I'm unhappy to say that I'm leaving FC Experts just as I was hoping to dig into the topic of the business of blogging.
However I can certainly leave you with a few relevant links on that topic before saying goodbye.
I recently discussed DrJays.com Blog as an excellent example of a fashion retailer posting content about their lines and about the celebrities involved with lines they carry as well as content that's related to youth fashion. DrJays.com has the added benefit of actual celebrity visits that they leverage in a surprisingly tasteful manner given the typical online treatment of such folks.
A related post, ReyShizz The Student: Self Promotion w/A Video Blog, focuses on a young artist's use of a blog to publically develop as an artist while simultaneously marketing himself. It's a nice example of a blog that makes use of a variety of Web 2.0 tools and related services.
For those looking for responses to corporate blogs, Mack Collier of The Viral Garden began a Company Blog Checkup Series over a year ago and it's well worth a look. I'd lost touch with Mack's blog so it was nice to see how his work has developed over time.
And with those few links, I must bid my Fast Company readers adieu.
Special thanks to Lynne d Johnson for bringing me on board.
Feel free to be in touch: clyde(at)prohiphop(dot)com
Last post I looked at the John Mackey disaster and introduced the idea of blogging as an entry point to Web 2.0, an idea that needs to be clarified before continuing. Rather than attempting to answer the question, "What is Web 2.0", I will focus on some key aspects of blogging for business communicators with a special nod to The Cluetrain Manifesto.
Speaking to humans in a human voice:
Catch the Cluetrain! Even before Web 2.0 the WWW was undermining the monolithic corporate voice and introducing human voices to business communication. Blogging is a great way to develop a human voice, one post at a time, in a relatively controlled environment. You can get into trouble on a blog but you can also discover the joys of building community by joining the conversation.
Conversations create communities:
So much of Web 2.0 is about conversations between individuals that also function as content. Blog comments are a great way to figure out how to move beyond simply broadcasting one's human voice and enter into dialogue. Such dialogue is a major aspect of the creation of online communities. The biggest danger here is in focusing on cheap content production and forgetting the conversation.
Low cost content management:
Yet cheap content is part of the appeal or, better put, lightweight, low budget operations can generate supersized results. In particular, hosted blogging introduced low cost content management that bundles software, hosting, tech support [sometimes] and lots of third party add-ons while leveraging the fact that it's easy to write a few lines and post a graphic. The huge downside here is that good blogging, not to mention great blogging, isn't as easy as it looks and adding blogging to the workload of already overworked employees creates burnout and bad blogging.
Open platforms: Wordpress plugins are just one pre-Facebook example of the power of opening up one's platform to outside developers. One of the coolest things about blogging software is that, unlike Facebook which is still a walled garden or data roach motel, this openness goes both ways. I'll save my comments on linking out for another post.
Distribution and syndication:
The default mode for blogging software typically includes an atom and/or rss feed. Blogs are primed for distribution and syndication and such feeds allow one to easily create newsletters and also allow others to syndicate as much content as one is willing to share. Furthermore, feeds create microchunkable flows which can be monetized, if needed, or simply deployed to expand one's presence. This easy distribution also gives content companies a way to start exploring free content without necessarily giving it all away.
These are only some of the examples of how blogging can introduce corporate communications to a Web 2.0 framework or perspective.
Please suggest your own in the comments. I'd love to hear from you!
Big Ups:
I'd like to recognize my man Chris Thilk at Movie Marketing Madness for being the first blogger of which I'm aware to comment on my new focus on the business of blogging. That's great cause I've enjoyed watching Chris take his blog from a text only version at Blogger to an even more enjoyable, graphics rich version at its own domain. He even claims my encouragement to do so helped!
Movie Marketing Madness is a great example of how a B2B blog can also function as a B2C blog on the open web, another topic for a future post.
The undercover online discussion board activity of Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey is already a great lesson in the challenges faced by corporations in a Web 2.0 communication environment and an excellent place to start my fresh emphasis on the business of blogging.
As a former Whole Foods employee who has deep issues with rich men who profit from progressive rhetoric, I'm viciously biting my tongue to focus on the useful takeaway rather than my very personal response. But I think this current drama is a strong example of how blogging can provide an entry point and focus for understanding Web 2.0 business communication.
Let's break this down and introduce some of the practical aspects of business and blogging that I will pursue in greater detail over time.
1) Mackey is exposed for pseudonymous discussion board comments.
