Jaffe Juice

Intel learns to listen

Intel has just launched ITopia (huh? OK, I get it "IT" + Utopia = ITopia) and in so doing, joins the conversation:

Intel is making its engineers available for one-on-one conversations as part of a move to embrace a "listening" marketing model.

What's really great here is the "no end date" associated with the program. As a wise old man once said, "Marketing is not a campaign; it's a committment".

Following the lead set by Dell and most recently Starbucks, what we're seeing now (as I wrote about in the book) is a strong backbone of customer service being interwoven into ongoing marketing and branding initiatives. It's a pretty sublime partnership of proactive and reactive backwards and forwards which aims to maintain a continuous and fluid dialog between brand and consumer.

Key links that caught my eye this week...

• Rapper and bloggers separated at birth? Fo Sho!
• Anatomy of a mob - ridiculously thorough commentary and coverage on Zuckergate
• 'er wuz I sleeping unerneath a rock? GM announces they'll shift $1.5bn of their $3bn treasure chest to digital/1-to-1 initiatives within the next 3 years. I had better start kissing Detroit a$$.
  • Wonder how much of this will be allocated to conversational marketing?
• 17 ways you can use twitter versus 10 things I hate about twitter.
• Know your meme: rickrolling.
• Incredible footage of the new exchange-ready iPhone
• Gibson v Guitar Hero. Another sore loser cries like a wimpy baby
• Does BT stand for Bad Temper? When will telemarketers ever learn?
• Via Tangerine Toad, another amphibian croaks in with a POV on Social Media. It's bold to say the least for a creative boutique to chime in. What do you think? courageous or foolish?
• More agency balls - Modernista's website is their wikipedia entry? WTF??? Personally I love it but wonder how long until the Wikizealots ruin the tea party.
• WTF Part II - Airborne is a crock? The wonder natural cold preventative remedy seems to be nothing but a bunch of marketing lies and deceit. $23.3MM settlement "without admission of wrong-doing" based on fudged research sends out a signal that word-of-mouth success can come back to bite you in the buttocks.
• Rubel posits that social media jobs soon won't exist in isolation. Not sure I agree with this one.
• Quite possibly THE worst tagline EVER.
• For the love of pod. MSM coverage on podcasting.
• 10 laws of real social networking success. Always insightful Mitch Joel.
• Ryan Jones, a (gasp) brand marketer, joins the conversation and challenges myself and Mitch Joel to spread the word about his new blog, M-cause, a blog about new marketing, cause marketing and sustainability. Sorry Ryan, I don't give away gratuitous plugs :) Now where's my audio comment that shows brand marketers are listening....?
• The critiquer becomes the critiquee: mystarbucksidea. What do you think?
• How companies are changing the way they deal with employees blogging.
• Age of Conversation bumrushes the Amazon.com charts - ends at #262 overall and #36 in business & investing.  I thought (hoped) they'd end up higher - with over 100 participants and their respective communities driving this, but think ultimately the high price point ($29.95) got in the way (even with the charity angle). Irrespective, this is an incredible achievement for 100% citizen driven thought leadership
  • As an fyi - Join the Conversation reached #26 overall and #2 in Business
• VERY interesting bit of reprehensible subliminal advertising caught in the act - citizen journalist style.

• YouTube releases stats for video
• Man writes check on 2-ply toilet paper. This has nothing to do with anything.
• Man cold. Too true. Too true.

I pledge allegiance...

Yesterday, I had my citizenship interview in Hartford and passed :)

Soon I'll pledge my allegiance and be sworn in as an American citizen.

I've spent the past 11 years here in the US. My career is here. My family is here. My life is here.

I'm very proud to become an American citizen and begin the next chapter of my life.

I'll certainly be voting in November and play my part in influencing America's new direction and path forward.

• 50 stars representing the 50 States; Stars = constellations = experiment of democracy was thought to be a lofty idea
• 13 Stripes = First 13 colonies
• Red = Hardiness, Valor; White = Purity, Innocence; Blue = Vigilance, Perseverance
• June 14, 1777 = Flag Day

Conversation Clickthrough Rate

Now that I've got your attention, I'm just kidding. The day there is a CTR for conversation, I'm officially throwing in the towel.

In this Adweek piece, Brian Morrissey (who it must be said, is without question doing the best job in the new marketing reporting space right now) pens an article about the $64,000 question: metrics/measurement in the social media space.

Although it seems as if the same subset of execs (all intelligent and all friends) are being interviewed for the the same articles (hint, hint), it's hard to ignore pearls like this one:

"Social media measurement is like radar," said Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. "You can't fly a plane without radar. The question is how much radar do you need."

Ian Schafer offers a new suggestion for the ultimate social media metric: T-shirts. He's referring to a program for Flight of the Conchords and ultimately, why it is so important to customize or even invent unique proxies of success based on everything from engagement to communal activation.

Social media, he said, is like figuring out if you have a good marriage: Quantitative measurements will only get you so far. "You can't assign a number to that," he said.

To Ian's point, what's missing is not so much the "metric", but the meaning behind the metric i.e. the interpretation, context and actionable insight that helps perpetuate and extend the learnings and ongoing conversation.

