Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Sing, sing a song

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Pal Mary Schmidt tagged me in the "songs that lift your spirits" meme. The goal of meme originator, life coach Hilda Carroll, is a collective playlist.

Mary comments that it is hard to pick just one song because she has different soundtracks for different parts and times of her life.

Yup. How do I pick?

Bob Marley. Aretha. Nina Simone. Eric Clapton. Jimmy Cliff. Warren Zevon. Norah Jones. David Sanborn. Bonnie Raitt. Cream. Blood Sweat & Tears. Chicago. Monk. Billie.  And yes even The Who, Beatles and Stones.

I can get it down to three.

Pretty much everything by Crosby Stills & Nash, but most particularly Southern Cross.

For What It’s Worth, Buffalo Springfield

And for the sheer joy of it, Ella Fitzgerald’s Berlin version of Mack the Knife.

{spoken} thank you. we’d like to do something for you now.
We haven’t heard a girl sing it. and since it’s so popular,
We’d like to try and do it for you.
We hope we remember all the words.{}

Oh, the shark has pearly teeth, dear
And he shows them, pearly white
Just a jack knife has macheath, dear
And he keeps it out of sight

Oh, the shark bites with his teeth, dear
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves though, wears macheath dear
So there’s not, not a trace of red

On a sunday, sunday morning
Lies a body, oozin life
Someones sneaking round the corner
Tell me could it be, could it be, could it be
Mack the knife?

Oh, what’s the next chorus?
To this song, now
This is the one, now
I don’t know
But it was a swinging tune
And it’s a hit tune
So we tried to do mack the knife

Ah, louis miller
Oh, something about cash
Yeah, miller, he was spending that trash
And macheath dear, he spends like a sailor
Tell me, tell me, tell me
Could that boy do, something rash

Oh bobby darin, and louis armstrong
They made a record, oh but they did
And now ella, ella, and her fellas
Were making a wreck, what a wreck
Of mack the knife

{louis armstrong imitation}
Oh snookie taudry, bah bah bah nop do bo de do
Bah bah bah nop do bo de do
Just a jack knife has macheath, dear
And do bo bo bah bah bah nop do bo de do {}

So, you’ve heard it
Yes, we’ve swung it
And we tried to
Yes, we sung it

You won’t recognize it
It’s a surprise hit
This tune, called mack the knife

And so we leave you, in berlin town
Yes, we’ve swung old mack
We’ve swung old mack in town
For the darin fans,
And for the louis armstrong fans, too
We told you look out, look out, look out
Old macheaths back in town.

( lyrics found on LyricsFreak)

Before you ask, yes, I am aware that  my three songs are all from the 60s. I like contemporary music and just about every genre, except country music, but the songs I grew up with lift my spirits the most. 

I’m tagging Mom 101, Jeneane Sessum and Kent Newsome. Because I know they’ll tell us about interesting music with great posts.

Defining Social Media Success: The New Adventures of CBS

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In the comments to my post about defining social media success, David Wescott pointed out, correctly, that we don’t know whether a program like the CBS blogger outreach for the program The New Adventures of Old Christine is really a success unless we know what the objectives were. We can guess, but the measure of success is whether the outreach accomplished what CBS hoped.

So I decided to find out. Last week, I spoke with Beth Feldman, the CBS communications VP who spearheaded the effort. Thanks, Liz, for making the connection.

Beth is a mom blogger herself, and recently co-wrote a book Peeing In Peace: Tales & Tips for Type A Moms. As a result, she has gotten to know a number of other parenting bloggers. The New Adventures of Old Christine was about to get a new day and time, and she thought outreach to parent bloggers was a perfect fit.

The goal was quite simply to get the word out about the show.

"We treated the bloggers just as we would reporters," she says. "There was a press conference with the entire cast including star Julia Louis-Dreyfus and series creator and executive producer Kari Lizer. Each blogger got to ask a question of the cast and they also observed part of a rehearsal. Afterwards, the bloggers went out for coffee with the show publicists and a programming exec."

"For me, the coffee was one of the best parts of the whole day. As Liz told you, we didn’t fly anyone out for it, but some did fly out at their own expense because  they wanted to participate. Many of these bloggers had never had a chance to meet in person. Even though they knew each other through their blogs and email, this day gave them an opportunity to connect in person. It was great to be part of that."

Beth was quite clear. She says that this outreach was most definitely a success for CBS, and overall, a step in the right social media direction for the network. But she doesn’t feel she had to achieve "more" with this project.

"I’m a publicist. My goal was to reach out to bloggers just as we would entertainment reporters. We wanted them to have a fun positive experience, and hopefully write about the show and the visit. Which they did. If I were a development executive trying to make decisions about programming, my goals, and tactics, would have been different."

Ironically, Beth told me that usually CBS would provide a gift bag on a set visit. This time, Beth was too busy. The DVDs the moms received? CBS sent them a few episodes in advance so they’d be acquainted with the show. They’d do the same for a traditional reporter.

