I have previously written about selling social media to a company, but that’s only the first step. There is more to be done after completing the initial sale than there was before the sale.

We who do social media full-time forget what a culture change it is for most organizations. Not just for those people in the C-Suite, but for everyone down to, and including, the receptionist. Remember, up until to about six years ago, most employees didn’t have to worry about social media or marketing their company in any way.

“Too often, people from company “A” will recognize great success that company “B” is having by doing XYZ with social media,” Blogger Adam Christensen wrote. “So, logically, they decide to do the same at company A. But the results are dramatically different. Why? Because they didn’t account for the corporate culture variable which is inevitably different between the two companies.”

Christensen is currently the director of social and digital communications and marketing at Juniper Networks in San Francisco. Until April, he worked for IBM in communications and marketing where he led IBM’s social business strategy and execution globally. He worked on projects including IBM’s Watson and Smarter Planet.

So first, what is corporate culture and how’s it formed?

Well, corporate culture is essentially an internal brand. It doesn’t exist until the majority of people at the company buy into it. The company’s leadership and employees who have the same values and assumptions about their place of work create it. Although it can awhile for a company to form a culture, once formed it can be difficult to change.

Why? Because it provides a sense of belonging and safety to the people who work there. Remember, in every company there are the written and the unwritten rules. The unwritten rules are that which forms the culture. By following both sets, especially the unwritten one, an employee can generally minimize surprises and things out of the ordinary.

The problem is that same culture can keep a company from taking the calculated risks they need to stay viable. Consider the bookseller Borders or the video rental company Blockbuster. While I don’t know the ins and outs of what happened to each, I know from being a customer of each that their cultures were wedded to a way of doing business that was clearly no longer viable.

Those examples are not going to stop other companies from making the same mistakes. Staying in one place is usually the normal human state.

So along comes someone like myself telling the leaders and employees they need to adopt social media if they want to remain in business. Yes, they know about Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and the other social media sites. They might even say they want to do it. But it still means a huge culture change.

So what do you do? Well, first it takes an intensive education program. You need to show everyone how social media works and what it can do for the company. You need to show each employee how they fit into the plan.

You also need to get their input. You need to find out what they are comfortable with and what they are willing to start with. As I always say, you have to crawl before you can walk.

Once you and the leadership feels that employees are ready to dip into social media, start out internally. Set up internal blogs, an employee Wiki and other applications. Let as many employees as possible play, learn, grow, build relationships, and develop the needed collective awareness. Once the employees are comfortable with it, take it public. It will work then.

The sites are supposed to help people keep track of their friends and what they are doing. For businesses, the idea is that if you or I see a number of our friends going to eat at a particular restaurant or watching the same movie, we will be inspired to do the same. That is supposed to increase the business’ sales.

It doesn’t appear to me that people are using those sites as their creators’ intended. Two things seem to be happening.

The first is that people are not just sharing a new restaurant or a good movie. No, they are listing everywhere they go and everything they do. Some of the things I have been notified about are that people are going for run, stopping to buy gas, grocery shopping, going to their office, and a myriad of other things. I can literally track some people through their entire day.

The only thing I haven’t yet seen – and I assume this will happen sooner or later – is someone will notify the world they have stopped to use the restroom.

The second thing that seems to be happening is many users seem to be dropping out of the services after they use them for a time. I suspect that people out on a Saturday night just forget to notify everyone where they are and what they are doing. I have noticed that some people used to notify of every step they took (my apologies to Sting) seem to have disappeared.

What is happening to these sites illustrates one of the pitfalls of social media. Some people seem not to have any kind of brake on their postings. They tell the world everything they are doing. I am not a psychiatrist so I cannot give you a professional analysis of why they do that.

However, it does seem to me to be a trifle narcissistic to constantly announce what you are doing and where you are doing it. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I really don’t care if you are at the gas station.

This is causing what I believe is another detrimental effect. I get so many notifications from people that they clog up my inbox. I tend to delete them because of that. I just don’t have time to go through all of them.

That means that if by chance someone does go to restaurant or movie in which I am interested, I am not likely to see it. That’s not good if you own a business. It means your message is getting buried.

Yes, I know that social media marketing calls for businesses to cede control of their brand to consumers. However, if I were a business owner, I would not cede my brand to a bunch of people who spend their time clogging up others’ in-boxes. That would seem to be counterproductive.

That’s just one more reason social media marketing has to be carefully targeted toward and audience and a goal. It should be used as a scalpel, not a meat ax.

Besides, isn’t it just a bunch of tweens, teens and 20-somethings who use those sites? I often hear from executives that my daughter and her friends use Facebook all of the time. My son seems to be constantly playing games online with his friends. Does anyone seriously think I can sell my industrial widgets to that demographic?

After they say that, they are going to lean back into their chair. You had better be able to make that sales pitch.

The first thing you should do is explain pull marketing. In brief, Pull marketing is not about pulling consumers in; it’s about giving consumers a reason to opt into a company. Consumers are in control; they decide where they go and what they experience.

Pull marketing means that companies go to clients, join their communities, give them reasons to voluntarily draw the company into their personal media experiences. They’re opting into the companies, not the other way around. Companies are being forced to give up some control over their brands.

That’s a hard concept of many companies to swallow. For decades, marketers have had it their way. This idea of giving up control makes the leadership nervous. Remember, most leaders are numbers people – accountants, engineers, and the like. They think they can control all the variables that go into selling their product.

Frankly, that’s nonsense. Marketing is an unpredictable thing. Anyone who says differently is naïve, lying, or has their head stuck in the sand. The best that can be hoped for is to reduce the chances of something going wrong.

Social media provides a better chance of that.

Why? Because normally the whole marketing campaign is created at an agency where six 20-something creatives couple their work with a 30-something senior account director, who in turn reports to a 40-something vice-president, who then takes the concept to the client’s 50-something chief marketing officer, who approves it. Throw in a focus group or two, and maybe two dozen people have signed off on the idea. It is then fired like an artillery shell into the general public with the idea that it will hit its target. The hope is the “explosion” will be big enough to sell the product.

Consumers these days, in general, are smart enough to get out of the way. That’s why more and more traditional campaigns fail.

So what needs to be done is to show the company’s leaders the facts on traditional campaign failures. The numbers are out there. I see no reason to repeat them here.

As I said, most CEOs are numbers people. They want everything the company invests time and money in to be quantifiable. That can also be done with social media. Again the numbers are there. I would suggest going to Hubspot – the Cambridge, Mass.-based social media wizards. They have all the facts and figures you need.

Be prepared to gently push back. There will be skeptics. A lot of old line-marketing people feel threatened by social media. As I said, to them it something “those kids” use. Well, I am older than most of the marketers and I think social media is the way to go.

Remember, social media is here to stay. Be gentle, be patient, but be firm when selling it.

Facebook has more users, YouTube has more viewers, Twitter updates more often but LinkedIn is where the people and companies you want to reach reside. As I tell clients, LinkedIn is the adult Facebook.

“ … what businesspeople appreciate and respect about LinkedIn is that is has significant processes and controls that keep it from becoming like Facebook,” writes LinkedIn expert Wayne Breitbarth in his book The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success. Kick-start Your Business, Brand and Job Search.

I highly recommend Breitbarth’s book. I have over 13,000 followers on LinkedIn. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the site. After reading the book, I realized that I knew just enough to be dangerous. Thanks to Breitbarth’s book, I am a much more savvy LinkedIn user.

So the first question is why used LinkedIn? I will let Breitbarth explain. He explains it through what he calls the Power Formula: “Your Unique Experience + Your Unique Relationships + The Tool (in this case, LinkedIn) = The Power.

What he means is that combining LinkedIn with your existing relationships and experiences will give you a decided advantage over your competitors. By using LinkedIn you can develop and refine your brand by a creating strong LinkedIn profile and expanding your network of contacts. Doing those things will help you accomplish your goals for yourself and your company.

LinkedIn is the place to show your experience and your expertise. It is the place where those you respect can state that in an endorsement. It is where you can connect with potential clients and employees. It is pretty much the Swiss army knife of social media sites.

Now there are many ways to use LinkedIn. But use it you must. You cannot simply sign up for it and expect the masses to find you.

The first you have to do is set up as complete a profile as possible. Breitbarth calls the top part where you list your name, title, business and location the “30-second bumper sticker.” The information listed there travels around LinkedIn with you as you post information, join groups, and comment on other’s activities. As Breitbarth points out this is the more important section of LinkedIn. He has found that many people will look no further than that box. Let me add that when I search for somebody, that’s the first thing that comes up on Google.

I also, and Breitbarth agrees, strongly advocate putting a professional looking photo there. To me not including a photo means you are hiding something. I know the argument that many of my fellow boomers make – that people are going to know how old they are if they post that picture. Well you know what, they are going to find anyway. If someone contacts you through LinkedIn for a job interview, what are going to do – have plastic surgery to make yourself look 26-years-old? So just deal with it.

After that, the key to profile to your profile is being as detailed as possible. The last study I read found that 85 percent of human resources people to go LinkedIn first when looking for a job candidate. You want to give them as many reasons as possible to pick you.

The next key is endorsements. This shows what others think of your work. People have been kind enough to endorse my work. It shows potential clients or customers that you are someone with whom they should do business.

Now, I have a firm rule on endorsements. I will not endorse anyone who I have not worked with. It is simply dishonest. How can one provide an objective analysis of work you have never seen. Likewise, I will not ask for endorsement from someone I don’t know.

Now, I have been lucky in that most of my endorsements are unsolicited. I think those are those are the most objective. On the other hand, I can understand asking for them from people who know your work well. I have also done that.

One more thing – LinkedIn groups. I highly recommend joining as many as LinkedIn will allow. That is currently 50. Those are the place to meet like-minded people, share information, get questions answered, and again demonstrate your expertise.

I don’t think there is any social media site that is as complete at LinkedIn. In fact, if you are going to join only one site, make it LinkedIn.

Granted, it would be better if those residents of the C-Suite had a guide who knew how to lead them throw the social media jungle. Obviously I think social media is the best marketing tool to come along since traveling medicine shows. Both relied on word-of-mouth to sell their products. One was and one is highly effective.

While those executives should do a better job of searching, I also fault we social media marketers. We are part of the problem. We need to make a better case for what we do. We need to show the skeptical executives that the social media sphere is the best place to be. These are people who are used to “fire and forget” marketing. In their world they tell their marketing people to hire an agency and produce a campaign. The only time an executive sees the campaign is in the final approval process. You have to show them how social media is replacing all of that.

What those executives want is a demonstrated method that is going to drive sales and profits. They want to know what the return-on-investment for the money, time and effort they are going to have to put into social media. They don’t feel any need to tell their friends where they are eating or whether they are leading in some kind of faux friend race.

