Jaffe Juice

Congratulations GM....you now have officially hit the bottom of the barrel

Not even 24 hours after you announce you're filing for bankruptcy protection, essentially swindling countless shareholders and creditors out of obscene amount of money and leaving thousands upon thousands of employees, dealers, partners etc SOL....you give us this:

Reinvention? That's what you're calling it?

We're not witnessing the end of the American car, we're witnessing the rebirth of the American car????!!!!!??????

This is not about going out of business, this is about getting down to business????!!!!!??????

...because the only chapter we're focused on is Chapter 1????!!!!!??????

WTF????!!!!!?????? Somebody deserves a real hefty bitch-slap.

My only questions are as follows:

1. Exactly HOW LONG has this spot been in the hopper?
2. When did this get briefed?
3. Did Deutsch and McCann get paid upfront or are they on the list of Creditors?
4. Who did you use for the voice over and did HE get paid? I'll bet it wasn't some dude in the mail department.
5. Could you not have waited....oh....a week....a month.....6 months to let some of the pain subside before you insulted us with your rah-rah-rah, the best is yet to come crap
6. When will you learn that advertising is not the answer....especially during times where cathartic healing needs to take place via honest (let's be completely honest sounds like "who farted?"), authentic, transparent and open dialogue.

Whilst I totally get Eric Hirshberg, Deutsch's CCO/co-President's perspective that it's important to convince (read: prove to) skeptical consumers that it's ok/safe/sound to buy from a bankrupt company, this is done by earning back trust, demonstrating commitment and staying power and proving to them that once and for all, GM has/is/will change for the better.

Ugggh. Seriously. Ugggh.

JJTV #14 - The King acts like a Clown

I'm no prude, but I don't like it when the dude is rude.

Link to the commercial is here

Spread the word:

• Tell Oprah, Alex, Russ, your friends, co-workers, clients and colleagues
• Tweet or RT: I'm no prude, but I don't like it when the dude is rude - JJTV #14 - Squarebutts & Burger King http://bit.ly/g0lPT
• Subscribe to the show via iTunes or YouTube
• Post a video response

Twitter is a giant Ponzi Scheme (there's a Twucker born every minute)

I fear many of us are falling victim to a giant, well-orchestrated Ponzi-type scheme involving the hyping of Twitter. It's actually nothing more than a simple traffic driving ruse, involving tweeting and retweeting links back to the various mainstream media and social media websites and blogs.

Here's the dupe: all of these articles are about Twitter. 15 best uses of.... 12 top brands on.... 7 smartest brand marketers etc,

So it's articles and posts about Twitter being promoted, distributed and amplified via Twitter and in doing so, driving traffic back to the same sites and blogs that set the ball rolling in the first place. And it's all thanks to the A.D.D.-like 140 character limit that basically lets you say Jack Squat except for a codified bit.ly slurl whatever that pushes you to go back to the scene of the crime.

And as this continues to escalate, the medias (Ali G) and internetz increase their coverage, attention and "air time" because they know they're getting rich quick in the process.

Am I wrong? I'm not sure I am. I'm not trying to be skeptical and all, but come on....there are bigger fish to fry and takes more than 140 characters to fry 'em.

Oh and just in case you forgot...I'm @jaffejuice on Twitter and feel free to RT the crap out of this post and remember, drinks on me when I get to 10,000 followers (tweet-up venue to follow soon)

What you say is not what they see (The Domino's Effect)

Domino's took an express position to bypass traditional and/or mass methods of taking charge of the situation. They did not issue a press release and they did not put up anything on their homepage. With the exception of responding to bloggers who alerted them (how exactly does one contact a corporation these days?) and an esoteric twitter handle, it would appear that Domono's took a Rupert Murdoch like (hopefully this Internet thingy will just go away) approach to crisis communication.

Whilst their intent was to avoid "putting out a candle with a fire hose", it would appear that their attempt closer resembled "putting out a forest fire with a sippy cup".

Here's how I would suspect people are viewing Domino's "clean" homepage right about now.

If Patrick Doyle, President of Domino's USA (or someone who know him) is reading this post, please contact me offline. If you're at all interested, my company, crayon, is prepared to offer complimentary consulting to you around this difficult experience. Consider it our bailout to you :)

fwiw, I worked at a fast food company in South Africa and my heart goes out to the poor franchisee that has had to cope with this tidal wave of negative sentiment and devastation.

ABCNews.com piece on Domino's

ABCnews.com just published a piece on the Domino's aftermath/PR response. I was interviewed in this piece, although one of points need a little elaboration...

One of my quotes states that Domino's should have blasted a press release instead of targeted blogs.

