FEBRUARY 4, 2010

Like many people, I’m following developments with Toyota very closely. This is a fascinating and incredibly important consumer/business crisis. From my experience in helping numerous corporations, universities, government agencies and non-profits work through complex crisis events, I would offer 3 thoughts on Toyota:

1. This story has a very long way to go. The facts are still being sorted out. Consumers are rightfully disturbed, but they haven’t made any final judgment on Toyota because they don’t yet know what to expect.

2. This re-levels the playing field in the US for all manufacturers. This proves once and for all that quality isn’t something one company or one country owns.

3. Toyota is just the latest shocking breach of faith for consumers. Going back to Enron and the Catholic Church, and more recently with Tiger Woods and Mark McGwire, we have grown used to disappointment.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Additionally, I was a guest on CNBC today along with Michelle Krebs, of Edmunds.com, to discuss whether Toyota can bounce back from its latest round of problems and who will be the winners if they can’t. Check out the clip below.

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JANUARY 29, 2010

Dan McGinn has made a science out of studying trends — not fads that disappear in a season, but deep-rooted cultural shifts that forever alter the way we look at the world. His passion for reading trends recently caught the attention of noted journalist Al Hunt, the executive editor for Washington for Bloomberg News.

Hunt, the former Wall Street Journal Washington Bureau chief and a long-time television commentator, described Dan as “a business consultant who thinks outside the box.” Dan is skilled at identifying “patterns and trends that give a sense of where we’ll be tomorrow and a decade or a generation from now,” Hunt wrote. “He has a penchant for understanding what these patterns and phenomena suggest.” The implications of such insights for every organization — businesses, foundations, universities, and others — are clear. As Hunt writes, “successful businesses over the last generation have been created or run by those who appreciate and understand the ever-changing nature of American society, customers and consumers.”

Dan knows that change is the byword of our times and that the businesses and institutions that anticipate the coming waves of social and cultural changes are the only ones that will continue to prosper and thrive.

Needing Weatherman to Know Way U.S. Wind Blows
By Albert Hunt

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OCTOBER 9, 2009

Here’s a look at what’s news-worthy in the social media space this week:

Today on YouTube’s official blog, CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley announced that the video sharing site serves well over a billion views a day. In his post, Chad takes a nostalgic look back at the three years since YouTube was acquired by Google.

Yesterday Twitter encountered a problem that caused many users’ timelines to be delayed. While nothing like early August’s denial of service meltdown, the event was certainly an inconvenience. For a few hours in the early afternoon, Twitter users were not able to see real time updates in their stream, but luckily search and the ability to update were functioning properly.

This week Chris Brogan hosted the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston. The conference featured some great speakers including Valeria Maltoni from Conversation Agent. Valeria says when people ask her what is the most effective form of marketing, her answer is valuable content. You can view her presentation here.

President Obama has been in the social media spotlight as of late. The announcement that the President had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize took 3 of Twitter’s 10 trending topics this morning. Twitter users are congratulating, expressing concern, and commenting on the news.

SNL’s infamous skit mocking the President’s accomplishments this past Saturday has also brought him to the forefront of social media this week. The video has been SNL’s first viral success of the year from online viewers on Hulu and NBC.com.

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OCTOBER 1, 2009

I have four kids at home. My life schedule after work is a blur of activities, logistics, dishes, homework and mediation of disputes that last all the way until the last kid is stymied once again after he thought he figured a way to stay up past his bedtime. On a weekly basis, it is a schedule truly worthy of a NASA super computer to figure out. So watch TV in prime time… are you kidding? No chance.

Yet, I’m from the TV Generation… we grew up with sitcoms, dramas and now reality shows. I was bred to watch TV and spent much of my adult life working in 24-hour TV news at CNN. I’m in the 24-54 demographic for Pete’s sake… I am TV’s best friend! But life has changed and so have our schedules and so has technology. I don’t know what is taking so long and why others don’t see this all coming together like I do. So, let me put it this way, I know what I want went it comes to watching television and it suddenly dawned on me the other day that soon I will get it.