So what do you do to convince them there they should be parking some of their marketing dollars in social media?

First, let me tell you what I don’t do first. I never show anyone Facebook as a marketing tool in the first meeting. To the average 50ish executive, Facebook is where their children post pictures of their dogs and friends. Plus, they have had their personal people tell them a seemingly good job candidate was rejected because of those pictures from that fraternity party. At best they see no need for Facebook, at worst they see it has a huge waste of time. As I once had an executive tell me: “there is a reason why I do not want to connect with people I knew in high school.”

What I do show them are the facts and figures showing how effective certain kinds of social meeting marketing can be. I also show them examples of companies such as Ford, Zappos, and others that used social media to expand their footprint in their marketplace.

When it comes to specific sites, I usually start off talking about what Linkedin can do for their company. Why Linkedin? Well in the business world it is viewed as the adult Facebook. Most likely the executives you are talking to have a Linkedin profile. They understand how it works and its effectiveness. They know their company has found good candidates for open positions.

In short, they understand how effective Linkedin can be when used properly. It is an easier sell. Not easy, but easier.

The second thing I talk about is blogging. It is a little tougher to sell than Linkedin. Executives usually balk at first when I tell a blog is not a sales document. But when I show how potential clients are drawn to the company’s website by a well-written blog that demonstrates the company’s expertise, the light bulb usually goes on.

From there I move onto YouTube. Watching a video campaign – such as “Will It Blend” shows the effectiveness of using sites such as YouTube. After that comes Twitter, which I describe as a billboard for their company. It is a term they understand.

I also make it clear that it usually takes six months to a year to see the results of a social media campaign. By then, having seen the results of successful campaigns, they get it and are willing to make the investment.

What I just gave you was view from 35,000 feet of my process. Trust me works, but only if you are careful to separate the substantive from the nonsense.

The key to marketing is twofold: to build word of mouth about your company and to increase your Google rankings. A blog is the best way to do both.

People who read and like your blog will tell others about it. They will retweet it, post it on Facebook, and generally spread the word. This builds credibility for your company. It builds Google rankings because the more people who read your blog, the higher Google will rank your company.

Look at the chart below from Cambridge, Mass. – based HubSpot. Note that companies that blog receive an average of 55 percent more visitors to their websites. But I am not going to bore you with a lot of data. Instead, I am going to tell how I do it.

Now granted I was a reporter from 26 years. I am used to writing on deadline. I know the rules of grammar. But as anyone who is a consistent reader knows I am not perfect. I strive for it, but I rarely reach it. You don’t have to be a great writer to be a blogger.

So here are my keys to blogging:

• First, lets talk about what a blog is not. It is not a sales tool. You try to sell something through a blog and you will have no readers. The social media sphere hates blatant attempts to sell.
• What a blog is a way to demonstrate yours or your company’s expertise in a particular area. It is also a way for current and potential clients and customers to connect with your company. It is a place for them to comment, compliment, debate, and criticize. It is a place for you to respond to all of that.
• Choose an overall theme. This blog focuses on social media, marketing and public relations. My readers know they come to PR 101 to read about those topics. This is important. Every successful blog I have read focuses on a particular area. Readers want to know what to expect when they come to the blog.
• Coming up with things to write about – this is often the toughest thing. It is what usually stops people from doing a blog. Here’s what I did before I started this blog more than two years ago: I wrote out a list of 24 things I felt I knew enough about to sound semi-intelligent about. That kept me going for about four months. Now I do research and follow what’s going on so I always have topics. I also try to have a couple of “evergreen” blogs in the hopper in case I am not able to write a new blog that week.
• A note about length – I read some blogging guides that say your piece should be no longer than 250 or 400 or 500 words. Balderdash. Some of my most read pieces have been over 1,000 words. Write something interesting and compelling and the readers will come.
• Be consistent when you publish. If you decide to post a new blog every Monday, do it. Readers want to know when they can expect to see a new post. Incidentally, I used to post on Mondays and Wednesdays. I moving that to Tuesday and Thursdays because of my work schedule.
• Do your research on the topic you are writing about. Yes a blog is part opinion. But back that opinion up with quotes and citations from your sources. When you do quote someone, link to the site from which the quote came, unless you actually interview them. If you interview them, make that clear. I do both. I think it provides a nice mix.
• It takes time to build a readership – usually at least six months. So be patient and don’t give up.
• To build that readership, you need to post links to your blog on as many sites as possible. I post on Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, Stumbleon, Friendfeed, Google Reader and Linkedin. I also have a dedicated group of readers who have requested I send them the link via email. In addition, I use Google Friend Connect, which is on my blog site. Those people also get the blog as soon as it is published.
• Which brings up another issue – make sure on your blog has share buttons so your readers can spread the word. I will always be grateful to those people who share my blog with their followers.

I think that advice should get you started. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.

Among that last sheaf of messages is a group that is really starting to bother me. It has gotten to the point that I have been flagging them as spam and blocking the senders.

Who are these annoying senders? Are they insurance salesmen, Nigerian widows offering me millions, or schemes telling me how I can make millions while working only 20 minutes a day? Nope, not one from one of those groups.

Where that email is originating is from so-called social media “experts.”

These are people who you would think would know better. After all, they claim to be social media experts. But apparently in their effort to learn about social media, no one explained push vs. pull marketing to them.

In brief, social media’s foundation is pull marketing. What that means is a company provides evidence that it is an expert at what it does or how it makes quality products. It does not send that information out itself. Rather satisfied clients spread the word around the Internet. That builds positive word-of-mouth, which in turn builds engagement and eventually sales.

What that means is one notice sent out. If it is worth reading, or attending, people will. It is more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.

What is not done is acting like a used car salesman and bombarding a potential customer with a dozen or more sales messages.

That’s exactly how I feel when I receive one of these emails telling everything they can do. I don’t care. When I help on something, I go looking for it.

One English-based trainer has sent me seven emails in the last two weeks touting her social media training systems. If an email can be described as breathless, these would fit that description. The subject line on one read: “complete social media course – last remaining places!”

Another group I joined (now that was a mistake) keeps urging me to post on Craigslist. I get one of those about once a week. I tried it once – it didn’t go well.

Then there is my personal favorite. I keep getting emails from people asking me to endorse them. If I do that for them, they tell me they will reciprocate and endorse me. Now mind you, I don’t even know these people, let alone worked with them.

I have a very firm rule about endorsements. I will only do it if I actually know you and worked with you. What value is an endorsement from someone who knows nothing about you? I also never ask for endorsements. If somebody likes my work, they can feel free to endorse me. But that’s up to them.

I am currently taking a sales training course from Westboro, Mass.-based Kurlan & Associates Inc. One of the first lessons we were taught is that people hate sales calls. When you connect with a potential customer start off just saying your name. Then discuss how you can help them. Don’t go on and list all the things you can do. At that point, they don’t care.

So when I get an email or a call from so-called “social media expert,” I immediately know they are not. The step is to hang up or hit the delete button.

Therein lies the conundrum for many of us. We can write compelling blogs, post interesting tweets, make fascinating videos, add to LinkedIn discussions, and draw people to our Facebook pages. But a lot of us couldn’t sell long underwear to Alaskan oil field workers in the middle of a January blizzard. We have forgotten to acquire that the one key skill that ensures that a business or agency will be successful – sales.

I used to be as bad as sales as anyone. I can do everything I just wrote about and then some. But when it came time to convince someone else that they needed to the same to make their business prosper, well just remember that shivering oil field worker.

Just because we know social media is going to dominate marketing doesn’t mean our prospective clients know or care. They need to shown and convinced why that is so. Too often we social media evangelists make the same mistakes other enthusiasts make: we assume that everyone shares our fervor. Well, that just isn’t true.

I have heard many stories of an internal marketing manager or an agency representative charging into the CMO’s office enthusing all over the place about social media. Done that way the usual result is the CMO tells the interloper to clear out and take the enthusiasm with them. Oh they might be polite about it and all, but they never call back.

You can’t go fishing with a shotgun and you cannot convince someone to buy something based on your attitude. Just like in fishing, you have to be patient. You have to have the right bait and you have to convince the prospect to rise to that bait. That is the only way to do it.

Using pull marketing tactics is how it is done correctly. As a refresher, pull marketing is a method in which you give a potential customer convincing reasons to buy something. You don’t force anything. You let them take their time and make a decision. That goes for both external and internal clients.

Second, you have to make sure you are targeting the right prospects. I have seen too many agencies use the “any company is a good client approach.” I know it is tough in a recession not to go after just about any business. But ultimately you will fail doing that. It is much better to pick out a market niche and target it. Set up criteria for which companies within that niche would be your ideal client and go after that group.

If you are inside a company, you have to make sure you trying to convince the people who actually the decisions. Generally, that would be people in the C-Suite. But be careful to pay attention to internal politics. Don’t bypass someone who has the power to stop you from achieving your goal. Rather get them to buy into your idea.

I once had an editor who would almost automatically turn any idea a reporter had. I don’t know whether he was insecure, busy, or just arrogant. What reporters learned to do was have a general discussion with this editor about the area in which they wanted to do a story. They would then let the editor has the “light bulb” moment and assign them the story.

The same tactic can work with the people you are trying to convince. Not that anyone’s superiors are insecure, busy or arrogant.

The bottom line is before you write that blog post or post that video, you have to convince people that it will work. Only then can you get the camera out and start shooting.

What the Brewers did and didn’t do is also a lesson for any marketer who has an idea that seems to be a surefire winner. I am willing to bet no one in planning the promotion that backfired asked “what if … goes wrong.” Until you think something through from every angle, you are asking for trouble. As the Chinese military thinker Sun Tzu said: “The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand.”

Here’s what happened to the Brewers. As a promotion, the team placed 1,400 statues of mascot Bernie Brewer across Wisconsin parks early Tuesday morning. Some of the statues had a prize attached, including ticket vouchers, player autographs, and merchandise.

The idea was Bernie would tweet clues to the location of each statue so fans could find them. Under the rules, the contest was to begin at 7 a.m. People were supposed to take only one of the statutes. It didn’t work out that way.

Instead, people were grabbing as many as possible. There were reports of people sleeping in their cars overnight near parks where the statutes were to be placed. One woman tweeted she had taken over three dozen. People were trying to sell the statutes on EBay and Craigslist. This caused a lot of angry comments from people who tried to follow the rules.

Clearly no one at the Brewers thought this thing through. This is a clear case I feel of “you know what would be cool?” No one in the meeting asked the “what if fans get greedy and take more than one” question.  It’s a cliché, but it’s true: “hope for the best, but plan for the worst.”