Tim McIntyre, Domino's spokesperson expressly chose following up with bloggers who had "expressed interest" compared to a press release route which he "feared would only encourage more people to find and view the video" (logic/rationale sounds a bit backward to me). My point of view was to be proactive ahead of the inevitable mainstream media pickup i.e. pretending it doesn't exist or hoping it goes away was both risky and unrealistic. Domino's should have taken preemptive action in terms of either telling their side of the story and/or being ready/prepared/available to tell their story to the major daily shows, news outlets etc.

Secondly, Domino's took a position to respond directly to blogs/bloggers that contacted them...but I believe they should have taken this further and - with a listening strategy in place - reached out to any blogs (including mine) that referenced the fiasco.

Marketers need to understand that when a blogger hits the publish button, they are essentially "contacting" the brand for a response, albeit indirectly.

That was my response, but I'm no P.R. professional and I know there are tons out there who read this blog that are.

• What would you have done if you had been in Domino's position and/or counseling the brand?

• Do you agree with my position and if not, why not?

Don't answer the door: It's Domino's Snot Supreme!

Doing the rounds in the Social Media fishbowl today is this video "gem", from two alleged Domino's employees - one lazy and one debauched.

It's a textbook P.R. crisis communication case and people like Ian Schafer are speculating that this *will* end up on the evening news. He's probably not wrong. And if it does, a LOT of people will be making the switch to Pizza Hut and Pappa John's (I hear the Boogers are half price there)

Kudo's to Schafer for updating this in real time, including the following:

• Consumerist helps track down store and is in communication with Domino's VP, Communications (I would have put the CEO on it miself)
• Apparently this is one in a series by these two employees who claim no food ever went out, it was just a prank and they never (Yeah, right!) thought it would take off the way it did (Whole Foods never felt so good)
• Backstory of New York Times piece about the rise of online sluething

The debate will rage on as to whether Domino's responds or responded quick enough (for example, they *should* comment on this post within minutes if they have a proper listening strategy in place). In addition, I wonder to what extent bloggers etc. will fulfil their end of the bargain and report the full story (i.e. including Domino's side)

Here's a safe prediction btw....IP cams in every Domino's back kitchen from hereon end

Update: Domino's President of the Americas, Patrick Doyle, responds on YouTube

fwiw, I still won't be going there in a hurry and I'm still waiting from someone from Domino's to respond to all the blog posts (including this one) Simply plonking a video on YouTube (like JetBlue did a few years back) is not a cureall solution

"...then you might be a parasite or tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internets"

WSJ Editor, Robert Thomson to Jeff Foxworthy: "You're welcome" in response to all the new material he just got based on the dumb-ass comments about coming after all the denizens of the Internets for "stealing" their content.

Seriously dude, you're (on behalf of the AP) trying to be the RIAA to our Napster and you sir, are no RIAA. That's how bad it is.

Thomson was referencing an AP move to come after those who "misappropriate" their content under "misguided legal theories", but in doing so AP Chairman Dean Singleton comes over like a spoiled little baby squealing something to the effect of "my Dad will beat up your Dad" with your comments about "build(ing) search-engine-friendly subject pages filled with recent, "authoritative" links, hoping searchers will see those pages above blogs and aggregators."

Both Thomson and Singleton demonstrate an acute lack of understanding in terms of how social media, consumer generated content, citizen journalism, blogging and search works. I could go on.

By all means, the AP and their related sites should invest aggressively in smarter search and conversationally-enabled functional sites, but they equally need to invest in a crash course in terms of understanding how distributed content, social networking, linking and reach activators like Twitter works.

Whilst I agree with them that reprinting or syndicating entire articles verbatim and/or aggregating this on some scaled basis, esp. with a view towards monetizing this content, should be dealt with...it's also important to recognize that this isn't always done maliciously/intentionally and to that end, slapping Google Adsense on a page isn't exactly the work of an evil genius and megalomanic with delusions of grandeur.

On the flipside, people who extend, riff, offer commentary or build on top of ideas, points of view, news articles (like I'm doing right now) and offer a combination of both link-love and attribution, with a reasonable/measured/considered amount of italicized quotes to boot are not the enemy. They are you and they are me and they are NOT going away.

To end, a bit of advice for the AP and NAA: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em is a not a bad policy to follow, however you're not going to achieve your goals with blunt-force brawn and legal bullying. Stop crying over spilt milk in the form of the realization that bloggers like myself and favored by the likes of Google over your sites and instead focus on building better hubs that reward conversation, distribution, linking, commenting and social/peer-to-peer interaction.

