Ms. Adverthinker

This has been online for a while and posted to this site before, but since it always makes me smile I thought it was worth dusting off again today.  Enjoy.

Admittedly, I am an iPhone “worshiper,” but this latest news proves its capabilities can benefit brands, too.  In mid-September, Pizza Hut released a kick-ass iPhone app that allowed customers to place orders through the app.  As an added bonus, customers that placed orders through the app received 20% off the total price.  To date, Pizza Hut has generated $1 million in sales through the app (according to Mashable).  I have no idea how much Pizza Hut paid for the development of the app, but they seem to have gotten a return on their investment in both sales and cool points.

In a presentation that we gave on social media last week, someone asked, “what is the biggest mistake companies are making in the space right now?”  Our response: “Not being in it.”  Social media and mobile communications really go hand-in-hand as social media gets more social with constant improvements to mobile devices.  Mobile applications–like those available for the iPhone–are the perfect channel for getting in front of customers.  So many brands are just dipping their toe in social/mobile media, timidly trying it out.  Brands should take a dive in and consider an investment in an iPhone app.  Yes, there are 100,000 apps available in the app store, but many consumer brands aren’t there yet.  Just being there will put you ahead of the competition in this social/mobile space (and don’t forget to put a little promotional support behind it; just putting it there will not guarantee it will be found by your customers).  This is not a complete list, but some things to consider when developing an app for a brand, it should: (1) do something cool that others haven’t done yet (or do it in a different way; improve on what is already out there), (2) provide a clear benefit to the customer, not just benefit the brand (example: Pizza Hut offered 20% off orders placed through iPhone app), (3) be free (example: not like CNN), and (4) give the customer a reason to use the app over and over (hint: constantly update/improve the capabilities).

Check out a demonstration of the Pizza Hut iPhone app here:

What pizza brand doesn’t get it?  Domino’s.  Everyone remembers the embarrassing “food defiling” video post by Domino’s employees.  It took Domino’s several days to respond, they signed up for a Twitter account to deal with the consumer response (note that they didn’t ALREADY have a Twitter account), and produced a stiff teleprompter-read video from their corporate office.  In those same days, Pizza Hut put out an ad for a Twitern.  Pizza Hut definitely gets both the digital and social space.

I made the point last night during SWIM that I think the media only started adopting social media at its fervent rate upon the use of social media by the Obama presidential campaign.*  His campaign used social media comprehensively and did it right.  Obama as president hasn’t let the social media advocates down: he proves that social media isn’t just for getting elected with the launch of White House 2.0.

By far, the best part of White House 2.0 is the Official White House Photostream on Flickr.  Social media is “about” a lot of things, but for President Obama it is about conveying his personality and bundling his messages up in that personality under an assumed premise that if we like him as a person, we will like what he has to say as a president, too.  That is what these photos seem to say.  And social media is good for that purpose.  We see him laughing; it seems genuine; we believe everything is going to be okay.  Our photogenic president appears serious when it is appropriate, accessorizes fashionably for events, and exudes confidence (or ego) in his overall presentation. 

In addition to the Flickr stream, on Friday the White House announced an official Facebook page, MySpace page and Twitter account.  There are also video postings by the White House on YouTube, Vimeo and iTunes.  All of this was announced as an effort to be more transparent and to engage the public.  And, they are allowing comments on all of these sites.  What I am not seeing in all of the comments are responses from the White House.  It makes me wonder if they are monitoring all of this feedback and providing a real two-way communication, or if this is simply another way to “push” information under the guise of engagement.  If they are not responding yet, I predict they will be soon: this White House knows how to use technology, the Internet and social media.

* While I recognize that many journalists and some media outlets had already recognized its power, for the rest of the slow-to-change media bunch, Obama’s success with social media was the turning point.  And now they just can’t stop talking about it.

Ms. Adverthinker is a bit of a compulsive magazine reader: at last count, I believe my subscriptions totaled 13 magazines at home and five at the office.  And, Wired is one of my favorites.  I have not yet received my May issue, but after reading the NY Times article about the puzzle embedded in the issue, I am very excited:

“…the intent of their new issue, created in collaboration with Mr. Abrams [is] to immerse their audience in a series of riddles — some announced, others not — that were buried just deep enough for the readers who wanted to dig them up.”

At a time when publishers are struggling to keep readers engaged in print editions of both newspapers and magazines (and thereby sell advertising), this idea is brilliant.  While the larger puzzle has already been solved, Wired says that there will be additional prizes for subsequent readers that solve the puzzle and there are still a few codes that haven’t been cracked yet.

We are launching a new program over here at Stone Ward: Stone Ward Interactive Meetings, or SWIM.  We saw a need for education among college students in the area of online communications and decided to create this eight week course.  Anyone can attend the sessions live, but they can also be viewed online through live, streaming video.  The first one will be May 1st at 5 PM at U.S. Pizza in Hillcrest, Little Rock, Arkansas.  We hope you will participate.

Stone Ward hosted the finale of our Energy Efficiency Arkansas television commercial shoot with Archie Bell and the Drells at the Peabody bar.  Among our honored guests: Max Brantley, of the Arkansas Times, and Mark Stodola, our esteemed mayor. Thank you, both, for attending our event.  Fun times!

Check out the 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced on the Internet.  Seriously funny.  And seriously time-consuming.

I don’t keep up with football and know nothing about fantasy football, but I love this promo video for fantasy football.  It is just fun to watch.  Enjoy.

I must be the last person on the planet to watch this (it has 26 million+ views on YouTube), but I have to post it here anyway.  Amazingly creative and entertaining.