There are hundreds of comments on social media sites posted by angry fans. The story went viral. I read a lot of the comments. People are really angry or laughing at the Brewers. Neither is good. The fact that the Brewers insisted that promotion went mostly okay shows me they don’t understand the power of social media.

Where the Brewers failed was not taking human nature into account. You announce you are giving away for free something people want they are going to find ways to game the system. Once the idea of the giveaway was decided on, the next topic of discussion should have been how to prevent the hoarding.

Brewers spokesman said the promotion went well with the exception of “some isolated” incidents. Wrong. They should have apologized profusely. That’s crisis communications 101.

What should the Brewers have done, or more accurately what would I have done?

First, there would have been no actual tickets, merchandise or autographed items in the statues if I were running things. What there would have been were vouchers for those items. Stamped on each voucher would be the words “One Prize Per Address or Family.” No, it wouldn’t have completely stopped the hoarding. But it would have cut down on it.

Second, I would have implanted a locator chip in each Bernie statue. Once I saw that more than Bernie was in one location, I would have noted the IDs on the chips (yes, the technology exists.) Whoever brought any of those hoarded statues in for redemption would have been disqualified automatically.

Third, to prevent anyone from selling the statutes on EBay or Craigslist, I would make it very public that the statutes can be purchased from the Brewers for $48. That would kill that market.

Fourth, I would have made those statues a heck of lot harder to find. Scavenger hunts are not supposed to be easy.

Now it is true that the people who thought they would corner the Bernie Brewer statue market are not particularly ethical or honest. But that’s human nature.

The failure was with the Brewers and their planning. You have to think these things through. It is why the first thing JJC Communications LLC does with a new client is an analysis what could go right and what could wrong. If you only do one of those, you end up with a lot of angry fans and people laughing at you.

If you want to learn more about how to such an analysis, let me know.

So I get an email the other day from a Linkedin connection. He wants me to invest in the next generation Groupon. It’s not going to happen. Why? Well because frankly it wasn’t a particularly creative idea. Creativity is what drives business success.

This is what I said in reply to the request:

“You don’t get rich by doing something somebody has already done. The Groupon space is getting pretty crowded, especially now that Facebook and Google are both jumping in.

“You get wealthy by coming up something entirely new, ala Facebook, Linkedin, or something like that. Each company founder identified an unmet need and filled it. That idea goes back to the founding of the Republic. Look at Edison, Bell, Ford, the Wright Bros., Watson, Jobs, Gates and others. They got there first and built empires.

“Come with up with a completely unique concept. I will be interested then.”

Being unique and creative are two keys to business success. It doesn’t matter if your company has one or 100 competitors. If your product and the way you market it are something new and exciting you will beat your competition like a drum. Actually the product doesn’t have to be that creative. If it a fills a need better than its competitors, you are going to be ahead of those competitors. Add in marketing in a way that attracts and engages your potential customers and you have driven the ball over the fence.

My agency works with established companies of all sizes. . Our clients, no matter the size or age of their company, are entrepreneurial. Their founders saw a need for something, came up with the product to fill that need, and took it to market. They didn’t copy anybody else. Because management has stuck with that, the companies are growing and dominating their competition.

Not wanting to just do what everyone else was doing in Milwaukee was why I decided to found my own agency. A lot of agencies still don’t understand what social media is or how to use it properly. A lot of them have seemingly rejected it. As importantly they also don’t know how to meld social media with traditional marketing and public relations. To ignore any of those three marketing channels seems to me to be the height of folly. It pretty much ensures creativity will be stifled. That’s the key to our success.

Entrepreneur and author Josh Linker drove that point home at Biztimes Milwaukee’s BizTech Conference-Expo last week. He spoke about companies have two choices: be creative or die.

In 1999 Linker founded an Internet copy called ePrize. He saw that while on-line advertising was taking off there was no online promotion company. ePrize is the company that developed all those games, contests and sweepstakes on-line companies offer. It has swamped its competition.

Linker points out in his book “Disciplined Dreaming” that: “Great companies are built on ideas. They discover new and compelling ways to solve problems for customers. They play to win rather than not-to-lost. In fact, we’ve reached a time when playing it safe has become the riskiest move of all. General Motors played it safe all the way to bankruptcy. Maxwell House played it safe as the more daring and creative Starbucks supplanted it as the leader of the coffee industry.”

Risk and creativity are two of the reasons I like social media and marketing in general. There are no guarantees, but the chances of success are much than just sitting on the bench. Think about it.

It is the fear of the uncertainty of creativity. I think to the average CEO or CMO who came through a business school being creative is a foreign concept. Most of those people are left brain types. Their dominant personality traits are that they are logical, sequential, rational, analytical and objective. They are not used to operating in an arena where creativity is demanded. Those traits often lead to the creation of boringly beige ineffective marketing.

The idea of doing something where possible outcomes cannot not always be predicted makes them nervous. So when confronted with something such as social media that demands creativity and intuitive thinking, their brains lock. The simplest thing for them to then do is either reject or ignore the ideas. The idea of a truly out there campaign – no matter how effective it might be – scares them.

I realized this at the Milwaukee-based BizTimesMedia’s 2011 BizTech Conference-Expo. EPrize founder and Chairman Josh Linker was speaking at the conference’s opening breakfast about how to empower employees to be creative. A creative company can develop a strong competitive advantage over its competitors, he argued.

Linker should know. The entrepreneur is also a jazz musician. He explained that any jazz musician that sticks strictly to the score is soon asked to leave. “This fluid, improvisation art form is all about taking risks and trying new things,” Linker wrote in his blog. “Going out on limb can be scary, but it is where the magic happens. Extending yourself outside your comfort zone is where the best rewards will be discovered.”

He goes on to say that “Jazz is also about listening. Listening to your fellow musicians, the audience, and your own creative voice. In business, that means listening to your team, your customers, your competitors, your industry, your suppliers, the latest trends and best practice, and of course, your own creativity. Through focused listening comes adaptation. Allowing the environment and your collaborators to influence the outcome as a group. Seeking inspiration and creativity from others, and adapting in real-time to your own Creative Challenge.”

At the breakfast Linker explained jazz musicians expect creativity from those with whom they perform. The jazz band is a collective creative effort.

The problem for many executives is they run their businesses from the top down. The modern corporate structure is essentially based on a military model. Think about it – there’s the CEO or commanding general. Underneath him are the division leaders. Do you think that designation was an accident? There are senior officers and junior officers, enlisted men and non-commissioned officers. The titles are different, but the roles are the same.

Not an atmosphere that lends itself to nurturing creative impulses. What those companies like is an ad agency coming in and saying we are spending $10 million on this television commercial. We are doing 15 million direct mail pieces and placing ads in 15 national publications. The campaign will look like the campaigns of all their competitors. Cut and dried – and there’s the rub. The CEO and CMO approve it and off it goes. The problem it is formulaic. It is result of that almost always fatal directive “that’s the way we have always done it.”

Many executives live the “fire and forget” marketing campaign. They feel they should not have to be involved in selling their own company. That’s the job of the marketing department and the outside agency.

Think about beer marketing or local auto dealers – all boringly the same.

All good marketing has to be creative. It is like jazz. There are core elements, but each player bends those elements, improves on them, while at the same time staying with the group. It demands that the company executives and employees take any active role in the campaign. It is their company, they should part of the effort to market its products. They need to learn to play with the band. Nine times out of ten, it is really effective. Good marketing works the same way.

There is always element of uncertainty in that. I always tell client not everything we try is going to work. We won’t know what works until we try it. Any marketer who says she does is not telling the truth. You can do all the research possible – from focus groups to surveys – and there is still no predicting the outcome.

As an aside don’t confuse that with measuring return on investment. ROI is measurable. That measurement takes place on what does work.

So if a CEO or CMO is told that the marketing effort is going to more jazz than symphony, they get nervous. It is way outside any envelope in which they operate. Someone needs to take them to a jazz club.

So it would seem at first glance that these companies are starting to embrace new ways of marketing. As most of you know, I firmly believe in melding traditional marketing and public relations with social media. That trilogy of marketing methods is the most effective.

However, I always dig a little deeper. I track these companies’ efforts. What I often find is that instead waltzing with social media, these companies are doing the “Zombie Dance.” All of you remember the Zombie Dance from the first dance you attended. The boy holds his rigid arms straight out and places them on the girl’s shoulders. Because of the distance created by the boy’s arms, the girl is forced to do the same. The pair then moves in a circle, barely lifting their feet off the ground and not bending their knees. It looks like the undead dancing.

That’s what a lot of social media attempts done by large companies especially remind me of – a stiff-armed dance that is about as a rhythmic as a drunk trying to play drums. These companies just don’t get it.

Now I know many CMOs would argue social media is not as important as search for attracting clients and customers. Current research would seem to back this contention up. For instance Google Inc.’s dominant search engine supplies about 30 percent of traffic to the top news sites, according to a study done by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. I would argue that same currently holds true for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business sites.

I know when I am looking for something in particular, I usually turn to Google. It is still one of the best ways to conduct research. However, the Pew study also found that “Facebook and other sharing tools, such as Addthis.com, are empowering people to rely on their online social circles to point out interesting content.” Although I do search for news, more and more I find myself reading stories friends have suggested or Linkedin. The same true when I shop. I will now often respond to tweets or Facebook friend pages when I am looking for a particular item.

This is where a lot of companies fall down, I feel. They are not integrating their social media efforts with their regular marketing efforts. Just having a Facebook page is not going to cut it. There has to be integration of all the marketing efforts. In this many companies are falling down.

Facebook is not the be all or end all. Blog, videos, and many other tools have to put to work. Yet which some notable exceptions – Dunkin Donuts and Southwest Airlines come to mind – most companies are doing all they could do. And I think I know why.

At major companies, people look at social media and consider it just too much work. Too many marketing departments are too used to using traditional advertising and public relations. It’s inertia. They want to move out of the ruts they are in. And then they wonder why they lose business to their smaller, more nimble competitors.

Doing branding so it’s effective means melding traditional media, public relations and social media. Using just one of those methods might be effective in creating a brand. While there are never any guarantees, using the three methods as a trio greatly increases the chances that your product will resonate with potential customers.

Remember, a brand does not exist until it is fixed in a customers mind. Until then it is just something up shelf space.

So, what do you to meld the three? Well, the first thing is to sit down with the client and discuss their goals. Then take a deep breath and do that client sanity check I have talked about. One you have realistic goals, write a plan.

This is what I do. I sit down with a client and talk. We hammer out what is unique about the product or the client themselves. This is important for doing traditional media. You need a hook, something that will make a journalist take interest in the story.