One other problem is the fact that as long as we continue to expect short term results from longer term opportunities, we're going to continue to stumble our way through understanding the true and longer term impact and potential of conversation.

Jaffe Juice #107 - Do you face inward or outward from the fish bowl, Starbucks and SXSW

This is an episode which focuses mainly on the conclusion to Sarah Robbins' meme challenge about breaking out of the fish bowl. Audio comments to +1 206 203-3255. Join the Jaffe Juice Facebook Group

Direct download here
iTunes subscription here

Links of note (please remind me if I promised additional links and didn't supply them but my memory escapes me):
- Sarah Lacy/Mark Zuckerberg Interview at SXSW
- Starbucks closure coverage
- Sarah Robbins' original post

What's in a name?

There's a new book out called "Bad Baby Names," which is a definite read if you're an expecting parent.

Some of the shockers are really just bad combinations, for example: Love Gunn, Mary A. Jerk , Willie B. Long, Young Boozer or the ultimate, I.P. Freely (an actual name believe it or not....unlike the Russian Mohel, Ivan Cutyakokov)

Then there are the first name howlers, which includes "crayon"!

Well, it could be worse. I could have named the company, "Lard", "Satan" or "Vaseline" (which were all included in the baby name hall of shame!)

Factoids and Talent

MRM Worldwide took out a 1-page advertorial in a special digital talent section of one of the advertising trades.

They listed some interesting data points, which I thought were intriuging and worth sharing:

• More than 70% of 4-year olds have used a computer
• More than 50% of 21-year olds have created content on the Web

The funny thing about both of these factoids is that as high as the percentages are, suddenly I'm surprised that they're not higher.

Also, a bit of advice to MRM (given they shared this info with us), if you're going to take out a full page ad focusing on talent (which itself says something), put a name (possibly even your CEO, Reuben Hendell) to the contact e-mail address as opposed to careers@mrmworldwide.com

The Putty Tail

It's amazing. Every time I see Tiger Woods at the Masters or this past weekend for example, when he sunk a ridiculous 25-foot putt to win the Arnold Palmer Invitational, I think of my "viral" video from 3 years back.

Apparently I'm not the only one.

The long tail wags.

Heads Up

I'm currently in London giving a Keynote presentation and workshop at The Digital Marketing Briefing. I'll be demonstrating the power of community, dialogue and partnership tomorrow so look out for my tweets, follow instructions and join in the fun.

We're also planning a meet-up/tweet-up on Wednesday at 6.15pm at 2 Savoy Place. If you're around, hopefully you can attend.

Grading the European Union from a customer service perspective

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the central premise (or promise) of the European Union all about interoperability? The ability to move freely between Schengen States - from Border Control to Working Permits to Currency etc etc.

I've always read or heard the EU being described from an internal perspective i.e. being a resident from the EU. What I haven't really read about or heard is the benefit of the collective brand from an outsider's perspective i.e. a foreigner; a business visitor; a tourist.

I can only imagine that tourism, as well as foreign business investment are separately key contributors to the various EU states' GDP's.

Why then is the process of securing a Schengen visa to visit an EU State so hopefully inconsistent and imbalanced from State to State?

For those of you that have the luxury of having an American or EU passport for examples, you probably have never encountered "Visa Hell". For a schmuck like myself however, a South African passport doesn't exactly open doors.

Since 2007, I have secured 8 Schengen Visas - 5 of the last 6 being 6-month, multiple entry visas. I've visited the following embassies: Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Italy and Finland and let me tell you...the various experiences couldn't be more different.

For those of you that don't know what a Schengen Visa is - it's basically one visa which applies for the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Greece, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

So if you're planning a trip to Belgium, Denmark and Greece for example, then you'd have to go to the Greek Embassy first and apply for your visa there. The reason being that Greece is the first port of entry.

Here's where the logic goes pear shaped:

• Does it really matter that the Greek Embassy gives you a visa which essentially is equally valid for any other Schengen State?
• Does it matter which country issues a Schengen Visa if in fact the applicant could conceivably end up in any of the Schengen States during the period covered in their visa?
• And if it does matter, why is the application process so fundamentally different from country to country?

I guess that's my beef. I've seen people made to wait outside of the Embassy in the freezing cold and falling snow until they are called inside. I've seen one Embassy that accepts inbound faxes and e-mails and even FEDEX'es the stamped passport to the applicant to save them from coming back a second time. One Embassy answers the phone whilst another only accepts appointments via online booking. I've also seen incredibly erratic and inconsistent standards when it comes to things like passport pictures - you can smile; no you can't; you're facing forwards when you should be tilted at 45 degrees to the left; why aren't you facing forwards? And the list goes on.

Where's the uniformity? Where's the integration? Where's the consistency?

Bottom line is that I heart Finland. Not so much when it comes to France and Italy. Netherlands and Belgium are perennial favorites.

Ask me why when you see me next.

And until then, EU: sort out your brand promise of being an integrated, holistic and unified community. Because if the visa application process is anything to go by, you're about as disconnected and disjointed as the typical product or service brand.