Although this behavior was not on a blog, the comments sections of exceptionally popular blogs are often as busy as discussion boards and offer the opportunity to learn how to enter a conversation with one's customers, critics and, yes, pseudonymous/anonymous commenters who may well be competitors.
In particular, learning to deal with hostile commenters in a way that shows that one is open to dialogue and not afraid of being challenged but also unwilling to involve oneself in petty disputes is an important lesson for all bloggers. Unfortunately, I haven't really internalized that one as longtime readers of ProHipHop can attest.
Blogging also gives one the opportunity to be tempted and to turn away from anonymous commenting. I get an A on that one!
2) Mackey's response to concerns on his own blog have been extremely weak.
Blogging is a great way to cut through the noise and get a company's message out, not in broadcast form, but in a form which can literally change the direction of dialogue in a positive manner by speaking with fellow humans in a human voice.
Mackey buried his response to the current controversy in an update to an extensive FAQ way down at no. 16 on a section of Whole Foods' website separate from his CEO blog which has few posts and tends towards the formal though one can see moments of promise.
The formal part comes with the territory of corporate communications. Blogs give one a change to move out of that mode at one's own pace. However, if Mackey had taken all that commenting energy and put it into his blogging, he could have built a great communication channel and would have a meaningful forum for addressing public criticisms of Whole Foods rather than another corporate outlet that's rarely updated.
3) Mackey is now being ridiculed, criticized and generally undermined as a result of his behavior. Though he's also receiving support, it's never a good thing for a public company to have the business press calling for internal probes and CEO downgrades.
I thought this post was to be my last at Fast Company so I wanted it to be a good one. No, I wanted it to be a great one. But, as it turns out, this is not my final post at all.
But if this were my last post, I'd want it to be a very special one.
Thankfully, I'm not leaving Fast Company at all, in fact I'll soon be relaunching my blog with a focus on the business of blogging, a major focus of my life for the last five years.
See you soon.
Clyde Smith • ProHipHop • clyde(at)prohiphop(dot)com
Seminole Tribe of Florida Chairman Mitchell Cypress signs a ceremonial resolution to finalize the Tribe's acquisition of Hard Rock International. (PRNewsFoto/Seminole Tribe of Florida)
During the last couple of weeks in which I've been absent from Fast Company, a number of interesting, possibly even landmark, events have occurred related to entertainment marketing. For example, President Clinton's agreement to speak at a TV Land advertiser presentation was a bit startling as was the Seminoles' purchase of Hard Rock International.
Clinton's agreement to endorse a corporate product aimed at baby boomers combined with Al Gore's amazing work with An Inconvenient Truth suggests that both these guys, in addition to whatever other aspirations they have, will be major players in the entertainment industry for years to come. There's a lot more wiggle room to make mistakes in entertainment while continuing to effectively intervene in mass consciousness.
As the Seminole Hard Rock Casino currently states, "It's Your Show," and the Seminoles' involvement with such initiatives as the Seminole Hard Rock Roadhouse Tour demonstrate they've long understood that Hard Rock can essentially be thought of as an entertainment company.
The purchase is also the largest by a Native American tribe and a landmark in the development of tribal corporate culture as the Seminole Tribe becomes a global player in the restaurant and hotel [as entertainment] industries. With the entry of Hard Rock into the booming new world of Macau, the Seminoles will move from leveraging their own casino profits to leveraging casino profits from a locale expected to be bigger than Vegas.
As someone who spends almost all their work time and much of their entertainment time online, it's oddly satisfying to see disruption in the business world that did not originate from use of the Internet.
Clyde Smith • ProHipHop • clyde(at)prohiphop(dot)com
One of my big interests related to branded entertainment is in entertainment properties with which the brand owner essentially takes on the role of a media company. Recent examples that have caught my eye all turn out to focus on manliness in one form or another.
Old Spice recently announced a website that I assumed I would dislike before discovering that it's pretty darn entertaining.
The opening video/commercial at Experience Old Spice is essentially a spoken word performance by Bruce Campbell on the topic of experience occurring in an absurdist take on a old boy's club lounge and it's hilarious. A variety of little time wasters follow, from tests of one's experience to a blog with a whole crew of writers, and they seem like a great way to decrease productivity at the office.
What's also nice about the site is that its comic take on masculinity offers an alternative to such disturbing phenomenon as The Man Show.