Make no mistake; traditional media should still be in the mix. By that I mean free media. There is no need to buy an ad in a publication or spend thousands of dollars for a broadcast. Those efforts rarely, if ever, resonate with a consumer anymore. Yes, there was a time when they did, but there was also a time when people had to start their car with a crank.

If you convince a journalist to write or broadcast a story about a product, that is a huge endorsement. I think print journalism still has come cachet with consumers, especially those over 50. Yes, print is dying, but it’s not dead yet.

The same goes for broadcast, only more so. With the rise of DVRs, fewer and fewer people are watching commercials. But every study I have seen shows they are still watching local news. A piece of local news is another good way to build a brand. Most local news shows still have credibility.

Of course, that is only leg of the marketing stool. Social media has to be part of the plan – in fact it should lead the plan. The tools are many and should be used in tandem with traditional marketing methods.

I usually start my clients out with blogging. Every study I’ve ever read shows blogging is the best way to build credibility. Remember, a blog is not a sales document. It is a way to build credibility. No one is going to think a product is credible if the company making it is not viewed that way.

What a blog is a way to demonstrate expertise and ability. No one likes it when a company thumps its own chest. What readers do like is when a blog provides answers to questions or solutions to problems or just general knowledge.

A blog is also good for monitoring what customers think. I know I continually hammer on this point, but you want to hear both the good and the bad comments. The good can be used to help build the brand; the bad can help correct mistakes.

Facebook pages can be used the same way. Twitter is a billboard that allows you to tell people wants going on with your product. YouTube is invaluable for actually showing people what a product does.

Then there are such things as trade shows, samples and all that other good stuff. I could write a complete blog on each of these items. But enough for now.

Next week I want to talk about once cutting edge marketing vehicles that no longer work.

Bloggers note: AirTran has been acquired by Southwest Airlines. It will soon be absorbed into the Southwest network.

As I watched the Delta and AirTran pages stream out of the printer, it made me think about marketing campaigns that do essentially the same thing the two airlines did.

A lot of campaigns are just too complicated, complex, and confusing. It’s the old saw about too many cooks. Too many executives, both at the client and the agency, with different views have had to sign off on the campaign. Before each of them gives their approval, they insist on adding in what they think is important. By trying to everything to everyone, the marketing campaign ends meaning nothing to anyone.

My question always is when I see one of these campaigns, wasn’t somebody paying attention. I always think back to what Kevin Brandt, a senior executive at a Milwaukee agency, said to a class I was taking: “the words I never want to hear from my team are ‘hey, you know what would be cool … ’”

Sometimes those campaigns end up just looking stupid. Other times, they are downright insulting.

Look at the recent Kenneth Cole Twitter campaign, which coincided with the uprising in Egypt: “Millions are in an uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring is online at (sorry, but I not dignifying that with the URL). So let me get this straight, people are risking their lives to free themselves from an oppressive, brutal dictatorship. Kenneth Cole sees this as a good platform to sell shoes.

When Groupon’s incredibly insensitive Tibet Super Bowl ad was roasted worldwide, one of the defenses was that people were now talking about the discount service. Yeah, there’s a client meeting I would like to attend. “Well, I have good news. We have raised awareness of Groupon to 87 percent of the targeted audience. Isn’t that great. Of course, they all hate us and are talking about organizing boycotts, but they know who were are.”

One of my “favorites” is the ad for the gout treatment Uloric. It shows some poor schlump hauling around a giant beaker of uric acid. He gets on a bus for goodness sakes. Would you want to sit next to somebody hauling around a container of sloshing disgusting liquid? He then takes the magic drug so the beaker shrinks down to a size small enough to fit into his fishing creel. Yeah, that’s what I take along when I go fishing – something guaranteed to scare away every aquatic animal for miles.

I am not trying to minimize gout. I know it is a serious, painful, often debilitating condition. But there was no way I could focus on that while watching this guy schlep around a couple of gallons of uric acid.

While I don’t know the insides of any of those campaigns, I have worked at a major agency where I have sat in on creative meetings. I have seen what happens to a campaign when too many people get involved. What should have been a simple message about a client’s product becomes a mishmash of bad ideas and bad execution.

That’s why there is an advertising slogan I keep in mind: “Know when to say no.”

That is something that often trips a client up. To someone who has been working at a company, or created a product, the brand is fixed and immutable. After all they reason, they know what they created. That’s well and good for them, but to the ultimate consumer that brand doesn’t exist.

While a product is a physical thing, its brand is not. As a speaker in class I am taking said the other night: “a brand doesn’t exist until it is fixed in a customer’s mind.”

A question I have started asking clients after hearing several speakers make this point is: “why would a customer want to buy your product?” Not why you want them to buy it, but why they should want it?

What a marketing agency has to do is create a consistent message about the product. The message helps a company create its image, its brand. It is that branding that lures a customer into making a purchase.

An important point to this is that after that the initial shot, the message and the image always have to be in sync. If there is any kind of disconnect, consumers will notice and turn to another brand. Companies often destroy their brands when they stray from their core message.

Here are the test questions every marketing person should be asking about their brand messaging: “is it true, is it believable, is it unique?” I didn’t invent that test, but I like it so I am using it. What the marketing plan should is make a product something people want to talk about.

As Milwaukee marketing executive Kevin Brandt said: “if you say something entirely new, entirely different, people will pay money to listen.”

Here’s an example that illustrates the point. I grew up near Troy, N.Y., which when I was young was the home of Arrow shirts. The shirt manufacturer, Cluett Peabody & Company, Inc. was an independent company until the 1980s.

In the early part of the 20^th century, a very strong brand was created around “The Arrow Collar Man.” According to Wikipedia “the Arrow Collar ads were a collaborative production of New York ad agency Calkins and Holden; Cluett, Peabody advertising director Charles Connolly; and commercial illustrator J. C. Leyendecker. Leyendecker’s model was his live-in companion, a Canadian named Charles Beach.

“Hundreds of printed advertisements were produced from 1907 to 1931 featuring the Arrow Collar Man. The fictional Arrow collar man became an icon and by 1920 received fan mail. President Theodore Roosevelt referred to him as a “superb portrait of the common man.” He inspired a Broadway musical Helen of Troy in 1923.” The message kept resonating long after the actual campaign stopped.

The Arrow Collar Man

Skip forward about 35 years. When I was about five or six, my parents bought me my first suit. To go with it, we drove over to Cluett, Peabody’s headquarters in Troy to buy an Arrow shirt from their outlet store. It seems to me they had children’s sizes. That first dress shirt instilled in me a strong love of button-down shirts that continues to this day, but I digress.

That was the first of many trips to Troy for dress shirts. I must have been about 16 or so when I first noticed that Arrow wasn’t the only shirt label being sold at the outlet. Along one wall were shirts with labels that included such names Marshall Fields, Filenes, Woodward & Lothrop, Abraham & Strauss. I knew those were department store names. There were many other such labels.

I asked one of the workers there what the difference was between those shirts and the ones with the Arrow labels. If memory serves, he told he there wasn’t much. Maybe a slightly bigger or smaller collar, or a different shade of blue, but essentially the shirts were the same.

Yet, I couldn’t buy one. I had to have an Arrow shirt. There was something about that label, about that Arrow image, that I wanted and had to have. That brand spoke to me. The idea that I would ever look anything like the idealized Arrow man is laughable. Yet, I would only wear those shirts because they bestowed the image of a self-confident, successful man.

That image created at the beginning of the 20^th Century had carried through to the late 1960s. It made myself and thousands of other men want that shirt because of that brand image.

That’s the definition of brand positioning. A good marketing agency will work hard to establish a brand such as the Arrow shirt. Next week I will take you behind the curtains to show how its done. Although be warned, creating a brand is more of an art than a science.

I get an email from the friend the other day, asking about particular social media site. My friends will often ask me which sites I recommend or what I think of a particular site.

Well, as I confessed to my friend, I had never heard of this site. That got me thinking. It seems like new sites are popping faster than dandelions in my lawn in June. But is each of these sites necessary? If someone did a business study of every social media site out there could many of them make a case for their existence?

Obviously, I am active user of social media. I am a social media consultant. I blog, I tweet, I post on Facebook, I use Linkedin incessantly and I am moving more and more onto YouTube. I can make a case for all of those sites. A large part of their appeal is that they are the biggest and easiest to use (more about that second point later.)

I also am a member of Orkut and I just joined a Chinese site called Ushi. I joined Orkut because it has a large number of users in South America and India. Ushi is self-described as the Chinese Linkedin. I do not currently do business in any of those places. But there could time when I do, so I want to have a presence there.

The key to all these sites is simplicity and ease of use. I don’t have to do much to interact with them. Which is good, but I am very busy. The less time I have to spend getting the maximum benefit is what I look for.

I also belong to Plaxo and Xing, but I am not sure why. I really don’t get much out of them.

Frankly, I think I am connected to enough sites. I don’t need any more sites. Yet, I keep getting invited to join others – a couple everyday. The latest is Facebook’s BranchOut. I joined it because I was curious, but so far I see no value in it. It doesn’t do anything that Linkedin or a regular Facebook doesn’t already do.

That’s my complaint about many of the newer sites. They are just duplicates of what’s already being done. Yeah, they might a couple of their own bells and whistles, but not enough to make them significantly different.

I am all for competition if it improves things, but I don’t see any improvement coming out of any of these. They are just not unique. I think this is an area that pretty much been covered.

It kind reminds me of television. ABC has “Dancing With the Stars,” so Fox comes out with “So You Think You Can Dance.” How many cop and doctors shows are on network television. It is all about being a copycat. Eventually, the market gets saturated.

People keep talking about the new Facebook or the next Linkedin. But the sites that might beat those are going to be something entirely new. They are not going to be clones of what already exists.

The newer sites that have taken off, Groupon as an example, did something new.  I belong to Groupon because I reap the benefits.

As long as I am ranting here, I have another beef about the new sites. There are just to many hurdles to join most of them. You want me as a member – make it simple. I think Groupon took me about a minute to join. Not so most of these new sites.  Name, email address, and a password are all that is needed. I will decide if I want to post a profile or a picture. It takes too much time. Yet, they ask for a lot of information. It is not worth my time to supply it.

When the dandelions take over, I pull them out by the roots. When I get site requests, I just ignore. It’s the best of both worlds.

The discount site Groupon ran a commercial during the American football championship game – the Super Bowl – Feb. 6 that appeared to start out as an appeal to help Tibet. It ended as an appeal to use Groupon’s service. Actor Timothy Hutton noted that while Tibet may be an oppressed country, a Tibetan restaurant in Chicago makes a great fish curry.

To me this a case of where a campaign was created in a vacuum with no thought of how the real world would react. Of what I have read of Groupon, its management and employees are 20 and 30-somethings. I think they, along the creatives at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, found the idea hilarious. But there should have been some adult supervision. This stab at humor ended up costing Groupon a lot of good will and might have opened the door for its competitors. They went for edgy and ended up cutting themselves.