It’s really quite simple: I want to watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it on whatever device that I choose. I want that device to be two-way, wireless, handy, with a killer screen, with charged and long lasting batteries where applicable and constantly capable of connecting to the news sites, entertainment sites, social networks, app stores, ebay and I’ll throw in Google Earth because, well, it’s cool. Is that too much to ask?

Yet I don’t have that today. Or don’t I? I already pay iTunes/NBC $1.99 for every episode of Law & Order, which I watch at my convenience on my iPod touch and rarely in prime time. I can also go to NBC.com and watch a missed episode there. I have the Verizon FIOS service at home, which brings a host of services into my house on one thin strand of glass. And that’s my point. It’s already one pipe to the service providers such as Verizon. It’s me and my way of looking at the world that divides that pipe into TV, phone and internet service.

You have heard of IED’s in Iraq… well how about IAD’s at home? Internet Assimilation Device - is there any question that in perhaps less than 5 years a TV will be little more than another outlet to display a connection to the internet and all the world it opens up? Honestly, it will be easier to find the programs I want to watch that way. Will anyone ever need a TV Guide again?

The truth is that very shortly there is likely to be little difference between the capabilities of the 3-inch iPhone screen, 6-inch Kindle screen, 10-inch Netbook screen and 75-inch home theatre screen. They will all draw content from the same locations and give me the same choices of information, entertainment and two-way interaction.

Anyone see it differently?

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SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

A colleague recently sent around a very interesting BusinessWeek piece about the efforts companies are making towards restoring public trust in their brands. It was, I thought, a great look at how McDonald’s, American Express, and Ford are tackling the core problem of distrust in an era when largesse, recklessness, and complacency among major corporations have led to a financial panic and recession.

While McDonald’s and Ford have primarily improved their public standing by actually improving their products, American Express’ story, I thought, was more interesting because its products aren’t exactly tangible. It, primarily, is in the business of moving money around - a valuable, essential service - but the extent of the average consumer’s interaction with AmEx involves swiping a card at the grocery store and paying up at the end of the month.  The same is true of all credit card companies, really.

So traditionally credit card issuers have competed at the margins. Credit cards are more or less functionally identical, so companies had to lure new customers by touting perks like the security of their cards (AmEx “Blue” cards),  the quality of their customer service (AmEx platinum cards), or the ubiquity of card-accepting merchants (Visa). AmEx even benefited from a false underground rumor of an exclusive “Black” card issued only to celebrities; in response to the rumors, the company actually started issuing a similiar “Centurion” card in 1999. Rewards like cash back and airline miles are other competitive battlegrounds for issuers.

But given the new austerity of the recession and the leeriness of consumers punch drunk from commodity bubbles,  financial panics and record unemployment, AmEx needed a new marketing tack. So it turned to the stalwart of American business mythology - the yeoman entrepreneur, repairing bikes and baking bread in once-vacant storefronts across the nation.

As someone with an entreprenurial bent, I love the ad. I really, really do. I’m incredibly inspired by stories like these, where an economically beleaguered place like Detroit, thanks to plummeting costs of living, attracts artists, entrepreneurs and other risk-takers to rebuild the city. My escapist fantasies usually revolve around moving to places like Baltimore or Cleveland and participating in their ongoing rebirth.

AmEx is right to run campaigns like these on two levels: first, as an emotional matter, I think most Americans are kind of like me - we envy the freedom and the boldness of entrepreneurs, and alignment with those virtues is never a bad thing. But on a more substantive level, the only surefire way to improve America’s moribund corporations is to enable small businesses to mount challenges to their dominance, and American Express’ fate is directly tied to the health of the broader corporate sector.

I would have liked to see more substance in the campaign, though. What concrete actions is the company taking to improve small business’ access to credit? Is it working with Chambers of Commerce in places hard-hit by the recession to offer business tips to would-be entrepreneurs? How else is it promoting OpenForum, its online resource for small businesses? Is it working with governments to remove barriers to business creation? You never find out.

So, big business - if you want my trust, don’t try to align yourself with my values, or sell me on your brand image. I want to know exactly how you can help and what you’ll do in the event you fail to help. Information that doesn’t accomplish one of those two things just isn’t particularly relevant.