One more thing, let's build up a repoitre for Jeff: "XXXXXXX, then you might be a parasite or tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internets"

How Slideshare (SlideScare) become the ultimate Fool on April Fool's

On April 1st (wasn't a great day for me....got up at 4.15am; totally messed up an appointment based on time zones and was 1 hour late in the process; had a flight canceled and ended up having to spend the night in a remote location), I received this e-mail:

Hi jaffejuice,

We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right. ;-)

Why don't you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

Like I'm ever going to tweet about increased views on Slideshare's behalf...however, just a little bit curious, I head on over to Slideshare and notice that my 2 year old presentations (I don't use this service much as I don't normally share my presentations publicly...sorry) have been viewed a whopping 100,000+ times.

Blown away, I do in fact decide to share this via Twitter and even make sure I use the suggested hashtag.

Here's my tweet:

woah - my 2 year old presentations on Slideshare have been viewed over 100K times; something must be wrong #bestofslideshare

Turns out, something was wrong...wrong with Slideshare that is, as they had decided to "prank" their community/customers by adding 2 zeroes to their presentation views.

When I found out, I was mad, uttering these tweets:

Dear Slideshare, You're a dopey bunch of children. Thanks for reminding me why I DON'T use your service

Long story short, I received a few lame responses from Slideshare and as someone who can take a joke and recognizes that there are far more important things in the world, I calmed down.

...but the reason why I'm (still) writing this post is that the damage has been done - not just with me, but moreover with their community.

Slideshare screwed up majorly and honestly, they only made matters worse with dopey predictable blog posts and canned or sterile conservative responses (as per their mea culpa blog post, which as of this posting has over 140 responses) and tweets to myself and others:

We celebrated April Fools Day with a little prank: views on your presentations have an extra two zeros on them. We hope you find this funny. Your views will be rolled back to normal in a few hours.

Here are some of the customer responses:

Dumb Prank I sent that email to my board members .. that was the dumbest April Fools Joke.. Slideshare Ive got about 15k views on my presentations anyways [totally]..next time this happens, I will pull everything out to scribd or something else

Your prank was quite a good one. I thought it had got to be a prank - when I first saw it. But then I convinced myself that 30,010 people had indeed watched a small presentation on the start of The Holocaust...I thought it was just conceivable that, after 8 months of horror in the financial world, somewone (sic) would actually wake up...the(n) I found out. Some clown at work. So it is all just sad. Happily for your organization I took a medication for high blood pressure an hour ago. What I think about the security of my Slideshare account cannot be spoken about right now. I feel sick. But it is well known here that this week the CEO of the German Rail System was obliged to resign over a similar lapse in the security of private and corporate internet records. Neil McPherson laughing fit to vomit.

Okie Dokie Then.

Here's a recap of the mistakes and the resulting learnings/insights/takeaways:

1. Slideshare is a business and professional service. They are not YouTube (as per one reader comment) and should not act as such.
2. SPAMMING their customers via e-mail was never a good idea
3. Manipulating them (arguably in a self-serving way) by tricking them to blog/tweet is a worse idea
4. Messing around with data sent out huge concerns/signals as they pertained to security of data
5. This is another example {Jaffe soapbox on} of what happens when there is no strategy present - this isn't just applicable to brands/brand marketers {Jaffe soapbox off}
6. When planning an April Fool's Joke, remember to factor in different time zones (a mistake I made myself on 4/1/09). Many people received the e-mail in Australia on April 2nd!!!
7. Sometimes it's better to shut the hell up (another lesson I've learned first hand) - was a blog post really necessary? Perhaps. But in this case, another set of e-mails to genuinely apologize would have better
8. Responses that are banal and empty are worse than not responding at all
9. Turns out Slideshare lost a bunch of customers from this prank AND helped their competitor, Scribd gain visibility.
10. April Fool's jokes are lame. It's not funny if no one is laughing

Move on, people. Nothing more here to see.

Update: Rashmi Sinha, Slideshare's Co-founder and CEO has already contacted me and represented his and his company's perspective. I respect that.

Ski-doodle

A lot of "buzz" has been going on about Skittles "homepage redesign"

For those of you who've been spared from the tempest in a teapot, essentially Skittles decided to go all Modernista! (an agency that made Wikipedia their homepage; irked Wikipedia purists and as you can see, became a little too transparent) on us and cede their entire web presence to "the people" by presenting the amorphous "conversation" as their true digital presence.

You'd think I'd be elated with this authentic demonstration of cession of control to the masses. You'd be 100% wrong.

For starters, I don't believe that we had control to start with and even if we did, the worst thing we could do is to give it 100% to consumers...who quite frankly, don't necessarily even want it.

Let's begin with Skittle's first bowl (a bold attempt at getting a strike, but sadly nothing more than a gutterball) which was to overlay their site against Twitter. Exhbit 1 shows that when left to their own devices, the "conversationalists" (as defined as social media insiders, fishbowl dwellers and navel-gazers) are mishevious little imps who are also a little sado-masochistic.