It was so controversial that Chicago-based Groupon pulled it on Friday, Feb. 11.

“We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted,” Groupon CEO Andrew Mason wrote in the company’s blog. “We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads (a few may run again tomorrow – pulling ads immediately is sometimes impossible). We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads.”

This brings to mind that cliche about closing the barn door and the horse. I do give Mason points for taking the blame. Many CEOs wouldn’t do that.

To me, the commercial was at best juvenile and at worst offensive. Watch it yourself and see what you think.

Groupon\’s Tibet Commercial

(Full disclosure: I am Groupon member and user. I was an early adopter.)

Groupon ran two other commercials: one about saving the whales and one about saving the rainforest. Although those two were also spoofs, neither appears to have raised the public’s ire like the Tibet commercial.

The Net lit up almost immediately with criticism. Twitter users called it tacky, vulgar, detestable and other things I cannot use if I want this blog read in offices. Articles in various marketing publications condemned as a wrong-footed move for a company that until now has had a misstep.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Chicago marketing company Alterian, which measures social media activity around Super Bowl advertisers, found that Groupon had the most mentions of every advertiser, but ranked last in sentiment on Alterian’s index.

“Groupon far and away had the most negative conversations relative to its (total) number of conversations,” Scott Briggs, who headed Alterian’s study, told the Tribune.

An AdWeek online column headline called the spot “Bad Taste, Pure and Simple.”

Dallas, Texas agency Team MutualMind and students from the Temerlin  Advertising Institute at Southern Methodist University worked together to monitor the social media buzz for 52 advertisements aired during Super Bowl XLV. Their analysis found that the Groupon commercial was the most disliked of the commercials it analyzed. It was mentioned on social media sites 25,421 times. Of those mentions, 54.9 percent were negative, while 13.8 percent were positive. Presumably the remaining 31.3 percent were neutral.

According to published reports, Groupon intended the campaign to be a send-up of the pompous, self-important public service ads that run on television. More importantly, the company said it was actually trying to raise awareness for important causes.

There were defenders of the ad. I myself got involved in a very spirited debate on Linkedin in which a defender said: “The reason this campaign may have hurt Groupon has very little to do with Groupon and more to do with folks who didn’t get the joke. That is again, on them.

“Groupon was very effective in brand recognition and building awareness and resonating with those who did get it. That’s a win. That some news outlets weren’t informed and missed the point is rather sad imo, because I personally get offended more by the fact that so many are more concerned about an ad than Tibet. That’s the point.”

MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell also strongly defended the commercial. You can watch what he had to say here.

However, I do have to take issue with something O’Donnell said. He noted that Groupon gave over two-thirds of the commercial over to trying to tell people about Tibet. Well VW gave two-thirds of its time to Star Wars, but I don’t VW was trying to tout the movie.

The argument was made to me that any publicity is good publicity. Balderdash. I would never want to walk into a client meeting and tell the client: “hey guess what. We are the most mentioned campaign on the web. Everybody hates us, but look at all the mentions.” You think Toyota was thrilled by all the publicity it got last year?

This commercial was so off, it even details wrong. Tibetans don’t make or eat fish curry. According to the New York Times, the purported Tibetan mountain used in the commercial is in India, not Tibet. I mean, come on, if the details are wrong, why should I believe anything else about the commercial?

I think Groupon made a huge mistake. I want to know what you think. Please make a comment. I will do a follow-up blog if I get enough comments.

What is micro-marketing? According to Answers.com, it’s “Designing, creating, and manufacturing products, marketing, and advertising campaigns for the benefit of very specific geographic, demographic, or psychographic segments of the consumer market.”

In other words, micromarketing means selling to your neighbors.

My exposure to micromarketing began when I came home the other day to find a plastic bag on the front steps. That’s not unusual – somebody is always leaving phone books or fliers or something else on the steps. Most of the time the bag avoids the house completely on its trip to the recycling bin in the garage.

This time the bag contained a dog food sample and two dog biscuits. As Chester the Wonder Dog has a voracious appetite, I always appreciate free food. Biscuits are good, too. He is more cooperative when he knows there’s a reward when I expect him to something.

The bag came from a local pet store called Hounds Around Town. Along with the food, there were two fliers inside the bag. On one there was an eight-paragraph explanation of the food – how it was made locally without any artificial ingredients. There were also a couple of paragraphs about Hounds Around Town, including an invitation to bring my dog whenever I wanted.

Also in the packet was a sheet from a group called the 3/50 project. This really caught my attention. I went to the group’s website and found this explanation from Consumer Reports:

“The 3/50 Project is a campaign to support local merchants. The concept has spread to communities nationwide, and its premise is simple: First, choose three local independent brick-and-mortar businesses—clothing shops, food stores and restaurants, and for the home, independent appliance retailers, hardware stores, and garden centers—that you find essential and want to keep from going under during the recession. During tight times like these, independent retailers suffer since budget-minded consumers are more inclined to shop at chain stores and big-box behemoths.

Then spend $50 or more among those places each month. If enough people in a town make the pledge, the theory goes, the pooled-together funds will prop up mom-and-pop enterprises and help sustain local business districts.”

The sheet quoted the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in noting that if just half the U.S. working population spent $50 each month in locally owned businesses, more than $42.6 billion in revenue would be generated. It also said that for every $100 spent in independently owned stories, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll and other expenditures. When a purchase is made from a national chain, $43 stays in a local community. When an online purchase is made nothing stays behind.

Powerful arguments on both counts. In fact, it affected me and that doesn’t usually happen. After all, marketing is what I do for a living. I have seen every kind of campaign that’s ever been done. Most either make me cringe or yawn.

However, this campaign made me think. I do like to shop locally as much as possible and I like products to buy that are made locally. I firmly believe that the only way we are going to dig ourselves out of this recession is to support each other. I have no faith that the politicians who spread all this rhetoric are going to do anything that will actually solve the problem.

In this case, if Chester likes the dog food the odds are good I will shop at Hounds Around Town. This a dog who likes to eat squirrels, rabbits and other small animals, so I don’t think his palate is that discerning.

It is also an instructive example of for small businesses. Many small retailers just don’t have the budget to advertise or do much marketing. Buying a newspaper ad or producing a television commercial can be expensive. Plus, those efforts are more of a shotgun approach. A microcampaign such as the one Hounds Around Town ran can be much more effective because the market is very targeted. It is a very good idea.

This piece’s headline is my professional mantra. I operate in three complimentary, and often overlapping, areas: social media, public relations and marketing. It is my firm rule when working in any of those areas that I am there to further my clients aims, not my own.

Too often I see other companies that operate in the same areas who don’t adhere to that rule. That bothers me. I think they’ve forgotten that they there to serve the clients, not themselves. I am not going to name any names. It just isn’t right. It gives my entire profession a bad name.

Let me tell you how I view the relationship between client and agency.

When a client hires me, the first thing I tell them is they are going to be their company’s face. The reason is simple – they are the best representatives. Since the person is usually a senior executive, they are going to know far more about the place that I will. Plus hopefully the enthusiasm they have for their employer will show through. If they don’t have that kind of enthusiasm, perhaps they should think about working someplace else.

The primary objection to that idea that I hear from clients about that is “well, I don’t how to handle myself in front of the news media and public.” This is where many agency types trip. They take the executive’s words at face value and make themselves the spokesman. Now it is as much about them as it is the client.

It is very frustrating to most journalists when the subject doesn’t know the answer. When I was a reporter, I would make it point to go around some public relations people. I needed information and I knew that the public relations person would have to ask someone for it. Most of the time that process took too long. So I identified who had the information I needed and called them.

That does not apply, by the way, to in-house public relations counsel. They are almost always very knowledgeable.

When a client tells me they are nervous about being out front that to me I reply: “don’t worry, I can train you to handle yourself.” I spent over two decades as a working journalist. I know how interviews go. I can take an executive through just about every scenario that will be encountered. I know them all because I use to create them all.

Where I do step in is arranging coverage. As I said, I worked a reporter for a long time. I know how to approach a reporter in a way that gives the client best chance at coverage.

That’s another thing that bothers me – agencies that guarantee coverage. No one should ever do that. What a lot of agencies don’t seem to understand is that media outlets have different needs and agendas than their clients. It is much easier to make a client’s needs conform to the media outlet than the other way around. What I mean by that it’s better to pitch a story in a format that the outlet use rather than conforming to the client’s outline.

The bottom line is agencies should realize they are planners and counselors. They should stay out of the spotlight. It is their job to make the client look good, not to pump themselves up.

I have to say that as criteria for buying a personal hygiene product, knowing that the manufacturer  sponsors concerts is not even on the list. I tend to select the brands that perform the best according to my needs.

As I was taking the survey, I started thinking about companies that sponsor concerts or buy stadium-naming rights or plaster their names all over race cars. I know the theory is that potential customers will buy a product because of the company sponsorship. Frankly, I don’t buy it – figuratively or literally.

As an aside, I have to again laud my Green Bay Packers. They have played in Lambeau Field since 1957. They still play in Lambeau Field. There is no Lambeau Field sponsored by Acme Meatpacking. The Packers will not allow their stadium to be sullied by some company seeking to market its products. Ditto for the New York Yankees.

I think social media has changed consumers’ attitudes. Companies have, for the most part, learned they have to sell a quality product. If they don’t, the Internet will rise up and slap them down. It doesn’t matter whether the logo is plastered on the side of a race car.

I think the companies who spend some of their money on sponsorships are, for the most part, wasting their money.

There is an exception to that though. If I see a company supporting a cause I agree with, I am more likely to consider their product. My wife and I back a number of charitable organizations, including the American Diabetes Association and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. If I see a company contributing to those organizations, I will take a look at what they are selling.

Even then, I will take the time to check the company out. There are companies that will make charitable contributions as a way to hide their real image. Tobacco companies, as an example, can make all the contributions they want, I will never buy their products.

Which brings me to another point. I will sometimes not buy a product because of something the company has endorsed. I am not going to discuss my beliefs here. But if a company endorses something I feel is morally wrong, I am not going to buy their product.

Frankly, I think it would be a lot smarter if companies used their endorsement dollars to make products. They would probably make a lot more money that way.

I want to give a huge thanks to Heather Asiyanbi, a Milwaukee-area writer who generously has given her time to become my editor. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for her work.

A cherished belief of mine about the Internet was crushed yesterday, making me rethink the whole idea of search engine optimization. Let me explain.

I have always encouraged my clients to make sure their customers have a place to comment on the client’s products. It makes sense for a lot of reasons, including the most important – Google rankings. The higher a Google ranking, the easier it is for a potential customer to find one of my clients.

