Hellacious Projects From Hell (So Bad, They’re Redundant)

Silly season. Welcome to it. Fourth quarter, that time when all the delayed projects become all of a sudden magically important and critical. Where ya been the rest of this year? Something else was more important this year. I dare you to analyze whether all that other stuff that pulled you all over Tarnation was truly more important than the stuff that’s now facing you squarely in the pie–hole.

 

The types of projects that get delayed fall into several buckets. First, the “Too Hard To Pull Off” projects. These can also be called the “Yeah, Right. Like That Would Ever Happen” projects. These projects typically involve a high level of interaction between marketing, product, and IT teams that work so awkwardly together it’s almost humorous, except for the fact that your ass is on the line. You think to yourself throughout the year, “I didn't get a degree in advanced psychology, so this is not happening.” Now, it’s fourth quarter. Your MBOs are looming, and Harry in IT just shut down all access to external social networks on the corporate network. Oh, and he’s the IT team lead for your social loyalty and advocacy strategy. Sweet.

 

The second bucket is the “I'm Being Asked To Identify And Capture A Herd Of Racing Unicorns” project. This is the project whereby the executive management team read an article from 2008 (it showed up in a Google search, but no one bothered to check the date stamp) talking about how the future is all about viral campaigns. Something about a subservient cockroach or . . . something. Whatever. I want that. Because if we go viral, then we’re awesome, and everyone will know us, and everyone will visit our Web site and buy our product.

 

This project is pure fantasy. Especially for your budget. Firstly, most viral videos (because that's really what we’re talking about) are amateur-made. Secondly, the corporate ones that went big—like the Old Spice guy—were goosed by Super Bowl ads and media campaigns. (Speaking of, if this viral stuff is so easy, where’s 2011’s equivalent? *cricket cricket*) These campaigns didn’t go viral on their own. Nothing does. OK, OK. Occasionally one gets unbearably lucky, but that happens so rarely that thinking yours will defies logic and sensible judgment.

 

And yet, here we are. No matter the scientific evidence, someone at the very top believes there’s a unicorn with your brand’s name embedded on its horn, and it’s your job to go find it. Sigh. Makes me sad and angry.

 

And finally, we come to my favorite one: the “Make A Baby In A Month” project. Otherwise known as the "I Know We Should Have Been Doing This Social Media Thing for the Past Three Years And Now We're So Far Behind Our Competition That I Need You To Catch Us Up By November Or Your Ass Is Toast, But Don't Look At Me . . . How Could I Have Known? . . . I Was Too Busy Approving The Talent For Our MySpace Campaign.” Look, don’t be the one asking for this project. It’s not your people’s fault that you’re late to the social media game. You should have been building your network diligently over the past two years at least, and the fact that you’re just getting started now doesn’t make social media any less difficult or painstaking. Social success is about earning trust and fostering real human relationships. It’s a slog. An extremely important, fundamental slog. So don’t direct your poor VPs of marketing into the first available bar and tell them that if they don’t emerge out of there in 20 minutes with their life-long lovers, then their tenure is over. Don’t ask them to be the economic equivalent of a one-night stand. And, by the way, they feel this way when you ask.

 

The silly season and the train wrecks of these types of projects come about because most corporations haven’t evolved past the idea that marketing can be turned on and off and goosed with the same level of output as you could when you controlled media and consumer impressions. Modern marketing is truly, TRULY about human relationships, and the dynamics we expect from one another as humans—don’t be a jerk, don’t spit in people’s food, wash your hands, don’t proposition their wife or husband at the holiday party—we expect from brands too. A lot of crap is going to get launched in the coming months. Watch for it. These will be the fodder for columnists and bloggers for the 2012 speaking circuit. Don’t be a part of it.

At the End of This Blog, You Will Buy Me a Car

Have you seen the 2012 Audi R8? No? Do you want to? Here.

Now that’s just a ridiculous car. It looks fast. I’ve never owned an Audi, but if I did, I’d hope it was the R8. I’d get a lot of speeding tickets. I mean, how could you not? “I’m sorry, officer. You see, I’m driving this car. You understand, right?”

How do I know about the R8? I saw one in a Target parking lot the other day. I didn’t see a TV commercial or hear a radio spot for a weekend “sales event.” (Really? An event? An event is something special, not something that happens every damn weekend.)

I didn’t know the car existed until I saw it, and it was extraordinary. When I got home I wanted to know more so I went to the Web site and began drooling. Then I Googled “what’s the R8 like to drive?” I really did. I wonder if the search engine specialists have optimized content for that phrase. I came upon several reviews from auto magazine Web sites like Autoweek.

Then I thought, “What’s it really like to drive?” I determined then and there that if I ever found another one in a Target parking lot, I would sit in my car and wait until the owner exited the store with his $300 toothbrush—I mean, that’s all he intended to buy in the first place—and walk up and say, “I’m sorry to bother you, but seriously, man. What’s it like to drive that car?” And you know what? I bet we’d spend the next 20 minutes talking about what it’s really like to drive that car. At that very moment, I will have moved from a non-believer to a total, complete believer. I believe in the Audi R8.

So what happened here? Was that advertising? Was that marketing? Or was that simply a car manufacturer making a product so extraordinary that its owner can’t wait to talk about it? Perhaps I shouldn’t have used this example. Fact is, we’re not all Audi R8s. That toothbrush is not an Audi R8, and I seriously doubt if anyone has ever said, “Hey, how do you like that toothbrush? Can I take yours for a test drive?” But many of you truly do lead extraordinary brands, and when you do, you have an incredible opportunity at your finger tips that allows you to harness the tipping-point power of advocacy.