The network did create a custom package of video coverage of the visit for each blogger, with an intro and outro recorded by the blogger. Some of the bloggers used it on their sites. Others did not. Which was fine with Beth. They were going to film the visit anyway. It didn’t cost much to make the special DVDs for the moms. My opinion? What a nice and well targeted extra touch. You wouldn’t do this for a print reporter because they’d have no place to use it. And TV or radio would record their own stuff. But it’s perfect content for a blog: multimedia, exclusive to each blogger, featuring the blogger.

Beth also mentioned that CBS’s "narrowcast" outreach to the small group of mom bloggers was followed by a "broader" cast effort to reach the same core group. About a month after the set visit, and a bit closer to the actual change of time for the show, Lisa Stone of BlogHer hosted a live Webcast with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Kari Lizer that also was posted on CBS.com. They also fed an electronic press kit about the mom blogger set visit to CBS affiliates.

So, was the CBS blogger outreach for the New Adventures of Old Christine a success? The bloggers invited certainly thought, and said, so. Independent observers think so.  The network says so.

And since we are still talking about it months after the fact, I don’t think there’s any question. How often does a blurb in Entertainment Weekly or TV Guide show a similar lifespan?

I for one certainly plan on watching New Adventures, at least once, when it returns in mid-season next year. Unless it is on at the same time as Battlestar Galactica….

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Are you LinkedIn to my Facebook?

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Work is a little light this month so I’ve been taking advantage of the lull to explore the two major, public social networks — Facebook and LinkedIn. As always through the lens of discovering how a tool can be useful in business.

It’s not hard to find the business angle for LinkedIn.  Salespeople and job seekers have been using it since the beginning to expand their networks and connect with potential prospects and employers.  Especially in high tech.

Who do you want to meet? Do a search to find out if someone in your network knows the person you’d like to know. Not connected directly? You can use a LinkedIn introduction to get connected, although I haven’t done so yet. No one I want to meet that badly, I guess.

Pretty useful. Pretty established. In that specific niche. But it’s not terribly sticky. You log in, look and leave.

It’s a network, but it’s not a community. What’s the difference? My opinion only, YMMV. A social network connects individuals. A community interacts. We expect members of a community to have something in common, a reason to converse with others. Yup, the old C word again: Conversation.

You won’t have a community without one or more social networks to provide the connections, but a network is not necessarily a community.

But it seems LinkedIn would like to be a community. Otherwise, why would it have community evangelist Mario Sundar on staff? The question is, can it become a community? Should it?  What can be added to the experience that would make it one? Why not leave well enough alone and continue to do what it does so well for so many?

Well, the answer is of course, what if another service comes in and manages to do both — make connections and facilitate conversations? Something like oh uh, Facebook?

Facebook is fast becoming much much more than the Internet version of the college facebook. If that were all it was, I wouldn’t bother.

The open API makes all the difference. Third party developers are linking their tools into Facebook, so now I can have all the "stuff" in one place. Twitter. RSS. Flickr. Movie reviews. And not so much my stuff as my friends’ stuff.  Because it’s not just about connecting. It’s about sharing information. Where we are. What we are doing. What our friends are saying. That’s what makes it a community.   

The principal drawback of Facebook is that it is hard to find people. You need to know their email address or stumble upon them in a group or a friend’s friends. This security measure is a legacy of the product’s initial user base: college and high school students, and an important one. It’s one thing if an adult shares her personal information. Quite another if a 9th grader does so.

The Facebook platform helps people who already know each other stay connected. But it’s not the best place to make a new connection. For that, you probably still want to use LinkedIn.

What do I really want? Something that does both.  Loosely manage and access an extended network of contacts with space for playing and connecting with  friends. One UI, one log-in and one password please.

Quick take:  Based on what we can publicly see about the two companies and assuming they want to play in the sandbox, Facebook will have an easier time doing this than LinkedIn. It has first mover advantage with the open platform and a loyal user base among the people entering the workforce.

Plus, it is way more fun. As Beth Kanter twitted last week: Facebook is like crack. Internet crack. I’ve only been using it for a little while, but am fast becoming addicted. Last night, I messed around looking for other Getgoods. Just because, let’s face it, it’s not like looking for Smiths or Joneses. And discovered that I am the oldest Getgood currently on Facebook. By a longshot. A dubious distinction, but oh well. 

Speaking of Twitter…. I’ve started using it just to give a periodic status. Something I want to share, with my Twitter and Facebook friends and blog readers, but don’t plan to write about. A pointless WebEx. The puppies born last week. Etc. Perhaps if I were traveling more, I’d use it to talk with friends and colleagues. Like Josh Hallet did last night when he was stranded in DC.

What do you think? How are you using these new social media tools? Are you?

Bonus Question: What about MySpace? Is it still relevant as a community platform or is it becoming just a blogging platform with music?

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