Jaffe Juice

The novelty curve

Armano introduces the novelty curve which has the following points on the spectrum:

• This looks interesting
• I think I'm in love
• I'm telling all my friends
• Hm. Haven't used in several weeks
• Are you still here?
• I've moved on. You should too.

As one of the commenter's aptly points out, the axes need a bit of work (there's no indicator of time), but the point behind the chart rings through nonetheless (in my words): marketers approach emerging new marketing platforms or technologies with the same predictable infatuation and fleeting novelty.

Hey Armano, why not overlay the mainstream media curve on top of the marketer adoption/infatuation one? Are they one and the same? Probably not.

Newsflash: When it comes to Social Media, Agencies don't it

It's almost too easy.

Where's the catch?

Strike 1: A new study from TNS Media Intelligence and Cymfony (n=60 marketers in North America, France and the U.K) reveals that when it comes to social media, traditional agencies view "social channels like blogs as traditional media".

Strike 2: ...their (agencies) ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area.

Strike 3: ...agencies have little of their own experience using social networks or video-sharing sites for themselves.

This, compounded by the rising importance of social media, makes for somewhat of a perfect storm:

• Nearly 50% of marketers said social-media efforts needed to be handled at an executive level with "significant" resources.
• Another 30% agreed social media is a "revolutionary opportunity."

The data/findings are consistent with the research piloted in association with SNCR and TWI Surveys for my book, "Join the Conversation."

Sidebar: I look forward to sharing some of this research when I keynote at the SNCR Forum on April 22nd.

To be sure, it is (as I opened up in this post) almost too easy to lay into the agencies. They pretty much deserve it, don't they? Still, it takes two to tango and I think this quote from Super Bowl loving FedEx

"I think traditional ad agencies have very little contribution to make," Bryan Simkins, a marketing specialist at FedEx, told TNS. "They are mostly driven by their compensation models which are made for closed media. Those models don't apply in open media."

This, coming from the company that put Jose Avila and his furniture on the map.

Marketers, if you want your agencies to survive and thrive, you too will need to adjust the way you source, compensate, reward and respect your agency partners.

...but yes, the agency model has to adapt, adjust and evolve and agencies are going to need to restructure the way they do business in major way if they are to survive.

To help you in your quest, here are 3 pieces of advice:

1. Stop being so damn arrogant and deluded to think you can do this yourselves. You can't. This is all about humility.
   
2. Stop trying to automate the whole process and solving your problems by a quick technology acquisition fix. You're drowning in your own data and laziness. This is labor intensive.
3. Stop trying to scale the whole process and replicate your old bad habits. This is about planting seeds and sticking around long enough to reap the rewards of care, consideration and hard work.

Questions?

Jaffe Juice #105 - "CEO" Roundtable Discussion on Social Media

Recorded in the Palm Room at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills on February 28th, a lively roundtable conversation on social media brought to you by United Online and Classmates.com. Audio comments to +1 206 203-3255

Direct download here
iTunes subscription here

Super De-Duper Linkety Link for the week of Feb 25

A busy week of traveling to the DMA Leaders Forum and a breakfast roundtable in Miami and LaLaLand respectively meant light posts, but plenty of notes:

• 6 ways of preventing the death of a brand
• Tweet or change the world. Pick one - Verdion ponders whether tweeting (2.0) is the new shooting hoops (1.0); perhaps but as long as it makes us smarter directly (if you work for an agency for example) or indirectly (learning something new...), I'd say daily social media "distractions" are anything but
• Sara Silverman is f@cking Matt Damon, Jimmy Kimmel is f@cking Ben Affleck and Viral Videos are alive and kicking

• Marshall McLuhan was Canadian? Explains a lot. Seriously though, this is a terrific post that asks the question, "if the medium is the message, what is the message (or rather the unique behavioral impact) that social media ultimately brings to and influences society.
• Uwe Hook asks if we've all become assholes by turning into the enemy in dissing traditional media/agencies as backward dinosaurs and portraying ourselves as puritan know-it-alls. Personally I think Uwe is a backward dinosaur and doesn't know what he's talking about. Kidding :)
• Top 10 uses for Yahoo! Live and ooVoo - great to see my client's product being internalized and contextualized

Mega Linkety-Link

These days I seem to keep my Firefox open with about 50 tabs to the extent where Firefox takes up about 400K+ of Memory. Fortunately, my Dell XPS M1330 has 4GB of memory, but still...