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SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

These days, it can be hard to tell how old people are, just by looking at them. With grandmothers on Facebook, the current cupcake craze and my whole office reading young adult fiction, the cues - visual or cultural - that we used to use to tell people’s ages seem to be disappearing. Personally, I don’t think of myself as old… despite an upcoming milestone birthday (ugh), I think I’m young at heart. I tweet, I download music, I blog, I watch reality TV - I can’t be that old, right?

Nope. I’m old.

And this is how I know.

Yesterday, I sat in a staff meeting and looked around the room at my colleagues, who were sitting with their chairs in a large circle, facing in. And it hit me - there is finally a failsafe way to tell who’s old and who’s young. Without exception, everyone in the room over 30 was wearing a watch, and everyone under 30 was not. It was striking.

The wearing of a watch seems to be the one thing that separates the men from the boys, as it were. Clearly, those under 30 have learned to find other, less constraining ways to tell time. Perhaps they have had cell phones or PDAs by their side from such an early age that they just never got used to looking at their wrists to find out how long they had before class started, or before their curfews came and went - a concept that is totally foreign to me.

I was intrigued, so I thought I’d ask these Gen Yers to explain why they weren’t wearing a watch yesterday:

• “My cell phone is so much a part of me that my watch is optional. A watch is only an accessory.” (Kristen)
• “I don’t like having anything on my wrist. I use my cell phone to tell what me time it is.” (Gloria)
• “The only time I wear it is when I am working out, because it can tell me my heart rate, etc. There are so many other ways to look at the time that I don’t need to wear a watch.” (Michele)
• “I never have. My cell phone is always with me, and besides, I don’t like knowing that I am always late.” (Lisa)

I admit it - I haven’t gone a day without a watch (intentionally) since I was about 8 years old. I feel unmoored and lost without my watch. Yes, I may look at the clock at the corner of my laptop screen more often that I look at my watch, and I do glance at my blackberry throughout the day to find out what time it is. But for me, going without a watch is just simply not done. It’d be like leaving the house without my keys.

So there you have it - the dividing line between young and old. Which side of it are you on?

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SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

The National Football League has announced that they are limiting the use of social media and social networks throughout the season. These limitations will fall on “players, coaches, league officials, and even the media”, and are meant to prevent play-by-play reporting of the games. The NFL’s reasoning behind this new rule stems from their longstanding policy of requiring accounts of a game to be sufficiently time-delayed so that official, authorized accounts are given exclusive reporting rights. While this policy certainly has precedence in the NFL’s history, does it make sense in today’s environment, where information is treated as a stream of unfiltered live updates? As Brian Solis points out, at the very least, the NFL will inevitably run into enormous difficulties when trying to enforce these rules. Sometimes, simply updating an old policy may not be the best solution to a fundamental shift in the way audiences get updates and information. Instead, it’s likely that the NFL will be forced in the near future to reexamine its entire approach to reporting on games.

For more examples of organizations that have struggled with implementing Twitter policies, check out Mashable’s list of Twitter trends (look for #4).

Technorati has been floundering for a while now, having lost its leadership position in blog indexing and searching to Google. Recently, the site sent emails to a number of its bloggers announcing its next phase of evolution: creating original content. By getting bloggers to write original articles for the site, Technorati could position itself as a reputable blog with a comprehensive list of topics. However, this move does signal a major change in focus - one that seems to fully concede blog indexing and search functions to Google and others. It looks like Technorati has revamped its business model, but how will it pan out?

A report this month from web security company ScanSafe stated that there was a 20% increase in employers blocking their workers’ access to social networks, bringing the total to 76%. This means that social networks are blocked more often than categories like online shopping, weapons, alcohol, sports, and webmail. Additionally,  increases across the board lead ScanSafe to suggest that the economic climate has spurred employers to look for ways to promote productivity. Mashable writer Jennifer Van Grove also thinks it’s quite possible that with the rise of phishing and spam connected to social networks, companies are afraid of security breaches. Can social media and real-time interaction continue to grow in tandem with companies cracking down on social media usage during work hours?

