You may already know that if tap water cost the same as bottled water on a per gallon basis, a bath would cost $192. And that it takes 1.5 million barrels of oil per year to produce the bottled water consumed in the United States. That’s like filling every one of those bottles ¼ full of oil.
But until I started helping CamelBak Products with blogger outreach for its Sustainable Hydration Project, I didn’t, even though my family tries to be environmentally responsible. And I’m pretty sure my family isn’t unusual. We know there is an environmental cost, so we take care to recycle our soda cans and water bottles, but most of us just aren’t aware how much that bottled water is costing us financially as well as environmentally.
Now, it isn’t always easy being green, but in the case of drinking water, at least in the US, it really is. Tap water in most places in this country tastes just fine. Otherwise companies couldn’t filter it a little bit, put it in a disposable bottle and sell it at a huge mark-up. To compound the crime, most of those disposable plastic bottles aren’t recycled. To the tune of 1.5 million tons of plastic waste per year. Bottled water just doesn’t make sense. Environmentally or financially.
What can we do to reduce the cost, for ourselves and for our planet? There’s one simple thing that almost every one of us can do without much difficulty.
Instead of expensive bottled water, switch to tap water. At home, on the road and in restaurants. My family has. We’re even bringing our reusable bottles with us on vacation. Still not going to be much use for airplane trips but just about everywhere else, we should be able to get clean, cool tap water.
And it will be even easier early next year when CamelBak installs hydration stations in more than 50 top outdoor and bike retailers where we’ll be able to refill our bottles for free.
Well, I can’t sing beautifully like my good friend Kami Huyse, who tagged me in the media snackers meme started by Jeremiah Owyang. Geoff Livingston already did the pet exploitation thing so I can’t leverage my dogs and cats, even though my puppy is REALLY cute.
While I’ve been known to invoke my child on this blog occasionally, and on my photo blog Snapshot Chronicles all the time, I can’t quite figure out an angle for him here, other than that he is pretty much a media snacker in the making.
Many others playing this lovely game have already talked about Twitter and Delicious media snacks, and while they are yummy, I won’t serve them again here. One needs variety.
And that’s the first way this blog feeds the media snacker. Variety. I have a wide variety of interests, and I mention them all here. Always with a marketing and communications angle. So, one day you’ll find a post about SciFi Channel, with a heavy dose of Battlestar Galactica. And the next day, a gender rant. Followed by something completely different. Like politics and the presidential election. Stick around, you’ll find all sorts of different snacks.
I regularly do round-up posts of different, usually unrelated things that interest me, most recently a post called Thirteen to One in honor of the Red Sox win in the first World Series game. Some items are almost "mini-posts," other items just one line. Easy to scan, not hard to follow. Snack food.
Sometimes I write long. When I do, I put a long post warning at the top. If the topic greatly interests you, you’ll sit down, set for a while. If it doesn’t, you won’t get sucked in and then pissed because the post goes on and on and on and on…..
Sometimes I’m funny. They say. You be the judge. Not as funny as some of my esteemed colleagues who are about to get tagged, but hey, I still have my pride.
And finally, even though I respect the right of someone to "read and run," I do hope they stick around for a while, once in a while. Pull up a chair at the table and read some of my longer posts. Comment on them. Challenge my arguments. Nothing pleases me more than comments on this blog, and particularly those from students and young professionals who, although they may be the "snacking generation," are clearly taking the time to dig in and learn. And in the process, they become part of our education.
And that is the most delicious snack of all. We are all teachers. We are all learners. YUM!
In honor of last night’s stupendous Red Sox performance in game one of the World Series, here are 13 things that I’ve been meaning to write about. Mostly social media and marketing related and in no particular order.
1. A new social network The Point attempts to harness the power of collective action to bring causes to the tipping point. People and organizations post their causes on the site as an if/then. The basic idea is that if enough people do whatever the action is – if the cause tips, then some other thing would happen. Once it emerges from alpha, it could be an interesting vehicle for a company that is supporting a charitable cause. If enough individuals/customers do something (volunteer, quit smoking, whatever) then the company would do something as well — donate money, sponsor an event, and so on. From Jeremy Pepper, who works for the company, via Twitter.