At some point the computer will crash or I'll just close my browser by mistake and I lose all my URL's. Yes, I know. Del.icio.us

Anyway, here this week's links are in no particular order and with commentary to boot:

• In case you missed it on Friday, newly retired Jim Garrity, ex-CMO at Wachovia, wrote this review/post on Jaffe Juice about Join the Conversation
• Social media will change your business. And if Business Week says it's so, it must be true.
• Question: Outlook + Twitter = ???? OutTwit. Get it now.
• Via memes.org, another great way of proving the power of power. In this case, circumventing Tom Cruise and Church 'O Scientology heavies with a reenactment video.

• David Armano on the 3 U's. I need to digest this against some of my Life after the 30-second spot models: RUE (Relevance, Utility, Entertainment) or the 6 C's from Join the Conversation.
• Average age of Twitterati as per this survey is 37. That's my age. I guess I  must be average then.
• Keith Burtis' social media miracle came true. More here and here.
• New ANA Survey. Marketers say TV ads are less effective. Yawn. Same survey. New Year. No new thinking. Come on ANA...take a position and challenge your members properly instead of pandering to them
• Top 10 Twitter Hacks; More twitter - Mack on why Twitter is better than Facebook
   
• Phil Gomes' position on open-friended SocNet's. I personally disagree and have invited him to chat about this. No response from him yet :(
• Top marketing experts dish on their best marketing secrets. I wasn't included in this list but here's my secret: don't dish your top marketing secrets to all and sundry; use them rather for your clients. Half kidding.
• HBR: The shrinking advantage of brands
• RSS in plain English (via the Consigliere)

Reflections on Chapter 18 - Ge tting Started: The Manifesto for Experimentation

On a recent vacation, I immersed myself in Joseph's latest book:  Join The Conversation.  While I found the entire book informative, relevant, inspirational and educational, I really related a great deal to the content in Chapter 18.  Two portions of the chapter really resonated with me.  The first was the summary of 30 reasons for defending the status quo.  I certainly have heard many of them throughout my career.  I have also heard some I would suggest should be added to the list.  My additions reflect the fact that I worked for nothing but very large (FORTUNE 50), hierarchical and quite siloed companies and may not be relevant for smaller companies.  That said, here are my suggested additions based on real life experiences of mine:

• "We tried that before and it didn't work"
• "That might work for selling packaged goods, but don't you understand we're selling investments"
• "This might be a good idea for the entire corporation, but the ROI for my division can't justify the investment"
• "I am not willing to take money out of traditional media to experiment with unproven new marketing approaches"
• "With our current focus on (fill in the blank here e.g. merger integration, budget cuts, organization changes, etc.) we don't have the bandwidth to do experimentation"

The second portion of this chapter that got my attention was the section entitled:  "Making Experimentation A Reality:  A Five Step Plan."  During my last two years at Wachovia, I spent a great deal of time studying the subject of innovation.  Researching best practices approaches from the leaders in innovation in order to make a recommendation for a model that would serve to drive innovation at Wachovia.  Ar the end of this study, we made a series of recommendations to the Operating Committee (just one year ago).  The recommendations were accepted and have since been implemented.

What struck me was the dead-on alignment between Joseph's recommendations and ours.  It is important to note, upfront, that our recommendations were strongly influenced by our desire to come up with a solution that took into account Wachovia's culture, history and structural makeup.  Clearly "one size" does not fit all when looking for the right organizational approach and these elements need to be strongly factored in.  Here's where our findings aligned with Joseph's:

• Separated, nimble teams reporting straight to the top - in a large corporation made up of numerous business units, the big innovative ideas will be those that have enterprise-wide value.  Placing the innovation teams within business unit immediately suboptimizes the potential for developing big ideas. 
• Mash up of internal and external specialists - exactly what we recommended.  This level of diversity is essential in driving true innovation.
• Experimentation team reports to Chief Marketing Officer - Yup, recommended this as well.
• Experimentation team is separate yet connected - this was a very key element of our recommendation.  For reasons stated above, it is very important for this group to be a separate, cross-enterprise-focused group.  However, in a company like Wachovia, where the revenue producing lines of business drive strategy and business results, it is critical to have very strong connections with each line of business.

