursue other less salubrious activities.  Many of these places are ongoing games (or "MMORPGS"), such as World of Warcraft, a Tolkien-like fantasy adventure, or South Korea's CyWorld, where just about every person in the country goes to escape the reality of interacting with every person in the, er, country country.

The Guidelines are pretty simple: don't be an idiot, remember that things you do online can come back to haunt you (your actions don't disappear just because you turn off your computer), and don't do anything regarding IBM in the virtual domain that would be considered a violation of copyright, business efficacy, or brand reputation in the real world.

IBM's interest is purely mercenary, of course: there's money to be made selling computer hardware, software, and ongoing services to corporations convinced by all the buzz on the topic that their money needs to be spent on such things.

But so what?  The Guidelines posit important questions about the what, how, and why of online experience.  And throwing them at its employees to consider is an enlightened thing for IBM to do.

For instance, what are the behavioral responsibilities of an individual who chooses to appear online as, say, a floating blob of spaghetti?  Is she allowed to do different things than she would if she were visualized as a cartoon woman, or simply a text listing of her name?  The IBM document talks a lot about responsible behavior, but I wonder what that means to a little Lego-shaped avatar walking in right angles through HabboHotel.

And what about names?  When an individual elects to visit some fantasy game site as a magical troll, or go to a chat room about fishing lures as hook_and_sinker666, is that individual functioning as himself, or only as a sliver or portion of himself?  How much can visitors trust about one another, when all they have are wild or angry political rants listed chronologically in a forum or blog?  Lots of people have lots of online personas.

What's real in an unreal world? 

Computer servers don't forget unless the data is purposely erased or, in the case of the White House recently, lost, but the Guidelines beg questions about what do these virtual worlds ever really know about their denizens in the first place.

There's no good way to connect even the most vocal commentators on a blog with subsequent purchase behavior.  As we know from the real world, often times the most vociferous advocates for action are the least likely to take it.  I suspect lots of branding money is going to be spent having so-called conversations with these people, with no real idea of why, or what will come out of it.

Further, someone who revels in the anonymity of functioning as an 18-yr old vixen on MySpace might very well be a middle-aged man, or group of people, as the fascinating photos in Robbie Cooper's new book Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators.  So what should IBM's clients sell to them?  How is their online behavioral data relevant to real-world commerce?

The latest buzz around word-of-mouth marketing – or "‘WOM," which recognizes the vital function of personal and trusted recommendation in prompting purchase decisions – has yet to come to grips with the impersonal and less trustworthy nature of much of what passes for recommendations online.

The IBM Guidelines address some of these big issues from a user standpoint, and try to generalize the rules for individualsby invoking common sense and good judgment.

But this new frontier allows -- if not actively encourages -- whole new definitions for those terms, along with what they might mean, not only for individuals wading through the 3D Internet, but to the businesses that hope to monetize those varied experiences.

Who woulda thunk that IBM – the folks who brought the world mainframes, salesmen in white shirts and thin ties, and those printed placards that said Think -- would be a corporate leader on these issues, and challenging its employees with such engaging questions?

I think it's great for the brand, irrespective of the answers.

Magic Phenomenon

While YouTube and CNN were busy propagandizing a few thousand inane videos as the start of a new era in social media, 72 million copies of the last Harry Potter book were purchased, qualifying it as the greatest single social media event in history.

Skip event.  It's a phenomenon, and its social dimensions are what make it so interesting.

Awaiting the arrival of a 600+ page book should be about as exciting as attending the change of seasons, shouldn't it?  Yet people lined up days in advance of the debut, many more than showed up to grab a new iPhone or watch the latest summer blockbuster movie.

What fueled the excitement – again, we're talking about a book here – was word of mouth, or "WOM," sometimes no-so subtly utzed along by hints about the plot, and questions concerning what England's richest person would do after the finale to her 7-book empire was revealed.

There were online bulletin board postings and endless chat speculation about what the book might contain.  The ending was rumored to have been revealed online, which got the faithful to test their intestinal fortitude and refuse to check it out.  Friends talked about it, whether online or sitting in a park.

Isn't reading is perhaps the most anti-social media experience there is?  Book experiences, by definition and the limitations of physical reality, require solitary time spent with eyeballs glued to pages.  Reading is the interaction between reader and words, and unavoidably so.

So chatting about a Potter book isn’t the same as reading it.  Not by a long shot.  No consumer has a relationship with the Potter brand that isn't centered on reading books that each look about as long as the Bible.  Engagement with a J. K. Rowling book requires the sacrifice of many hours that could have been spent doing other things, like chatting or posting videos on YouTube.

And yet, right now, there are organized and informal races underway to finish the tome.  "Deathly Hallows" readers are referring back to prior editions to check references to characters and plot twists.  I'm sure the bleeding-edge of Potter fan fiction is already penning additional scenes and alternate endings.

This is a social phenomenon without equal in society.  And it's centered on a media artifact that hasn't been new for over 500 years.

What does this tell us about how to architect and deliver WOM?  I think there are at least five things we should look at:

First, content matters.  Sometimes, because we hope to capture as much attention as possible, we confuse interactive sizzle with experience of the steak.  I bet lots – maybe a majority? -- of readers were sold on buying the 7th book the moment they closed the cover on the 6th.  A solid foundation of the WOM for the series arose from the text, and did so utterly and unalterably organically.