2. Last week Doug Haslam from Topaz Partners emailed me about a social media survey done by his client, community builder Prospero Technologies. What was most interesting about it, though, wasn’t the survey. The sample size of 50 from a population of the company’s customers is neither large nor random, and the results were pretty much what I’d expect given that population: generally positive about social media with no clear idea of what is working and what isn’t. I do however give the company credit for actually asking its customers, rather than assuming. What was most interesting was that Doug was pitching other marketing and communications bloggers; both Shel Holtz and BL Ochman wrote about the survey. If you wanted more tangible proof that the media landscape is shifting, this is it. We aren’t just the media relations folks. With a nod to Dan Gillmor, we are the media. Ain’t that a kick. Doug also blogged about this phenomenon.
4. Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules by Mike Moran. Not much news here for anyone already deep into social media marketing and communications, but a good read anyway. I’d recommend this as an intro text for experienced marketers who want to come up to speed quickly and get some practical advice on what they should do next. Plus Moran is funny and he says lots of things I agree with :-) (via pitch from Peter Himler)
9. I’ve been playing around a bit with Photrade, a new photo sharing site. It’s now in closed beta but I have three invites. Email or twitter me if you want one.
10. Courtesy of Scott Baradell, a great example of why we should NOT write blog posts simply for search engine optimization.
12. Thank you to all the PR and marcom students who have been reading the blog and leaving comments. I love to hear from you, even if I disagree with you.
13. Are the comment spammers getting a little more clever? Check out this one on an old Marketing Roadmaps post, comment left up purely to use as an example. Someone less suspicious might not catch it as spam, as the comment is pretty innocuous. BUT: I almost always follow commenters back to their sites. It’s a great way to discover new bloggers and get to know my readers better. AND: I am always a little suspicious when I get comments on really old posts.
Saturday morning, before I went into town to see Wicked, I had a little twitter-chat with Steven Streight "Vaspers the Grate" (quotation marks not superfluous) about blogging versus microblogging using Twitter, Jaiku et al.
Personally, I seem to be back in a "twitting" mode after a few months of just occasionally checking in. That, combined with the interchange with Vaspers got me thinking, again, about how blogging and microblogging fit in the total social media scheme, and especially how they both relate (or not) to marketing communications.
Here’s the back and forth over about a half hour before I had to leave for the play:
vaspers - Marketing experts *have* to be on Twitter. Fear of fast messaging and loss of narcissistic platform (slomo blogs) are two major impediments. vaspers - "slomo blogs" = conventional blogs, where new posts take a whole day to appear, and comments accumulate less than every few seconds. LOL sgetgood @vaspers but there is place for both slomo and microblog, it’s not either/or vaspers @sgetgood - Correct, but for a marketing expert to shun Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, YouTube seems rather drearily Luddite and egotistic to me. sgetgood @vaspers agree that is dumb to ignore twitter et al off to read about target vaspers @sgetgood - I stick to my claim that slowmo bloggers hate the anonymity, loss of ego, loss of message control that microblogging represents vaspers @sgetgood - I’m not trying to be mean-spirited to non-microblogging bloggers, just wondering why they resist the evolution of blogging sgetgood @vaspers fear, control issues, attention disorders, difficulty following threads, not good at sensemaking
I agree with him 100% that to ignore the microblogging platforms, and particularly Twitter where so much of the microblogging conversation happens, is extremely shortsighted for any marketer, particularly marketers in the tech space. The conversation that happens there is just as — if not more — important than the conversation that happens on our blogs, in email and through social networks like Facebook. And the reason some balk is most likely fear of losing message control. Just think about how PR pros stress about each and every word in a PR message. Those same messages that may be becoming the biggest anachronism in marketing communications today.
It’s also hard sometimes to follow the disconnected conversation on Twitter. Nevertheless, that, in my personal opinion, is where the real power of the Twitter network is, and I’ll get to that in a moment.
Microblogging doesn’t replace blogging. Sometimes 140-characters won’t do, and we need the longer format. I know very few bloggers who have completely abandoned their long format blog to just converse on Twitter. Blogs and microblogs have different roles.