The remainder of the chapter contains further suggestions that also align very well with our recommendations - especially the section that deals with being tolerant of failure.  This is a challenge for companies that are traditionally quite risk intolerant, but this significant obstacle to innovation needs to be overcome.  We recommended an approach that would involve "failing fast, celebrating failures and learning from them." 

One key element in our recommendation I didn't see in Joseph's book was something we referred to as "an idea management system."  Fact is most companies have many, many creative people who have numerous excellent innovative ideas.  The problem is that they don't know where to go with those ideas.  Best practices companies have an idea management system.  This includes a visible center for innovation that welcomes innovative ideas from all employees (and other constituencies) irrespective of title, level or tenure.  The second element is a well defined and maintained system that continually manages the corporate inventory of innovation ideas - those that have been implemented, those in the pipeline, those in consideration, etc. etc. etc. 

In closing, I found great comfort in these congruencies between Joseph's suggested approach and our conclusions at Wachovia.  We never thought we had invented something unique, and therefore I have no concerns about the fact that the two approaches are so similar.  After all, we started out studying best practices companies looking to plagerize as much as possible.

- Jim Garrity

Twitter's potential in 341 comments or less

Jeremiah Owyang has lit or should I say twit a firestorm of conversation and engagement with this post and this tweet to illustrate both the explosive potential and power of Twitter (presence applications) as a powerful conversational and communal "tool"

341 comments (and counting) says a LOT. When is the last blog post you saw garner this kind of response? It's a great UNM2PNM organic case study...

Like Jeremiah, but unlike Phil, I share the same POV about a reciprocal approach to expanding my network.

You can find me on Twitter here - add me and I will add you back.

Update 1: This defeats the purpose (as I'm blogging this), but I tried out an experiment on Twitter itself which was to see how quickly I could hit the 1,000 person follower mark. Based on a tweet on 2/18 at 3.43pm, I decided (thanks to @BarbaraKB) to give away 1 hour of consulting/conversation time to my 1,000th follower. That was when I had 900 followers. I currently have 935

Update 2: So...I got "Owyanged". Jeremiah tweeted about this and the floodgates opened up. I now have 1,034 followers and I belive that @DHotchkiss is my 1,000th follower and therefore, gets an hour of my time.

HANDS DOWN, twitter beat blogging as a means to activate immediate response/impact.

Now I have to think about how to one-up this. What about a presentation by myself and Jeremiah to the person or company that ends up being my 2,500th follower? Jeremiah - you interested? We could ustream it to our combined followers...

Will the real Alex Perez please stand up?

OK, if this is a PR shill, I'm going to Jeff Pulverize you.

I got an e-mail from a gmail account alerting me to Alex Perez, Commercial Spokesperson-for-Hire. He's pimping Kraft Singles, Pepto-Bismol, Ocean-Spray, Hostess Cupcakes, Fritos, Skittles and Duracell Batteries (but not necessarily in that order)

Check out his purple leather-jacket wearing videos which are clearly parodies (same video; different product)

I guess the $12.95 question is who's behind this? Ad agency? CGC DIY Acme Inc. Co?

Verdino thinks this could be for a stock video company, although it might appear that Alex is for real (I've sent him an e-mail but he hasn't responded yet) as in searching for his 15 streams of fame. Unless of course, he really does moonlight as a scab awards show writer.

Free Kraft Singles for the first correct response.

The mouse knows best

Disney is ramping up efforts in the Virtual arena. So should you.

Where's MY friggen' royalties???

3 years ago I was consulting for a company who will remain nameless and I suggested to them that the songs from American Idol should be readily available for purchase on iTunes.

It was a no-brainer to me that consumers en masse would rather purchase Idol hopeful renditions of contemporary, classic and even forgotten songs than the originals (which we KNOW are not selling based on continued declining music industry CD sales etc)

Take Donny Hathaway's A Song for You, brilliantly sung by Elliot Yamin, for example. How many Elliot Yamin teenybopper fans even know (or care) who Donny Hathaway was.....until now!

Talk about the Long Tail in action.

Anyway, it was just announced that this is now going to be a reality.

You're welcome.