Any bells going off? Social media, perhaps? When I ask marketing executives if classic word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of consumer persuasion, most nod in agreement. Yet, when I ask if there’s a formal plan to encourage and make word-of-mouth an embedded if not critical component, many of them indicate they do not. They hope and maybe even expect it’s happening. As I’ve said many times, I’m not a big fan of hoping for something to happen when my career is attached to that something happening. When I ask these same leaders if they have a Facebook presence, they often say they do. Or they think they do. Someone’s doing something on Facebook.

We’re at a nexus where we finally put a dagger in the idea that social media is an actual media broadcast channel. It is not. And treating it as one has us in the wrong mentality. Facebook, online forums (like car enthusiasts sites), LinkedIn, and many other sites are places of critical conversation, celebration, critique, and advocacy. Without a plan around these communities, brands become terrified of the “critique” element of social media, and go into corporate fetal positions. They fire up their crisis management PR people rather than their product managers. What do I mean by that? For example, when Apple customers flood message boards with complaints about a new operating system or an iPhone feature, they’re complaining not because they hate Apple—they adore Apple so much they want them to be better. And Apple listens. Do you think Apple is afraid of critique? Those millions of customers are essentially giving them the road map to future success.

This is the right mentality around social. You as a leader of a brand have an incredible opportunity to be more excellent, simply by allowing your customers to make you better. Publicly. You also have the opportunity—no, the responsibility—to provide platforms for your brand advocates to tell their stories loud and clearly. They’ll do this on their own, mind you. But why not put plans and platforms in place to make it easier? That, dear readers, is what social media is all about. Social media is not a shiny new place to put your product videos. But it is most likely the best place for your advocates to put their product videos.

Moving a mental picture of social media from broadcast channel to advocacy channel is the great leap. Doing so will make your life a heckuva lot easier.

So. Will I buy the Audi R8? Here’s the deal: If this blog post was so compelling to you, so likely to earn you millions of new customers and hit all of your revenue targets, then by all means, please send a check for $186,000 to Andrew Eklund, c/o Ciceron, 126 N. 3rd St., Suite 309, Minneapolis, MN, 55401. I will forever advocate for whatever it is you sell. All day.

“No Summer Vaca for You!” Back to School Special

This morning, like millions of other parents, I watched my middle schooler and sixth grader hop on the bus to start another school year. The shock of educational stimulation will hit their summer-sogged brains like artillery fire. They’ll be exhausted tonight. (Date night, perhaps?)

Unlike them, marketing professionals don’t have the luxury of summer vacations. In fact, if you’re not feeling like you’re under fire every single day, then something’s gone madly wrong. Quite literally every Monday morning (or Tuesday, this week) I arrive at my desk at Ciceron wondering, “How do I have to reinvent this company this week?” Or, “What’s about to happen that I may or may not be prepared for?” As my colleagues here know, I operate every day with a healthy dose of paranoia that at any given time I may be behind the curve of innovation, the pace of my clients’ expectations, and, most important, the adoption of new media and practices of the consumer.

If you were hoping that marketing would be a good sunset career, I guarantee you’ve found the wrong professional trajectory. In fact, over the past 15 years or so, marketing has gone from being one of the more docile business units to the most daunting. Expectations of marketing executives have moved from the old John Wanamaker quote of not knowing which half of his advertising budget was working to expecting that marketing knows every minute detail of how the department is performing.

But wait. There’s more! Now marketing is expected to know how well the entire company is doing—from customer service to product design—simply because marketing has primary access to all that juicy Web data. Again, if you got into marketing because you thought it was 100 percent creative day in and day out, your head is probably spinning at the amount of wonky analysis that’s expected of you. I know plenty of marketing creative types who have very simply had enough of it and have moved on to other pursuits. This wasn’t what they signed up for, and they have the personal wherewithal to decide to find another passion in life.

So how does one stay on top of the changing world of marketing? Attending a conference or two per year is hardly enough. Below are a few recommended “daily reads,” as well as sites where I find a lot of value.

Center for Media Research/MediaPost—Great daily digests of emerging media and research

AdAge Digital—I might get a few chuckles for this one, but I enjoy watching the advertising agency world continue to morph. There’s much to learn about change. Hell, I might be a digital native, but eventually I too will face certain obsolescence. The agency world is in major rebirth right now. AdAge is also doing a great job of reinventing itself, especially with Minnesota native Abbey Klaussen at the helm.

iMediaConnection—Great overview of the daily developments in technology and trends

InsideFacebook—Let’s face it: Facebook to many is the Internet. And as a marketing leader, getting a leg up on the inner-workings of this nearly billion-person network is critical to your success. InsideFacebook gives you, well, the inside . . . of . . . Facebook.

Twitter—I list this last because if you’re like me, you’ve scanned this entire article and gotten to the bottom. I wanted to be sure you saw the most important content recommendation, Twitter. If you’re a marketing executive and not on Twitter, it’s time to stop fighting whatever personal battle is going on in your brain and get on board. You don’t need to post a damn thing, by the way. But get on and start following people. I get 90 percent of my industry news through Twitter updates from the best and the brightest people on Earth. When they tell me something’s important, I read it. And most of the time, the time I spent with their recommended content was well worth it. Twitter is not a time waster when used correctly. It’s a huge time saver. Get all up in Twitter’s grill and learn to love it.

OK. So while the kids are whoopin’ it up on their first day of school, here you are at your desk jamming on your savviness. Hopefully a couple of my recommendations today are a small contributor to your quest for awesomeness. And don’t forget to thank your lunch ladies.