Second, real relationships are based on real experiences.  The primary consumer-brand interaction for the Potter franchise can be found in the hundreds and hundreds of pages of the books.  Every time people wanted to engage with Potter, all they had to do was open one of them.  There would always be a payback, however large or small.

Contrast that with the promotions we sometimes throw at consumers with whom we believe we have relationships.  Instead of interacting with a real product or service, we substitute interaction with marketing and call it engagement with the brand.  I wonder how much of this CRM-driven stuff is either incidental, or perhaps a negative to the consumer experience?

Third, communities exist to share reality, not marketing.  Sure, we can get a chat room abuzz about a TV commercial, maybe get some nudniks to patch together their own ads, or give a logo to the inmates at MySpace to help clutter their sites.  But these interactions are fleeting; they’re the junk food of branding.

Potter-ites prefer to talk about the characters and plots.  This arises in part from the nature of a literary work, which is full of this content, but it's also because the marketers behind the books didn't waste time with the easy social media stuff.

Fourth, remember the ultimate purpose is to sell stuff.  Most WOM holds up socializing as a benefit, sometimes with some absolute or inherent value (people waste time socializing about something, so it's time they’ve spent with a brand).  The Potter strategy was always to focus people on getting their hands on the books.

Finally, the last thing we can learn from this phenomenon is that there's an element to any marketing success that cannot be quantified or replicated.  Experience is wedded to time and place, and there are just too many variables involved to think that a strategy that worked one moment will work two years later.

Lots of thoughtful case histories will be written on what happened, and lots of marketers will dutifully follow the to-do'.s  And, like trying copying Apple's successes, most of those also-rans will end up as also-rans.

The Harry Potter phenomenon is a good reminder that social media are not driven by technology, aren't the exclusive purview of marketers, and don't have to yield only awareness or other atmospherics of branding.

72 million books sold (and counting) is excellent proof that sales can and should be the ultimate measure of WOM, and that there are many old, as well as new, ways to get there.

Finding the right balance is pure magic. 

Faux Populi

Yesterday's YouTube-CNN Democratic Debate has been praised as innovative, unprecedented, and groundbreaking.

I think the marketers at Google deserve the most kudos, as the debate itself paled in comparison to its hype.

Nothing about it was particularly innovative, insightful, or even real.

So candidates had to squint at video questions on little screens instead of listen to them read aloud.  Wow.  How futuristic.  Had the audience been given special glasses, the stage would have appeared in 3-D.

Politicos have been fielding queries from regular 'ol voters for many elections, but these questions were vetted as much for entertainment value as actual content.  YouTube advised aspiring questioners to "Be original...be personal...keep it quick...make it look good."

We're supposed to be excited that videos revealed the real people who asked the questions, and that an inquiry from, say, a lesbian couple about the issue of gay marriage, was thus made somehow more authentic than getting the exact same question from the moderator.

Nope.  Same question was still the same question.  The politics of identity might have added some molecule of entertainment value, but it didn't bring much weight to the substance of the inquiry.

It also didn't matter that YouTube had trolled the Internet for them.  There weren’t zillions of participants; in fact, I understand that there were only a few thousand submissions.  That comes nowhere near to the approximately 60,000+ people who've watched "nuTsie girl pool scene" in the last 16 hours.  This morning, the debate videos – or any replies, riffs, mashups, whatever – didn’t even make it to YouTube's Most Viewed page.

And since the questions that made it on-air were selected by CNN, they weren't the most commonly asked, or perhaps the most important.  There was no voice of the public here.

Instead, what we got was a TV entertainment show, masquerading as a news event, wrapped in the hype of a social media tool.

Social media are a cultural phenomenon, no question about it.  The idea that people can share information easily, quickly, and repeatedly, and do so in compelling, multimedia ways, is radically changing not only politics, but also the ways we buy and sell products in the business world.

Could the debate have truly tested these uncharted and potentially dangerous waters?  Sure. 

How about a real time debate that challenged people to get online while the candidates were onstage, and start asking questions via IM that would be collated and put forth?  This could push up the program's ratings, and give people a real, participatory purpose for watching it.

What about putting the candidate's answers up for critique to the audience, and use that to prompt follow-ups?  Couldn't statements and facts get analyzed in real-time, and then fed back into the conversation?  Perhaps viewers could organize into teams on various issues, and prepare both questions and resources to check answers?

Subsequent to the gig, maybe videos of the key questions or debate exchanges could be posted on YouTube, and some mechanism could collect viewer responses into consensus opinions that fed into the next debate? 

There are many more ways technology could be used to get people involved in real ways.  But the format of video itself is irrelevant to the nature of social media.  Watching an inane question, or a candidate's canned response, is no different on a little computer screen than it is on a larger TV screen.

What matters is the conversation it might prompt, and how people behave therefore, and thereafter.  The message is still the message.

So in response to yesterday's debate, right now I'm on YouTube watching Paula Abdul go nuts trying to get her hair done.

And thus the public speaks!