This isn't Old Spice's first foray as a media company. Their When She's Hot site, which is a bit more Man Show-ish, is a great '05 example of a trendy, interactive site with "Beats & Scratches by the X-Ecutioners" that could be debuted in 2007.
At first I was hesitant to write about the electronic ads for Aqua Teen Hunger Force that set off the Boston Lite-Brite evacuations because, once I saw a picture of one of the devices, it became difficult for me to take the concerns raised very seriously.
To me, the Boston response was an overreaction to a street art campaign that had already successfully launched in multiple cities. As Adisa Banjoko put it to me today, the "nation has to be at its most hypersensitive level when Lite-Brites are shutting down Boston." And, in the first day or so, I felt myself returning to the near-total shutdown of free speech after 9/11.
However, I've been heartened to find that a wide range of people share my opinion that the response was overdone, including King County Sheriff's Sgt. John Urquhart who stated: In this day and age, whenever anything remotely suspicious shows up, people get concerned - and that's good...However, people don't need to be concerned about this. These are cartoon characters giving the finger.
Business Week blogger Burt Helm says: If I saw these things on the way from Manhattan to Brooklyn my reaction would have been less "It's a bomb!" and more "stupid hipsters and their weird street art."
His colleague Jon Fine states: When I saw a version of this image...on a billboard at night in lower Manhattan, I thought it was about the coolest ad I'd ever seen.
Now, I'm not buying into the idea that Boston is less sophisticated than all the other cities that recognized the street art element, but it is a good reminder of an important point beyond the fact that the real terrorists are still riding high off 9/11, both here and abroad.
Though I may be sounding flip, I'm absolutely serious when I say that decent art education may be one of our nation's best defenses in a media saturated environment in which reality and fantasy are quite blurred. Mix in some serious media criticism and folks will have better tools for encountering the unexpected in a productively fluid manner rather than with a fatally rigid approach.
Clyde Smith • ProHipHop • clyde(at)prohiphop(dot)com
The North Face and Lexus present The Ice Lounge, a hospitality lounge built to bring together celebrities, filmmakers, media and the environmental community. (PRNewsFoto/The Ice Lounge)
Though one usually thinks movie marketing when considering the Sundance Film Festival, this time around I kept an eye on the marketing being done towards attendees. Sundance draws a rich variety of celebs, entertainment industry players, trend setters and media folks making the event a real dream for brand marketers, many of whom participate in the action without an official relationship with the Festival via lounges, swag suites and nightclubs.
Such add-ons have led to the coining of the moniker "Brand-dance" and comments from Robert Redford in '06 that all this additional activity sometimes "blurred what we are doing" as folks arrived with "agendas that were not the same as ours." Of course, Sundance offers a variety of well-placed marketing opportunities to its sponsors and supporters and the Sundance Channel has its own swag giveaway for a select few featuring offerings from their promotional partners.
One company whose marketing is officially and deeply intertwined with Sundance is HP who worked closely with Sundance on a variety of projects including "mini-films" made with HP gear to air on the Sundance Channel and elsewhere, a photo essay contest at the Sundance Channel site, a Backstage at Sundance blog and other activities
Though much of HP's brand marketing has a populist reach, Sundance is an elite setting, despite their outsider claims, and the opportunity to reach celebs has resulted in a wide range of giveaways, lounges and events. A core feature of marketing via celebs is the giftbag, which has seen downsizing due to IRS scrutiny, but lives on to ensure that the "ambush marketers" about which Redford lament are able to provide the famous and their friends with items mostly costing less than $600 to avoid record keeping.
One of the folks from Treehugger visited Sundance and explored the growing range of ecomarketing offerings from the Sundance Channel's green goody bag to the North Face/Lexus Ice Lounge pictured above. The ecomarketing trend is a nice one for brand marketers who can add social responsibility to the accomplishments of a Sundance outing.
Such examples merely scratch the surface of marketing to attendees at Sundance, whether related to film or leveraging celebrity, and make Redford's chagrin at the swirl of events surrounding his cinematic kingdom quite understandable. From a distance, one gets a sense of a scene so packed with parties and products that one could have a great Sundance experience without ever seeing any films.
Nevertheless, I'm struck by two observations. If one took away the films, the nonfilm marketing would collapse and I think that's important to remember.
In considering what's actually innovative, I find that it's the web extension of activities at Sundance that are breaking new ground in branding, rather than the event marketing itself. And I'm most impressed not by indie web activities but by HP's work with Sundance, an outcome I did not expect two weeks ago.