The microblog. Twitter. Sure, it’s where you can find out who is free for lunch and literally twitter on about nothing. But it is also fast and close to real-time. Not unlike the old news ticker. In fact, it is where news happens. Follow the thread and you can learn and influence the conversation much more rapidly than ever before.
The blog. The blog is for analysis. It’s where, yes, as long as a day later, a blogger can sit down and put the perspective on the news and comments issued in rapid-fire bursts on Twitter. And it’s where bloggers, and ultimately, reporters will write the longer stories about the things they read in Twitter. Like this post from BL Ochman about Spirit Airlines’ customer service problems, which she initially read about "via Twitter from Mack Collier."
But the thing I find most fascinating about Twitter is the discovery. Each user only sees the messages from the people he is following. When someone you know replies to someone you do not, you only see half the message. And that is the opportunity for discovery. If it interests you, you can follow the trail back, check out the Twitter profile of the unknown person (assuming it is a public profile) and perhaps make a new acquaintance. That is how social networks grow in interesting and unexpected ways.
And the real reason I think marketers who ignore the microblogging tools are missing out.
Over at Communication Overtones, Kami Huyse has proposed a "drip theory" for social media adoption. No, not that we are all drips, thank you very much. Her thesis is that social media is adopted slowly, by presenting it to clients/bosses in easily digested bits or drips :
"By adding in a few social media tactics at a time, they start to get the power of the medium and they tend to add a second, then a third element. Soon, they are converts."
She concludes:
"Progress is achieved by the relentless drip of water weakening the established structure. When the dam finally gives way it looks like a revolution, but it really happened just one drip at a time."
A spirited discussion ensued in her comments, and I urge you to check it out.
Even before her post, I was thinking quite a bit about how companies and agencies adopt, or not, social media strategies. And the conclusion I keep coming to is that the traditional lines between the disciplines of public relations and marketing are blurring. Perhaps into a new discipline, but definitely into a new set of requirements.
Here’s how it goes. A long time ago, when the earth was green….
Well maybe not that long ago.
It used to be clear. We had public relations and we had marketing. PR reached out to the press, which acted as intermediaries between companies and their customers. There was a process, and everybody understood the rules of the game. It was all about news.
Marketing, on the other hand, developed programs and campaigns to communicate directly to customers. There was a process and everyone understood the rules. It was all about mutual benefit, mutual value.
Each side had its place, and rarely the twain did meet.
But it isn’t that clear anymore.
When we talk to a blogger, we are talking to both an influencer and a customer. We need to bring both the marketing and the PR mindset, and skill set, into the conversation.
And that makes it hard. Because the traditional PR agency trains and reinforces the skill set necessary to reach out to intermediaries, reporters. Talking to customers? Not the strong suit.
And though marketers are often not much better, talking to the customer is a slightly more natural state for them, so it may be easier to make the transition. Once they stop calling them "consumers" that is.
The fact of the matter is that the lines between the two disciplines are blurring as a direct result of social media. You have to bring both sensibilities to the table. That means understanding that bloggers are influencers, often with as much, if not more, power than the mainstream media. It also means talking to them with enthusiasm, commitment, and caring — just the way you would a valued customer. They don’t need, or want, the studious detachment you practice when talking to reporters. They also don’t want press releases with no cover note (pet peeve).
Learn how to meld the two skill sets when you reach out. It truly is adapt or die.
The Unicorn Song words and music Shel Silverstein, performed by the Irish Rovers
A long time ago, when the Earth was green There was more kinds of animals than you’ve ever seen They’d run around free while the Earth was being born And the loveliest of all was the unicorn
There was green alligators and long-necked geese Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you’re born The loveliest of all was the unicorn
The Lord seen some sinning and it gave Him pain And He says, "Stand back, I’m going to make it rain" He says, "Hey Noah, I’ll tell you what to do Build me a floating zoo, and take some of those…
Green alligators and long-necked geese Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you’re born Don’t you forget My unicorns
Old Noah was there to answer the call He finished up making the ark just as the rain started to fall He marched the animals two by two And he called out as they came through Hey Lord,
I’ve got green alligators and long-necked geese Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees Some cats and rats and elephants, but Lord, I’m so forlorn I just can’t find no unicorns
And Noah looked out through the driving rain Them unicorns were hiding, playing silly games Kicking and splashing while the rain was falling Oh, them silly unicorns
There was green alligators and long-necked geese Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees Noah cried, "Close the door because the rain is falling And we just can’t wait for no unicorns
The ark started moving, it drifted with the tide The unicorns looked up from the rocks and they cried And the waters came down and sort of floated them away That’s why you never see unicorns to this very day
You’ll see green alligators and long-necked geese Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you’re born You’re never gonna see no unicorns
If you really want to "get" this social media "stuff," you have to have it. Not just understand it. You truly have to believe.
