The Extra Hurdle for Marketing Through Social Media: You Gotta Make 'em Feel

So we've been chatting recently with a vendor, Corporate Visions. They follow the

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

approach that a message that sticks is one that's wrapped in emotion. It's amazing to see when this technique is executed well. This video that a friend pointed me to is not new new, in fact 150k plus people have already seen it. But I think the folks at Grasshopper.com (actually the agency they hired) really nailed this approach.



It's interesting to note how intertwined the notion of making a message stick, something good salespeople have known how to do forever, and our expectations associated with new and social media.

Clearly we all want to feel something, and we all have very high expectations of social media in this regard. I think this notion is perhaps an extension of my last post, The Importance of Being Earnest.

So....I now have a request.

Please add comments to this blog with links to messages that you think were made to stick - messages wrapped in emotion. I wanna see what you got.

Go ahead, try to make me cry.... or laugh. Actually, I have a strong preference for laughing.

The Importance of Being Earnest in Social Media; or What Facebook and Twitter Should Do to Save Themselves from Becoming Irrelevant

So who hates their personal e-mail inbox? I do! Yahoo has just become complete spam. I have maxed out the number of filters on the paid account, tagged every possible item that even remotely looks like spam as spam and yet it keeps coming.

According to KGB.com 183 Billion e-mail messages are sent per day. I would give them a shout out, but it looks like this number is from 2007. Also they didn't give me an answer to the second half of my question for my 99 cent text message investment which was - how much of this is spam? Maybe the KGB just doesn't know. Afterall, they lost some of their best spooks to capitalism after the iron curtain fell.

Well wikipedia does and it is free! Wikipedia led me to this reference from the New York Times. Spamalot? Why yes we do. 94% of the time as it turns out. So approximately 2,000,000 e-mail messages are sent every second of every day and 1,880,000 are pure crap that we don't want.

My financee's brother actually works at the post office. He told me that the only thing that is really keeping them alive is junk mail. In fact, like e-mail it is the bulk of what they move these days. I got on the USPS' marketers spam list and they send me all sorts of paper materials telling me how green they are. They actually sent me a large express mail envelope to tell me they weren't going to be sending me the T-shirt they offered me. That they sent later in another large package, in the wrong size of course. Forget about solar power and hydrogen cars. It seems the greenist thing the US Government could do is close the Post Office. (Sorry future brother-in-law. I'll help you bounce pack with a new startup that sells spam filters on late night infomercials using Swedish models that austensibly made the stuff...oops that one has been done Remind me to stop staying up to watch Craig Ferguson.)

So where am I going with this? Well the Post Office is dying a slow death at a rate of one cent price hikes a year and service cutbacks until we all give up. E-mail is almost dead on arrival. Myspace and Friendster lost their mojo before they even tried to stretch to reach my demographic. What do they all have in common? They are filled with crap!

Recently I've been experimenting with feeding content to Twitter. (see The Need for Feed). I am trying to use the technique for good - serving up interesting data sources that people can actually use. I have become painfully aware of the potential to use these techniques for evil though. Last week two guys I went to high school with both crapped in the walled garden that is supposed to be my Facebook account on the same day. They both posted some BS about this new energy drink called efusjon. It's a multi-level marketing company selling some acai berry sugar water. Supposed to save your life not just dangerously elevate your sugar levels and rot your teeth. Apparently part of their "viral" marketing was to get some dudes from my high school to spam me with their fake musings about this garbage.

There you have it. The beginning of the end. One day you'll nod knowingly when your using Farcebluch.com instead.

Attention all entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley - this is your shining opportunity. Build us a social communication platform that keeps this crap out! Of course we need to buy things to keep whatever it is we are talking about afloat, but can't you at least try to address our interests? If Facebook did this they would know that the only acai berry I consume is made into Pinkberry style frozen yogurt. That's unrealistically specific for the time being, but you get my point.

So what does it mean to be earnest in Social media? It means making a college try to be relevant. Sure we can't all possibly keep up with the information demands of the hungry new communication mediums alone, but we have to try to keep content flowing that is at least interesting to our audience.

I am going to offer up The Cocktail Party Rule for Social Media.

If it is not a reasonable leap from the context or the topic in a group chat at a cocktail party, don't go there.

I send a link to this blog to our corporate Twitter account. I work at Oracle Corporation and market our CRM solutions. I think it is a reasonable leap that someone interested in CRM may be wrestling with the same new marketing concepts I blog about.

On the other hand, if a group of guys is gathered around the punch bowl, Mojito vat, beer tub, or Franzia box (depending on what kind of cocktail party you are having) talking about whether the Palm Pre has a snowball's chance in hell of tarnishing Apple's shine, you don't bring up the fact that your wife, the tennis coach just started selling some acai berry fizzy water out of her trunk.

It's a nonsequitor and it is annoying. It's worse than annoying in fact. It's that feeling of trepidation every time you open up your Yahoo inbox or your mailbox for that matter.

So what does this all mean? The power is in your hands. It's in all of our hands. Just use the The Cocktail Party Rule for Social Media and we'll all be fine, and we won't stop having to change communication mediums every 6-12 months. ....or will we?

See you on Farcebluch.

The Need for Feed: RSS & Twitter, Why They May be Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

The challenge with all things social media is keeping them up-to-date. Blogs can be a serious drain as they beg for content like Audrey in 'Little Shop of Horrors.' If you are using Twitter to communicate with your network and push relevant content, you may be experiencing the same thing. Even keeping up with 140 character posts can be a grind.

Recently, I've started experimenting with pushing some of the content that I feel is most relevant to the people I interact with as well as the public at large. It's been fun to watch the reactions and the results.

http://www.twitter.com/topcrmbloggers is a feed I set up that aggregates what I consider to be the best CRM Bloggers out there. You'll note that I have 33 followers in just a week without even trying. The feed of this twitter handle in turn feeds one of our Netvibes pages. Entropy yes, but we are serving up content at different potential access points for different users.

I also set up a fun feed of Odd News which I love to read while on the bus. It started on @pulverman on Twitter and is now featured on @OddNewsNetwork. @pulverman will now be an aggregation of the top Marketing 2.0 blogs starting tomorrow as well as my shorter musings on the world of Marketing 2.0. From the same feed as OddNewsNetwork I select one post at random once a day and feed my personal Twitter feed, @bolobao. This in turn updates Facebook providing a bit of fun for friends to see and comment on.

On slow news days, I know that at least the feeds I've set up are keeping various sites up-to-date with interesting content.

These are early days in my feed experiments, but I imagine marketers everywhere are struggling with these same issues.

Like a good blog post, I think in the final analysis, what you chose to feed to your social marketing efforts like what you post on your blog will be judged on relevance. If it is relevant - aggregated feeds crafted with the love and personality you apply to a post - it will be appreciated.

I'll no doubt keep tuning my feeds to make them ever more relevant and interesting. I just sent my Yelp reviews to my personal Twitter (@bolobao) and our Delicious posts (www.delicious.com/OracleCRM) to our work Twitter account (@OracleCRM). Perhaps RSS and Twitter aren't quite as cozy at PB&J yet, but I would like to submit that we all have the need for feed, even newspapers, making this combo perhaps your own personal Associated Press.