On that note, I've strongly criticized some of HP's online marketing tactics in the past, yet I recognize that even in their mistakes one can see a serious attempt to adapt corporate marketing to the challenging environment of the Internet. And as much as I'm a champion of little guys who leverage the Web, I'm very impressed when I see a huge corporate entity like HP allowing their brand marketers room to experiment.
Clyde Smith • ProHipHop • clyde(at)prohiphop(dot)com
Though finding new places to put ads is not my favorite marketing game, I'm very interested in Billboard Bands' nightclub wristbands advertising network. I've certainly seen branding placements on wristbands before, usually for alcohol, but I have not encountered news of a national network before now.
Billboard Bands' surprisingly useful recent press release, if taken at face value, reveals that the company has "struck exclusive, long-term commitments with over 150 trendy nightspots in the top 20 markets, offering a reach of over one million branded bands per month" including such spots as NY's Webster Hall and LA's Knitting Factory.
Of great importance for their longterm dominance of this space is the claim that "all nightclubs have signed contracts as their exclusive distribution partner." Though they're focusing on wristbands, once the network of clubs is established, they'll have strong lines of communication for related efforts.
The wristbands have flexible uses according to the release: Billboard Bands provides advertisers with the opportunity for numerous promotional and transactional overlays, such as sequential numbering, promotion codes, tear-off coupons, drive-to-web sweepstakes and even scratch-and-win and scratch-and-sniff applications. We also offer our clients a 3-week lead-time on delivery of their final creative, and the opportunity to target their buys based on geography and flight requirements.
They're also reaching an important demographic, based on a recent survey of club-goers that surprised me with the info that 29% of respondents say they don't remove the bands till the next day.
There's something about the notion of wristbands becoming a crucial marketing platform that really appeals to me, much more so than the eggvertising platform.
Clyde Smith • ProHipHop • clyde(at)prohiphop(dot)com
High School Musical: The Concert [not to be confused with the stage show] takes the cross-marketing universe of High School Musical [the tv movie] on the road in a collection of songs from the movie plus cameos for the show's stars who are also building their solo careers.
Reviewers of the concert noted the abundant merchandise as one entered, about which I've seen few complaints, not surprising given that such merchandising is now a norm. The concerns about the concert most often relate to the cameos or "showcases", what one writer terms a "crafty Disneyexec’s euphemism for a bombardment of product placements promoting the cast’s solo albums and upcoming movies."
Shillfest aside, the solo segments have been more pointedly questioned for the "young women's grown-up attire and adult dance moves" that conflict strongly with the squeaky clean image of High School Musical. As a writer for the NY Times noted: Ms. Tisdale, who plays an ambitious snob in the movie, with a penchant for pastel blazers, here dances provocatively in a corset and tiny plaid mini-skirt. As the 10-year-old female friend I brought with me proclaimed: "She's wearing a corset. But she said her grandmother was here!"
Ashley Tisdale - He Said She Said
The issue of appropriate behavior under the Disney brand must weigh on the stars themselves, since pressure would come both from Disney and from fans to conform to a particular image, though they certainly don't seem to mind.
The performers explain: "They don't have to watch over me," says Ashley Tisdale, who plays Sharpay. "Disney knows who I am." She adds: "I'm not into the club scene. You won't see me go over the edgy edge. I will always be wholesome."...
"I don't want to be seen buying cigarettes and liquor," says Efron. "It wouldn't be a smart move to be out doing promiscuous things."
Though they sound positive and comfortable with such restrictions to their emerging adulthood, one can already sense the recipe for disaster inherent in maintaining a squeaky clean facade. To a large degree, by breaking in via Disney, the transition from tween idols to whatever comes next must occur without visible signs of the inner turmoil faced by all young stars.
Corbin Bleu: Up Close
The stars of High School Musical not only face pressures to conform to a restrictive marketing image, they also face the fact that their solo careers are potentially overextensions of the HSM brand. As possibilities like a theme park and an ice show materialize and fans are glutted with High School Musical II, the movie and the merchandise, the fallout in response to oversaturation could hamper their solo efforts.
Currently HSM performers are riding a wave of popularity pushed along by Disney power and each has a serious shot at pop star success. But I don't envy them as they attempt to mature beyond their current image and begin to leave High School Musical behind. As difficult as the marketing challenges will become, they may well be dwarfed by personal challenges.