Now, I always thought it was the good comments that drove a customer’s Google rankings. After all, it is illogical to think the bad comments would influence page rankings. Why would Google allow a company with terrible customer ratings to dominate the rankings? If you had a bad experience with a store, you certainly wouldn’t send a friend there.

Well, apparently Google is not so discerning. A Brooklyn-based company known as DecorMyEyes.com has some of the worst customer rankings I have ever seen. Yet it shows up on the first page of a Google search for eyeglasses.

As reported Nov. 26^th by The New York Times’ David Segal, company owner Vitaly Borker discovered that it really doesn’t matter what is said about a company. All that matters is that something is said.

In response to the negative comments, Segal said Borker wrote a blog post using a pseudonym. He thumbed his nose at all of his dissatisfied customers.

“’Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com,’”the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

“It’s all part of a sales strategy,” he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: ‘I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.’”

That burst my bubble, I must say. I always thought Google, and other search engines, looked for the positive results when considering rankings. I assumed that the wizards at Google had created an algorithm that considered the tenor of comments.

As Segal wrote: Which means the owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.

“I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works,” Borker told Segal. “No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

This bothers me. What this appears to mean is no matter what one posts about a retailer, it helps them if they know how to game the system.

There is an old adage from the early days of public relations that goes, “any publicity is good publicity.” The other is, “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you get my name right.”

Those are both from public relations’ dark ages – the days of press agents, three martini lunches, and sometimes out-and out-lies. I had hoped we had moved beyond all of that. This kind of thing could destroy consumer confidence in web searches. That is not good for any reputable company that relies on the web.

I hope Google steps up and figures out a way to deal with this.

As an aside, I was told by my professors three decades ago we would living in a paperless society by now. But a lot of trees are still dying.

Be that as it may, it seems to me these companies are working very hard to make me their friend. But once I acquiesce, that’s the last I hear from them. Oh, I might get the occasional email telling me about a sale or something, but that’s it. They don’t post anything on Facebook, they don’t blog and if they do tweet, it gets buried among all the other tweets I get.

Or even worse, they send me snail mail fliers. I don’t like junk mail. Maybe it is because my mother was a mail carrier. She used to complain how much weight the junk mail added to her bag. She knew that most of the people on her route were just going to toss them anyway. It seemed ridiculous to her to have to schlep all those ads all over the place.

It seems silly to me to have a company ask me online for information so they can mail me something. That shows a complete lack of understanding of social media.

What I think is happening is that somebody told the CMO, or even the CEO, that the company needs to have a presence on the Web. But once they have that presence, they don’t know what to do with it. Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s ignorance, or maybe it’s just laziness.  Whatever the reason, they are letting a fantastic opportunity just lay there. I cannot believe they don’t know how effective social media can be when done properly. That has been demonstrated over and over again.

They could also be causing themselves problems. The social media universe demands interaction. It is one of the cores of social media. If there is no interaction, people will go away. They will look to a competitor who better understands what to do with social media.

I think CMOs and CEOs want it both ways. They want to continue to use the old methods. Those methods are not as effective as they once were, but it’s something they still understand. There is always a fear of the unknown.

Still, they know they need to do something in the area of social media. Yet, they don’t want invest the time it takes to do it right. So they stay in the shallow end of the pool. As I already said, that’s wrong place to be. The only thing they are accomplishing is crippling their own company’s efforts.

I figured why this is – the people who create these campaigns work in the bubble a marketing agency can be. They are creating campaigns for three groups – the client, their supervisors, and they and their friends. It doesn’t matter none of those groups are often objective when it comes to a campaign. Those are the people who sign off on the idea, the plan and the execution.

The problem is that none of those people know how the intended consumers should be reached. The client is often dazzled how creative the campaign seems. The agency people have no other point of reference than their own. The research they do is designed to reinforce their own ideas.

Let me give you an example from another industry that I think proves the point.

When I first moved to Detroit in 1978, I was struck by how many miles of really good freeways the area had. Residents would boast that Detroit was second only to Los Angeles in multilane highway mileage. At the time, these were really well maintained roads. Potholes and other obstacles were rare occurrences. Maintenance was done late at night, so there were no traffic tie-ups during the day.

This was the environment in which U.S. car companies operated. I think it influenced the way they designed cars. Those cars were not designed for the typical American highway because the executives and designers drove on good roads everyday. The executive and designers lived in a bubble of their own making. They assumed that every road was like the ones they drove on each day. When consumers rejected those cars because they didn’t meet their needs, it took Detroit a long time to break out of that bubble.

I feel the same thing is true of a lot of marketers. They live in that bubble, or silo, or whatever you want to call it. They don’t understand that they are just looking in a mirror when they ask for input from the people around them.

I think this is why a lot of agencies simply ignore baby boomers. Even though my generation is large and still has some discretionary income, the average 29-year-old doesn’t know to market to us. Oh, they try, but they have no idea works for us. So, the campaign fails and no one wants to try again.

That’s one of the things I like about social media done well. It forces the campaign out into the real world. It is lot harder to stay in a bubble when people from the outside are popping it.

A lot of people though flounder when it comes to creating, implementing and running a social media campaign. Many people I have dealt with seem to think that the new stuff can be done the same way as the old methods. It just ain’t so.

What is often misunderstood is that social media takes a lot more involvement from a client than the old way of doing things. I think that’s the reason a lot of CEOs and CMOs balk when presented a social media campaign proposal. Advertising doesn’t require a whole lot of work from the client. A concept is hashed out with the agency, the campaign is created with input from the client, the client approves it and then it goes live. That’s all.

Social media demands a lot more work from the client. While any good social media agency will work with the client to create a Facebook page or a Twitter campaign, it’s up to the client to use collaborate in using those and other tools.

Which brings me to an important tangent. I often run into marketing people who want to do it all at once. They want to set up a blog, start posting on Facebook, put up videos on YouTube, post pictures on Piscasa and maybe through in Twitter campaign. I never let clients do everything at once. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: you gotta crawl before you can walk, and you gotta walk before you run.

I think this is another issue CMOs and CEOs have with social media. Advertising usually happens all at once. Social media is done as a graduated approach.

I usually suggest starting with a blog and perhaps a Twitter campaign. Blogging is the hardest thing to do, but research shows it is also the most effect. Blogging is something a client should do. After all, they know their company and product best. If they cannot do it, or are unwilling, I will write articles for them. I will not do their blog. Blogs are assumed to be a personal expression of a company’s plans, outlook, and what-have-you. No one but a company person should write it.

Twitter is one of the easiest applications to do. It allows a company to start a conversation about their brand without a lot of effort. I will monitor a company’s Twitter stream to see what is being said about the brand. That’s important to do obviously.

This leads me to my second tangent. Many people in the C-Suite are not prepared for negative comments. I often have a hard time explaining that it is a good thing. When the negative comments come in, a company can identify and deal with problem areas. It is good for a company to acknowledge that it has made mistakes. It builds confidence in the company when they correct them. People like that.

See, social media is different. But it is also a lot more effective.

I object to using that line for two reasons: the late Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein coined one the phrase. That’s like quoting Hitler in an ad. Two, it’s just lazy writing. Rather than come up with something original, the copywriter fell back on something easy. Of course, the client approved the script. But, that’s no excuse.

Using clichés is never acceptable in my book – except in an ad that is deliberate satire. On that matter, I beg you if you are creative not to try satire unless your name is John Stewart or Jonathan Swift. Most people are just not any good at it.

Getting back to clichés, there are so many phrases that shouldn’t be used; yet they are. Let’s run down a few:

• “To be perfectly honest – so you have perfected honesty. What imperfect honesty, lying?
• Pushing the envelope – that phrase originally came from test pilots, who were pushing the limits of their planes. It meant they could die if something went wrong. That is not how that phrase is used now. You really thinking you are going to die with the new campaign?
• For the record – a legal phrase that originally meant something to be entered into the court record. I have heard and read this in too many campaigns. Is this campaign meeting some kind of legal requirement?
• World famous – I see this on restaurants a lot. So, the next time I am in Dublin, can I ask what they think of Joe’s Hot Dogs?
• Fantastic and amazing – Usually used when describing some new product, such as a cleaning soap. I got news for all of you, chemically all soap is exactly the same. I am rarely amazed by ketchup or beer bottles.
• Prices will never be this low again – yeah, until the next sale. That one is a favorite of car dealers. While I am the subject of car dealers, why do they always shout? Why would I buy anything from anyone who shouts at me?
• We always give 110 percent – mathematically impossible.

I could go on, but I am curious what clichés you crazy. If I get enough responses, I will publish them.

I don’t know what’s going on in your state, but in Wisconsin, it’s election time. Since we Badgers are purple most of the time, every political party from the Greens to Tea Party wants to talk to us. (Maybe the Greens and Tea Party could merge and form the Green Tea Party. Healthy at least.)

I have to say for someone who has done marketing for a decade or so – and was a working reporter for two decades before that – I have never seen more terrible marketing campaigns. A five-year-old with a lemonade stand does a better job marketing their product than your average politician and his/her campaign staff.

“Advertising is essentially truthful, except political advertising, which … gets worse every year … (It’s) just the artful assembling of nominal facts into hideous, outrageous lies,” Adage Columnist Bob Garfield, as quoted on the PBS Frontline Show “The Persuaders.”

What amazes me is so many people believe those advertisements and information that comes from robocalls and information provided by the candidates themselves.

Here in Wisconsin, we have tight races for US Senate and Governor. As I said, we are generally a purple state. We are a contrary people. You can never be sure just which way we are going to lean. So, every election season we get bombarded with calls, fliers, and newspaper and television ads. Each side is trying to convince us that they are the solution to all their problems.

The ads usually run along these lines:

Attack ad – “Did you know that (fill in name here) proposed barbecuing puppies on the steps of the capital? Well, call (fill in name here) and tell him/her you are opposed to barbecuing puppies on the steps of the capital.”

Reply – “My opponent (fill in name here) says I proposed barbecuing puppies on the steps of the capital. Balderdash and poppycock!! Why my opponent has proposed eliminating child labor laws so that it is mandatory that every child over the age of three go to work.”

Of course, when a candidate appears in his or her own commercials, it goes something like this: “When Moses parted the Sea of Reeds, I was there. It was I who suggested the route the Israelites took through the Sinai. Re-elect/elect me and I will steer my constituents through the desert we are in currently in. I will lead you all to a land of milk and honey.”

I have a friend who is a veteran marketing and public relations practitioner. He is so good at it, he teaches it at the college level. He is also, I think, a conservative Republican. Yet, he told me the other day he turns the volume down every time a political commercial comes on the tube. He said they are so bad they make him cringe.