Translation - Skittle's entire web-presence AKA Twitter is skittled with gems like: @qwghlm More like: ARE SKITTLES MAKING PAEDOPHILES OBESE? or Skittles Skittles Skittles Skittles Capitalist Whore Skittles Skittles Skittles Capitalist Whore.

Like the Octo-Mom, very soon the media coverage turned on their once darling and Skittles swapped out Twitter for Facebook before settling it would appear on banal Wikipedia as their final resting place.

Rumor has it that this was always a short-term "campaign" and Skittles always intended to go back to a more traditional destination website presence i.e. revert back to the way things used to be. I find this suspect at best and loathsome at worst: suspect given Agency.com's (the same agency behind Subway's When we Roll...We Roll Big) involvement in this and their subsequent backpeddling from the Subway kerfuffle and loathsome if this entire move was nothing more than a short term attempt (campaign) at seeking "buzz" or "viral" response.

So why am I so irritated about all of this? Honestly, I'm not entirely myself. I think it's because of the ridiculous lack of strategy behind this program. It epitomizes 90% of all the work out there right now, which continuously demonstrates "tactics in search of strategy" and an acute lack of understanding of the real power of conversational marketing.

I could go on for hours about the myriad of holes in this program. Here are a few examples:

• Exactly how many of Skittle's core target audience are actively on Twitter? Even if the attempt is just to reflect the buzz, it's a classic example of the Revenge of Second Life (there I said it)
• A company's digital presence or storefront is arguably more important and inarguably as important as their physical presence. Why on Earth would a brand cede this equity or asset to an emerging, unproven and unstable platform like Twitter or a more stable, yet decentralized environment like Facebook or Wikipedia? This is 100% cart before the horse
• What exactly is the message or idea behind this entire effort? It's not remotely clear what the intent or goal is? From a functional standpoint, the Wikipedia page is your boring "about us" tab, which is one of many tabs on a traditional website. From a form perspective, I still can't possible think of what the takeaway is....do you?

I do want to add that a lot of people have said, "why chastise them for being bold and innovative; taking a risk; experimenting" - indeed, a big part of my and crayon's message is about experimentation. That may be so, but there is a huge difference between experimenting with versus without any structure, cause, process or methodology. Case in point, would you casually experiment by playing with matches, gunpowder and a gas cylinder...I think not.

And so, although most mainstream media outlets have praised these efforts, I am not jumping up and down with the same excitement (an understatement) Perhaps they're all right and I am wrong. All I know is that brands need to be adopting new approaches, technologies, platforms and experimenting accordingly....but NOT at the expense of a smart, integrated and solid strategic foundation.

It's really that simple.

Just to be clear, I'll gladly share sales data and mea culpa if I'm wrong about this and there is success at the cash register. However, I think the end result is another demonstration that short term buzz or viral success is relative when a) it is fleeting and b) it is predominantly negative.

So final result? At best, a "split" in keeping with the Skittles analogy.

The Good News Express derails

According to a new ANA study, the current recession is hitting marketing much harder than was anticipated 6 months prior (when the study was first conducted in August of 2008). Here are the low lights:

• 93% of companies are identifying cost savings and reductions (compared to 87% 6 mo. ago)
• 37% of respondents are looking to cut budgets by more than 20% (compared to 21% 6 mo. ago)

Some of the top areas where marketers plan to reduce costs or expenditures in marketing and advertising efforts are:

• Dept T&E restrictions (87% vs 63% in the last survey)
• Reducing advertising campaign media budgets (77% vs 69% previously)
• Reducing advertising campaign production budgets (72% vs 63% 6 mo. ago)
• Challenging agencies to reduce internal expenses and/or identify cost reductions AKA layoffs (68% vs 63%)
• Eliminating or delaying new projects (58% vs 61%)

The findings are good for Cisco Telepresence, ooVoo and consumer generated content, but pretty much horrible for everyone else...with agencies at the top of the list, as well as talent, the airlines, Cannes and Cape Town. Experimentation is also at risk.

6 months ago, when advertisers were asked what they thought would happen to their budgets, 53% of marketers felt their budgets would be reduced. In fact, 71% experienced cuts. Implications? Marketers were a combination of delusional, optimistic, guarded and/or taken by surprise.

If there's a silver lining, perhaps it's that their answers in this round would be tempered by a counter measure of conservatism/prudence to even out the bravado from 6 months ago.

Perhaps not (49% feel their budgets will be cut 6 months from now vs 43% who preduct no movement and only 8% predicting increases)

Ugly. Ugly. Ugly.