The talk about Twitter right now is abundant.  It seems that it has finally reached the masses and people (and companies) are starting to get more interested in it.  The Wall Street Journal has even written about it.  I signed up for Twitter about a year ago and write my own tweets pretty intermittently - some days I am very active, other days nothing (you can see my latest Twitter posts in the right-hand column on this blog).  However, I keep Twhirl open on my desktop every day and track many people and news organizations.  I am addicted to getting that feed directly to my desktop all day long.

It is an interesting social phenomenon: humans have always been curious about other people’s lives and thoughts, and now people actually want to openly share their lives and have found a way to deliver those straight to your desktop or cell phone instantly.  I am amazed at how open our lives have become, including mine.  I have always been a private person, but now I am sharing everything online and am having fun doing it.  Part of me feels like I have to do it out of fairness: I love reading everyone’s else’s information and I feel too voyeuristic if I am not sharing my own.

(If you love reading about people’s lives and don’t mind feeling voyeuristic, check out PostSecrets: “an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.”  I am also addicted to this site.  Some of the secrets are funny, some are scary and many are sad.  I think this site has a interesting way of making people feel not so alone in the world.  It is also a cool mash-up of traditional communication (mail) with online communication (blog).  It reminds me of a more anonymous Twitter.)

For now, Twitter seems to be best for communicating up-to-the-second news updates and keeping up with your friends.  I am interested to see how companies will use it to communicate with their customers and if customers will actually “follow” companies through Twitter.  How Twitter will be used as a direct marketing tool has not fully been determined yet.  Marketers can (and should) be using Twitter to better understand their customers and their perceptions of brands/companies; we should think of it as an online focus group.  Through the Twitter search feature, we can plug in company names and see what people are saying about us and our clients.

A new Twitter project that I love is My First Tweet.  This was created by Noah Brier of Brand Tags-fame (I am jealous of his ingenuity when it comes to things like this).  My First Tweet is a database of people’s first words on Twitter.  He calls it “an anthropological dig on Twitter.”  Love this.

For those in Arkansas: Thank you to Lance Turner of Arkansas Business for the shout out on his blog as a local Twitter-er.  Check out what Lance says about Twitter here.  Blake Rutherford also recently wrote about his use of Twitter: see his comments at Blake’s Think Tank and follow Blake’s political commentary on Twitter.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

Check out Wordle, a toy for generating “beautiful word clouds.” Too cool. Here is the Wordle for my del.icio.us tags.

Here.

Google, always on the cutting edge of innovation, demonstrated its Android mobile phone OS this week. This looks like it could be major competition for the iPhone. Very cool stuff. The phone’s built-in compass allows users to pan around an image by physically moving themselves. Check out some of the coverage and videos:

Keynote and Sneak Peak Images

Hand-held Videos

The talk in business these days is all about how to involve the consumer–the end user–in the brand. Through brand interactions, comes loyalty. Bonus for businesses: consumers want that involvement too. They want to contribute to product creation, give their opinions on product reviews, throw out advertising ideas. All of this is an effort to be heard. Consumers are desperate to find outlets where they can feel individual and important. And brands are giving them an outlet to do this (good thing, since consumers would do it anyway).
The convergence of these two desires results in blogs, product reviews, and consumer contribution to content. The epitome of consumer contribution to content is the amazing Wikipedia. The NY Review of Books has a great piece summing up the success and addictive qualities of Wikipedia when contributing content for the world to read:

“More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay—in fact it’s up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it’s very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there—even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product. There are no banners for E*Trade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense.”

“It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed. The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P.G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman—all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn’t been a waste of time—would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something. This wasn’t like writing reviews on Amazon, where you were just one of a million people urging a tiny opinion and a Listmania list onto the world—this was an effort to build something that made sense apart from one’s own opinion, something that helped the whole human cause roll forward.”

And on the thrills of the edit:

“I clicked the ‘edit this page’ tab, and immediately had an odd, almost lightheaded feeling, as if I had passed through the looking glass and was being allowed to fiddle with some huge engine or delicate piece of biomedical equipment. It seemed much too easy to do damage; you ask, Why don’t the words resist me more? Soon, though, you get used to it. You recall the central Wikipedian directive: ‘Be Bold.’ You start to like life on the inside.”

Providing consumers an outlet to interact with a brand and be heard can give a brand that addictive quality needed to bring consumers back again and again.

Others might view Wikipedia differently, and not quite so democratic, as noted on Slate.com:

“While Wikipedia does show the creative potential of online communities, it’s a mistake to assume the site owes its success to the wisdom of the online crowd.

“Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.”

Everyone has an opinion. Here is where other Stone Ward staffers are expressing theirs:

Blake’s Think Tank - Blake Rutherford, our Director of Public Communications, writes about politics and other current events.

Monkey Bulb - Chris Kindrick, Art Director, comments on creative executions of advertising.

Officially Lucky - Clint Ecker, Senior Web Developer, is a source for all technology and social networking.

Ain’t Misbehavin’ - Kyle Riley, Public Communications Account Executive, records news that is too good not to pass along.

The Angry Czeck - Jeremy Harper, Senior Copywriter, calls his blog “the most furious newsletter in modern times.”

Enjoy.

The Wall Street Journal is going social, as reported by Brandweek:

“Using SeenThis?, built by the social networking technology developer Loomia, members of Facebook, and eventually various other social networks will be able to receive notifications on what Journal content their friends are reading or sharing – while logged into those sites or visiting WSJ.com. Those users will then be able to check out those articles themselves for free (without having to leave their networking site of choice), and share them with others. For example, a user might receive a notice of the top five articles read by members who attend his or her college.”