What amazes me is that research indicates those commercials work. And the more excited the commercial gets the viewer, the more effective it is.

“We know from lots of good geeky political science research that ads that are able to stimulate emotions are more likely to be effective,” University of Wisconsin – Madison Political Science Professor Kenneth Goldstein. Goldstein is a political advertising expert.

As I said, I just don’t get it. Of course, it just shows me that my hero, H.L. Mencken was right when he said: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Still, although they are late to board, the institutions of higher learning haven’t missed the social media train,  a recent study found.

The study, “Marketing Spending at Colleges and Universities” found that higher education institutions’ interactive and social media budgets are increasing. Between fiscal year 2008 and fiscal year 2009, 55 percent of the institutions allocated more of their budgets to interactive media and 52 percent allocated more to social media.

The study was conducted by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and Lipman Hearne, a marketing communications firm with offices in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

“People really want to know what kids are reading and how they spend their free time – what is capturing their attention,” Lipman Hearne’s COO and director of research, Donna Van De Water is quoted in the report. “They’re trying to figure out what kinds of communications should move from print to the web. And they’re wondering what kind of language to use. They’re asking, “Should we use a student voice or our own voice?”

It is important to remember almost college students first used every social media application I know of. Student, for goodness sakes, developed Facebook at Harvard for use by other students.

Yet, colleges and universities are just now catching onto the fact that they need to be recruiting using social media?

Of course, people who demand facts and figures run most universities. They want definite empirical proof that something is working. The study does bear that out. It found that institutions that use social media report positive incomes in website hits, search engine positioning and, most importantly, rates of alumni donations.

The study also found something that should be music to a university comptroller’s ears: moderate-to-heavy users of social media spend less per student on marketing. The moderate-to-heavy users spent an average of $83 per student as opposed to the $121 per student that light-to-non-users of social media spent. In addition, 71 percent of those institutions who invested in market research and strategy reported those efforts have a positive effect on the quality of their applicants.

“Students tend to say that they want to hear the university’s voice,” Van De Water said.  “Students know if they’re being talked down to, or if their own voices are being mimicked. That said they still do want to hear a student’s perspective. So an institution needs to know what its own voice is, yet also allow students to represent the authentic student voice. Alumni want to hear a range of voices: faculty, students, other alumni, and the university’s. They understand and appreciate the complexity of the institution and welcome the various perspectives.”

In addition, the increasing use of social media has allowed colleges and universities to cut the amount of money they spend on traditional advertising. Of those institutions that are moderate-to-heavy users of social media, 42 percent spent less on traditional advertising in fiscal year 2009 than in the previous year. Of the overall survey group, approximately one-third spent less on traditional advertising than in the previous year.

So as I long as I am continuing in cliché mode, I guess it is better late than never.

I had an amazing response to the two-part guest blog on why executives hate social media. My weekly readership more than doubled. I did have a few complaints that it was too long or needed better editing. Both are good points.

Nonetheless, it raised a lot of provocative points about the C Suite and social media. I appreciate that all of you took time to read through it. Plus, I had a lot of comments. It was a good debate. Thank you all.

It’s high time that a C-level individual engaged in social media, and – once and for all –created a high-level overview and synopsis, crystallizing all of the strategic benefits and critical value streams, and distilling them into a language that speaks to executives everywhere in our native tongue – bottom line stakeholder value. So here you go. I’ve done the work for you. What follows is an “Executive Summary” of my findings.

Social Media Value #1:  Unfiltered Feedback

As you already know, some of the scarcest (rarest) yet most valuable information a CEO can obtain is honest, unfiltered feedback. Think about it. You interact all day with managers, employees, and handlers working to keep the boss happy and therefore keep their job. Sure, being surrounded by “Yes men” can be more comfortable, but it can also insulate you from the stark realities of your business. If done correctly, social media enables CEO’s to hear raw, candid feedback from real people – people who aren’t afraid of being fired because they CAN’T be fired. The truth is, leaders with their ego in check are already fully aware that they work for the customer – the customer is his boss – so if the customer doesn’t like dropped calls on their iPhone or the sauce on their Domino’s pizza, it’s their job to make it better.

Now, every customer is not always right (or wrong), but if 850 out of 1000 user comments say tthe new Sketcher’s Sport shoe caused them to sprain their ankle, then something needs to be fixed – and fast! CoolCleveland’s Founder Thomas Mulready is a perfect example of a CEO with this customer orientation. After emailing out his weekly eMagazine for 7 years, he decided that it needed to be updated, and set about introducing a new format with much fanfare. In doing so, he also did something revolutionary – he asked all 90,000 of his readers for feedback on what they thought of the new style – and boy did they reply with scores of comments submitted over the span of a few days. But then he did something else revolutionary – he actually listened, modifying and improving the new site to reflect reader tastes and preferences. Yes, it takes humility (“Who are these people to give me feedback?  I invented this product! Don’t they know they can just click the links?) but the end result is an engaged audience who now feel genuinely empowered to provide even more feedback, emboldened by the knowledge that their comments actually impact (and can improve) the end product.

Social Media Value #2:  Authenticity

Hand-in-hand with the unfiltered feedback above is the ability to leverage social media to authentically communicate with your employees, partners, customers (and non-customers), investors, and media, directly engaging all of your brand ambassadors efficiently and economically. Rather than layers of staff, spokespeople, and sterile press releases, social media now offers an elegant and effective medium for disseminating information either “straight from the heart” or “straight from the horses’ mouth” depending on your preferred idiom. Dan Gilbert’s recent LeBron James “rant” would qualify as both, capturing the owners’ anger, frustration, and competitive resolve just moments after James’ announced his departure. As you’ve probably noticed, nobody can tell the company story and embody the company brand like the CEO (think Steve Jobs) and by offering the ability to immediately and directly engage stakeholders – whether on a typical day, during a product launch, and/or especially during a time of crisis – social media provides an invaluable medium for maximizing brand value and minimizing potential brand degradation. Social media helps firms “keep it real” but couches it in a positive brand-reinforcing context.

Social Media Value #3: Six Sigma (Low Cost)

In case you were wondering, executives LOVE things like Six Sigma because:

1. It reminds us of our Greek fraternity days in college.

2. The other soccer dad’s don’t understand Value Stream Mapping.

3. Six Sigma and lean processes are all about speed and cost sacvings, two of our favorite topics.

By its very architecture, social media is positioned to leverage firms’ Six Sigma orientation by expediting interactions, exchanges, customer service, feedback loops, product launches, marketing, and advertising, and enabling it at a fraction of the cost of traditional media, to a much more targeted audience, and in a far more nuanced and contextual value exchange. Social media options allow your message distribution format to evolve from shotgun to sniper, from billboard to message board, and from broadcast to narrowcast.  Plus, it takes your marketing posture from a one-way, blanketing, bullhorn approach to a more intimate, just-in-time interaction; offering the opportunity for a more detailed, valuable and more profitable conversation and connection with your audience (and you don’t need a Black Belt to do it).

Social Media Value #4:  Balancing Transparency AND Privacy

The only thing worse than not using social media tools is using them in the wrong way. Your firm could very easily invest time and money on social media, and then end up spending even more time and money doing damage control because you did it wrong the first time – talk about a lose-lose situation. With social media, there’s a “right way” and a “wrong way” to do things – so if you’re going to do it, do it right. Remember, anywhere-anytime-anyone social media channels must be handled as the “nuclear options” that they are, with the capability to destroy your brand value in a single Twitter, email, or YouTube video that goes viral.

With great power comes great responsibility, and a healthy respect for the global reach and impact of social media must emanate directly from the CEO, who knows better than anyone that the same programs allowing firms to connect and influence the marketplace can also be turned against you to alienate them. And just as social media can provide the market with a transparent window into the soul of your company, it can also showcase you at your worst, doing more harm than good.  Let’s face it, your firm is already dabbling in social media as it is – so you might as well manage your risk and liability by codifying corporate expectations, establishing specific ground rules, and educating your stakeholders regarding proper use of these seemingly innocent yet powerful tools.

Social Media Value #5: Supporting Statistics

Executives rely on market research to support and substantiate any designated course of action, and devour facts, stats, and data-points like shrimp at a wedding reception. Summarized below are a few statistics buttressing the explosion of this social media trend, and detailing how Corporate America is leveraging it to realize significant revenue and market share growth going forward.

• In the last 7 years, Internet usage has increased 70 percent a year. Spending for digital advertising this year will be more than $25 billion and surpass print advertising spending (forever)

• Lenovo has experienced a 20 percent reduction in activity to their call center since they launched their community website for customers
• Blendtec quintupled sales with its “Will it Blend” series on YouTube
• Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• Naked Pizza set a one-day sales record using social media: 68 percent of their sales and 85 percent of their new customers came via Twitter.
• Software company Genius.com reports 24 percent of social media leads convert to sales opportunities,
• Dell has already made over $7 million in sales via Twitter.
• Thirty-seven percent of Generation Y heard about the Ford Fiesta via social media before its launch in the US and currently 25 percent of Ford’s marketing budget is spent on digital/social media.
• Seventy-one percent of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40 percent.
• A recent Wetpaint/Altimeter Group study found companies that widely engage in social media surpass their peers in both revenue and profit.

(Sources for Statistics: meyersreport.com, lenovosocial.com, George Wright, Blendtec, Mashable.com, econsultancy.com, businessweek.com )

Getting Your Board On Board

Lest we forget, even the Boss has a Boss – they’re called the Board of Directors – and these are the people that recruit and hire CEO’s for the purpose of serving as a charismatic and visionary leader of their organization. And so I urge you, don’t disappoint them when it comes to leveraging social media within your organization. The “Bang for the Buck” value proposition is too compelling to ignore, and the fact is – your competitors are already entering this arena and establishing new service baseline norms and minimum threshold expectations – so standing still amounts to losing ground and therefore is not an option. What you need is a plan.

Do I still hate social media?  No, but I’m only going to embrace it on the “executive terms” that have served me so well to this point in my career and they are, “If you’re going to do something, go all in and do it right.”  From now on, all social media, social marketing, and social networking will be discussed in the context – not of a campaign (which starts and ends) – but as part of an ongoing, strategic, and systematic dialog with our stakeholders and marketplace.

Executives have the focus and vision to road map strategies playing out three, five, and 10 years into the future. But, we’re also “plodders” and are comfortable with short, measured, consistent steps – day in and day out – as long as we know that they are aligned with reaching a desired goal. When we discuss your social media strategy, the focus will be on consistency and sustainability over the long haul. Remember, executives don’t have the ego needs, risk profiles, or the time to be on the bleeding edge, or even the cutting edge. We just want it to work.