And that’s why it is so hard for so many. Because education, corporate America, keeping up with the Joneses. Whatever. Often destroys our ability to believe. And our passion.
In a post today about blogger relations, David Wescott reiterated three principles that I firmly believe in. Blogger relations is all about Respect, Relationships and Relevance. He also mentioned passion, and some of the things I’ve written about it here (thanks David).
In brief, if your product or service doesn’t mesh with something a blogger is passionate about, don’t send the pitch. Really. Not to belabor the point, but that’s why pitches to moms about cleaning products fall flat.
Reality check: the paid actresses on TV commercials are NOT real. Moms are not passionate about cleaning the house, laundry or how fresh the bathroom smells. It’s not that we don’t care. But passion. For Mr. Clean? For Mr. Brawny? No.
Not too long ago, a marketing blogger friend told me about a whole new class of blogs springing up that are optimized for keywords. Companies building blogs for SEO. No other reason.
Blecch. That’s as bad as press releases about crap I don’t care about with no cover note.
And it is also doomed to failure. Because keywords don’t have passion.
People do.
And if you haven’t already figured this out, let me be the first to tell you. It isn’t HTML or RSS or OPML or JAVA or AJAX or any of the myriad other tech acronyms we can throw in the soup that make all this social media work. And I mean really work. Sure, they provide the technology that lets us have these communications.
I promise, I do have some actual marketing content in this post, but before I get back to the Roadmap, I’ve got one more comment "for the road" about the absurdity that is our national presidential elections.
You may recall my comments in earlier posts about how the media always seems to pay inordinate attention to the appearance and demeanor of female candidates — hair, make-up, nature of their laugh. You know, the really important stuff that tells voters whether a candidate is qualified for elected office. You know, more important than the issues facing our country like the war, health care and the economy.
Well, I must extend kudos to USA Today and reporter Maria Puente for an interesting story on the front of the LIFE section this morning about how style is "an issue for ‘08". The story presented a pretty balanced view of the media’s obsession with the candidates’ (and especially Hillary’s) looks.
But the best was the sidebar on page 2 of the section that dissected what all the presidential candidates are wearing. Absolutely priceless. Absolutely perfect. Here are just some of the gems:
John Edwards
[...] Earlier this year, Edwards was captured on camera fussing over his hair. Then there were jeers when it came out that he spent $400, twice, on haircuts. But Edwards laughed off the criticism, spoofing the kerfuffle with his own video (featuring Hair from the Broadway musical).
Rudy Giuliani
The former New York mayor gets applause for finally giving up on the comb-over and accepting the realities of male-pattern balding. Now if only he could spiff up those oversized, un-stylish suits he sometimes wears.[...]
John McCain
[...] Then it was reported on Radar Online.com that he was miffed at his staff for dressing him like a metrosexual in a "gay" V-neck sweater over a T-shirt. McCain’s campaign did not return calls seeking comment, then or now.
Mitt Romney
[...] Romney criticized Edwards on the haircuts, but then it came out that he had spent $300 on a makeup job before a debate. [...]
Go read it.
Now back to the roadmap. You remember, the Marketing Roadmap
The media landscape is shifting. Right in front of our very eyes. Customers are increasingly taking control of their own brand experiences. Generating the content, deciding what is important. Targeting by behavior is more effective than demographics. It’s not just about viral, it’s about spreading the right message for the right result.
Now, if you’ve been active in social media marketing for the past few years, none of the above is news to you. At all. You already know that the traditional lines between PR and marketing are blurring. We aren’t talking in isolation to influencers (the media) and customers. Intermediation is no longer the name of the game. We can, and must, talk directly with our customer, who is simultaneously both influencer and buyer. Forget about messages. We have to connect with people. Honestly. Authentically. No bullshit.