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SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

I’ve been seeing some interesting examples lately of companies using Twitter to increase engagement with customers and make their products better. Here are two I really liked:

1. Kodak’s crowdsourcing.  Kodak has a pocket videocamera currently called the Zi8, which is similar to the Flip videocamera. Kodak wanted a new name for the camera, and apparently wasn’t happy with what it came up with internally. So, it turned to “the crowd” for ideas. The contest: submit a new name for the camera via Twitter or the company’s blog, and if your name is chosen, you get a trip to CES 2010 in Vegas to see the camera revealed. Another 100 people chosen at random from those that submitted entries will get free cameras too. I love this promotion - it got people thinking about the product, and judging from what I saw, inspired a lot of really creative entries. (I submitted 6 myself - Kodak, when do we find out who won?). I also have been enjoying tweets from Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak’s CMO, who allows his followers a fascinating glimpse into what he does all day long. I like hearing about his meetings, and guessing at the strategic directions Kodak is taking, as described briefly in 140 characters. 

2. Fox’s “Tweetpeats”. Tomorrow night, Fox is re-airing an episodes of one of its TV shows, “Glee”. “Glee” is a new show for Fox whose pilot aired once last spring and again last night.  The Friday airing will be a little different - it will feature cast tweets across the screen as the show airs.  The tweets will answer fan questions and offer behind-the-scenes commentary on the episode. I think this is brilliant - it gets viewers involved, it generates interest in a new show, and it adapts to the new multi-tasking reality of how we enjoy our entertainment these days.

I love seeing the creative ways companies are using Twitter to engage in conversation about their brands. Nice work, Fox and Kodak.

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SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

What if you could see a portrait of how the internet views you? What would this portrait look like, and how would the tnternet view you?

Leave it to the geniuses at MIT to figure it out. Personas is a project on display at the MIT Museum. It uses complex algorithms and other smart stuff to scour the web for websites, articles, and other tidbits about you. It then characterizes the data and spits it out as a bar graph sort of visual that serves as a “personal profile” of who you are on the net.

I first learned about it through my friend Liebchen and I decided to take it for a ride. It was fun to see the computations as the site scanned references to my name and produced a graph that lists “Committees, Legal, and Genealogy”as my biggest attributes. I wish I knew more about what the terms meant, but the whole deal was intriguing nonetheless.

Besides being a fun way to spend five minutes of your online time, MIT recognizes that projects like Personas take a step closer to mining and processing the vast amounts of information online: “It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.”

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AUGUST 31, 2009

Cross posted on Solutions for Power, the Network Solutions blog.

Last month, Dallas Lawrence, Vice President of Digital Media at Levick Strategic Communications, and I spoke on a panel for lawyers sponsored by Grow Smart Business.

Our topic that morning: “Social Networking for Law Firms 102,” and specifically how lawyers can help clients use social media in times of crisis to get their messages out proactively. The crowd was made up mostly of lawyers and law firm marketing professionals, and while we did talk about crisis communications, some of the discussion also centered around how law firms can use their own social media – websites, topic-specific blogs, and even Twitter accounts, to attract clients and manage their own reputations.

As Dallas recommended, using keywords and search engine optimization on each page of a law firm website can help generate business simply by including strategic descriptions of practice areas and attorney expertise. Dallas also recommends that law firm HR departments “friend” their attorneys, so that they can see how the firm is being represented on social networks. We talked about some of the key points to consider when advising clients how to use social media to protect their reputation in a crisis:

(1) have a social media presence and a crisis plan in place in advance of the crisis;

(2) be willing to respond, engage, apologize, reassure and explain, for as long as it takes;

(3) don’t forget to engage your employees, who can become brand messengers; and

(4) use all of the tools (social and traditional) at your disposal to amplify your message.

Here are some other points that were raised on our panel:

Generally, bloggers write about what they are passionate about.

Helping clients engage in dialogue with social media on topics of shared interest can be very rewarding for both parties.

There are many tools available to clients trying to monitor what’s being said about them online. Google Alerts, BackTweet, Tweetdeck, and Tweetbeep are examples of free social media monitoring tools that can help track client names and issues, and provide instant notification of relevant discussions. Social media is also an excellent way to research jury pools and community opinion on issues related to litigation. There is no one tool that provides a silver bullet for communication today – clients need to be engaged in traditional media as well as different kinds of social media in order to reach their intended audiences.

Many thanks to Steptoe & Johnson LLP for hosting the panel.

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