If you’ve been doing this for a while, you understand how important this new communication is to our brands, our companies, our survival. You’ve sucked that social media kool-aid right down. You get it.
But it can be hard for people to put their heads and arms around when faced with it for the first time. And there’s no real way to cut the learning curve down. You just have to jump in.
Now, I am always suspicious of business experts who don’t actually do what they write about, so I viewed Larry Weber’s new book, Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business, with a bit of a jaundiced eye. Sure, he has the PR background but I’m not sure he even has a blog… How much could he really know about marketing to the social web without doing it? Without being in it?
Well, I can’t answer that question, but I just read an excerpt from his new book in BrandWeek, and while I’m not sure I’d get much new information from the book, I was pleased with the 12 steps he outlined for companies to follow toward an interactive future.
Which makes me think his book might be a good intro for brand marketers and PR execs. Budget is tight right now, so I don’t plan to buy the book, but I’d love to hear from my readers if it is any good. And of course, Larry Weber, John Wiley & Sons, if you send me a review copy, I will read it.
Books are pretty much the only things I do review here.
First, to express my delight that Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No hanging chads in Norway I guess.
And to share with you what has got to be the most absurd moment in the media’s coverage of the presidential campaign to date. As you may remember from my Sexual Politics post last week, I am continually dismayed by the amount of attention paid to female candidates’ looks. Well, CBS has taken it one step further and actually had the nerve? stupidity? to comment on Hillary Clinton’s laugh. And actually not her laugh, but more specifically, the absence of her "cackle" during a recent MSNBC interview.
I was particularly fond of the way CBS tried to distance itself from its own report. The senator’s laugh, the report said, is "overly analyzed." Apparently, it’s so excessive that CBS finds it necessary to note its absence.
In related news, Rudy Giuliani delivered a speech yesterday in which he didn’t answer his cell phone; Mitt Romney answered questions without abandoning a position he held five minutes prior; John McCain hosted a town-hall forum in which he did not refer to anyone as a "little jerk"; and Fred Thompson went the whole day without responding to a reporter’s question with, "I don’t know anything about that."
And just think, the election is still more than a year away. How much weirder is it going to get?
This week, events in two blog circles in which I travel drew the trolls out from under their bridges: the League of Maternal Justice’s BreastFest and the "retirement" of a PR blog character whose public face was attractive but who was best known for its ill-spirited, trollish attacks on other bloggers.
When a topic is controversial, even if only mildly so, the trolls are inevitable. What do you do when they show up in your place or in your face?
The safest and sanest approach is to ignore them.
That’s why I don’t feed the trolls. Sure, I’ve had them here from time to time, but lack of sustenance leads them to go elsewhere for their jollies. I don’t respond here, and if they attack in the comments on other blogs or Web sites, I ignore them there. It’s hard, especially when they get personal, as they always do. But the child’s nursery rhyme is true: sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.
Dealing with the trolls was particularly hard for some of the women actively engaged in the breastfeeding debate. The act and the decision itself are so highly personal, and it didn’t take long for the trolls to get offensive. But remember: the troll is the one with the problem. Not you.
If a troll or two turns up here as a result of this post, I’ll ignore them. But unless a comment is obscene or libelous, I won’t delete it. I stand by my words. Let them stand by theirs.
Some folks take a different approach. They bait the troll, on the theory that a troll’s arguments are so ridiculous, the troll will end up proving the initial point it is attacking. This can be successful, but you have to have a really strong stomach. Because a troll is not rational. No matter how logical your argument, it will never penetrate the troll’s generally thick skull. You will never convince him. Or her.
But maybe, just maybe, proponents of this approach argue, if you can stay the course, the weird non-logic, personal attacks and ramblings of the troll, as compared to your logical, reasoned arguments, will convert a few folks on the fence. And of course, initially there is an adrenaline rush from building your argument to beat the troll.
The rush doesn’t last, the troll will get ugly, and the chances of changing anyone’s mind this way are pretty slim. So, think hard before troll-baiting. Because it is going to hurt.
As for the late, not lamented blog character, Robert French’s "eulogy" for the not-so-dearly departed says it best.
GO RED SOX!!!!