I can confidently predict that every month for the next 100 years there will be a new “Must Have” application, portal or community that one of your employees will discover, and then try to convince you that your company will implode if you don’t immediately join, link, or Retweet. In five years, all but three of these ideas will probably be forgotten.  During our meeting, we will discuss how to frame out an enterprise-wide social media strategy, predicated on the foundation of proven tools and that have stood the test of time and offer “Best-In-Class” results, so that you will be empowered to handle these conversations proactively in the context of a larger road map, rather than reacting to these weekly ambushes in a dismissive defensive way. Remember, our goal for social media is not a lark, but a lifestyle and work-shopping a strategy which builds on stable, scalable tools, yet also affords the flexibility to address unprecedented “Black Swan” technology developments, provides you with a welcome buffer from being whipsawed by a weekly website.  Between the two of us, we’ll finally take that reliable “80/20 Rule” and apply it to social media, and then spend time focusing on the 80 percent of stakeholder value that can be extracted with 20% of the effort (while knowingly and purposefully ignoring the remaining 20 percent of value which takes up 80 percent of the effort).

The Bottom Line

In the Forward of Geoffrey Moore’s bestseller “Crossing the Chasm” Regis McKenna writes:

“Fundamentally, marketing must refocus away from selling product and toward creating relationships. Customers don’t like to be ‘owned’ if that implies lack of choice or freedom. But they do like to be ‘owned’ if what that means is a vendor taking ongoing responsibility for the success of their joint ventures.  Ownership in this sense means an abiding commitment and a strong sense of mutuality in the development of the marketplace. When customers encounter this kind of ownership, they tend to become fanatically loyal to their supplier, which in turns builds a stable economic base for profitability and growth.”

While there will always be a “me” in media – social media, social marketing, and social networking tools were designed to work best as a conduit for enabling information exchange, establishing a dialog, and creating a two-way conversation with your audience. At the end of the day, social media is simply about creating and maintaining relationships – and even and executive can do that.

Well, them whippersnappers couldn’t be more wrong. The New York City-based Nielsen found that boomers dominate 1,023 of the 1,083 consumer packaged goods categories. We watch 9.34 hours of video per day, which beats out any other age group. We also compromise a third of all television viewers, Web users, social media users and Twitter users. We are also significantly more likely to have broadband Internet.

“Marketers have this tendency to think the Baby Boom — getting closer to retirement — will just be calm and peaceful as they move ahead, and that’s not true. Everything we see with our behavioral data says these people are going to be active consumers for much longer. They are going to be in better health, and despite the ugliness around the retirement stuff now, they are still going to be more affluent,” Doug Anderson, SVP/research & development for Nielsen, told Marketing Daily. They are going to be an important segment for a long time.”

The Nielsen research found that while we Boomers spend 38.5 percent of all money spent on consumer priced good, only five percent of advertising dollars are spent trying to attract us.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Baby Boom began in 1946. Beginning in second of half of 1945 millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines came home from World War II. Those men had built of lot of um, energy, during the war. You can do the math on what happened when they got home.

By the time the Boom ended in 1964, there had been 75.8 million Americans born, according to the U.S. Census bureau. It stopped because of the introduction of the birth control pill.

I am a Boomer – I was born in 1954. I am often ticked off when I see marketing campaigns for products I am clearly interested directed at 25-year-olds. However, I sympathize with marketers trying to figure out how to reach us. Why?

Well, most marketing campaigns are designed to reach the widest possible audience. The strategies and tactics used in the campaign are created to reach the entire audience. You cannot do that with Baby Boomers. We are just too diverse.

Let me explain. Boomers range in age from 64- to 46-years-old. That’s a huge swing. Let’s look at three groups of Boomers.

A Boomer born in 1946 – the first wave – came of age during the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the time of sock hops, malt shops, Rebel Without A Cause, cheap energy and a pretty good lifestyle. This was the group who both became hippies and fought in Vietnam. They are now either retired or are thinking about. A lot of them are grandparents.

Someone like me who came of age in the middle-to-late ‘60s remembers the summer of 1968, with its race riots, anti-war protests, and assassinations. Vietnam had turned into a quagmire. The Cold War was raging. I remember being taught to hide under my school desk during the Cuban missile crisis. It was a dark, cynical time for the most part. We are struggling with the economy, although our children are now mostly on their own.

Someone born in 1964 came of age in the late ‘70s and early 1980s. I went to Woodstock – they went to discos. Theirs was the era Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, CD players, Jane Fonda’s workouts, and Yuppies. It was a much more optimistic time. They are probably trying to figure out how to pay for their kid’s college education.

So there you have it. How do you market to those three groups, even if they are lumped together under one name? It cannot be easy.

While all of the sharing social media has caused might be connecting people, I see a lot of danger in that. Is it a really good thing for people to know you ate at Ray’s Famous Pizza in New York, then went to see “Promises, Promises” on Broadway and finally dropped in for a nightcap at your favorite local bar?

I often hear complaints from people who are inundated with marketing solicitations. They wonder why they are they getting so many. Think about it. I think this trend is increasingly dangerous. Do we really mean to give up all of our privacy?

Today (Monday), I read a piece in the New York Times about the late author John Updike. It reminded my just how much things have changed in a very short time.

In the piece, writer Sam Tanenhaus that says “Updike was a private man, if not a recluse like J. D. Salinger or a phantom like Thomas Pynchon, then a one-man gated community, visible from afar but firmly sealed off, with a No Trespassing sign posted in front.”

Updike was a man of the middle 20^th Century, pre-Internet, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogging. I think the reason he could maintain that distance was that there were not the tools to break the walls he had erected.

I wrote on this topic last year. But since I did, even more ways to reveal yourself to the world have come along. Now there is Foursquare, a site that tells everyone what restaurants, movies and other things you attend. There are more and more review sites, which ask people to comment on a hotel, a car or a book. There are location sites that tell people exactly where you live and where you are traveling.

The amount of information people are willing to share with the world – or at least the 1.8 billion people on the web – is staggering. When I was a reporter, I used to tell people in a week I could tell their life story. I could do that because the paper I worked for bought proprietary databases. Some poor person had spent weeks gathering and inputting all of the information those databases contained. It took time to look through them and you had to know how search what you were looking for.

Now, I can do it an hour or two. It doesn’t any particular skill to gather the information. Anyone with some time on their hands can find out just about anything they want about anyone they want. Often that information is used maliciously.

While malicious use of information is one effect of this spewing, I wonder if there are other side effects? Do we really need to know everything about everybody? I am not so sure. I am curious as to what you think.

I don’t watch a lot of television, but when I do, I pay close attention to the advertisements. As a marketer, I like to see what major companies are doing to drum up business. Granted, I think social media would be far more effective, but a lot of companies still feel comfortable with what they view as the tried and true.

Watching commercials always reminds me of a major reason reasons I don’t like traditional advertising. The copywriters and producers constantly use stereotypes and half-truths to make a point. It is a lazy way to make a point. As times, those ads can be downright insulting.

As an example, Kellogg’s has been running a commercial entitled on YouTube “Fruit Loops Doctor Commercial 2009.” The commercial has a small boy playing the doctor, a small girl playing the nurse, and a small boy as a patient.

The commercial claims Fruit Loops can be good for you because it now contains fiber. That claim alone I find dubious. According to Kellogg’s, a typical serving contains three grams of fiber. The American Dietetic Association says children under 12 should be consuming at least an amount of fiber equal to their age plus three. There are a lot better ways for a child to get enough fiber. Fruit and vegetables come to mind.

In addition, the first ingredient listed for Fruit Loops is sugar, 12 grams in a typical serving. The American Heart Association says that’s the amount of sugar a child should consume in an entire day. Somehow, the ad doesn’t mention that.

What really frosts me though are the gender stereotypes. As I said, the doctor is male, the nurse is female. According to the May 6, 2010 New York Times, almost half of medical students are women. The last number I could find – from 2006 – said 33 percent of practicing physicians are women. So why did Kellogg’s or their agency decide the doctor had to be a woman?

Plus, since women make most grocery buying decisions, wouldn’t it be logical to show a sympathetic character?

As for another stereotypes, AT&T has been running a commercial showing a family that has just signed up for AT&T’s Internet service. With that service comes Wi-Fi. Only Dad doesn’t seem to understand how Wi-Fi works. He keeps asking for a cord to connect to the Internet.  He is told the cord is invisible. He asks for his own invisible cable. I mean, come on.

It always bothers me when a campaign singles out a parent – be it mother or father – to ridicule. Why make fun of anybody?

As for the dad in this commercial – I don’t anyone who calls a USB cable a cord. Second, anyone using the Internet on consistent basis must know what Wi-Fi is. What kind of a dolt is this dad?

To me, this kind of commercial is just a very lazy way of doing things. And, no is it not satire. It is just a lack of creativity.

Why it is every time I turn on the television or listen to the radio, some company is trying to scare me into buying their product? Instead of touting the benefits of their offering, they tell me I will be facing dire consequences if I don’t purchase what they’re selling.

Now, I don’t watch a lot of television, but there are some shows I like. I am excluding watching sports. That’s a whole another issue. As a loyal Milwaukee Brewers, New York Yankees and Green Bay Packer fan, I try to watch as many of their games as possible.

Of course, watching television means accepting the advertising that comes with it. I don’t have a problem with that. It is how the broadcast networks can afford to provide those shows. I love PBS, but I am not naïve enough to think every network could hold pledge drives to keep themselves on the air.

What I don’t like are ads such as the one General Motors runs for its OnStar® system. Briefly, OnStar® is an “in-vehicle security, communications, and diagnostics system” GM puts in more than 50 of its models. It notifies an operator when there has been accident. It can also be used to track and shut down a stolen car and be used for diagnostic purposes.

In the television commercials, former NFL player Howie Long shows a “skeptical” customer how only OnStar® will help him in the event of an accident. The radio commercials are lot more graphic. The commercials play out scenarios where someone has been in accident and because of OnStar®, they are saved. Or a stolen car is found because of OnStar®.

H & R Block, the tax preparers, did something similar during tax season. At least one commercial talked about how there were something like over 1,000 changes made to the U.S. Tax Code. The narrator said how people should have H & R Block prepare their returns because of those changes. It intimated if you didn’t go there, you would be in trouble.

To deal with the last example first, there might have been over 1,000 changes to the tax code. But, I am willing to bet most of them were not to the personal income tax section of the code. What most people don’t realize is lot of laws are changed every year for many reasons, often very minor ones such as misplaced period or a word out of place.

Why should creating even more anxiety over something that has sweating already be a marketing technique?

As for GM, to me those ads are almost disingenuous. Yes, it is true OnStar® would help you. But, so would a lot of other new cars’ systems. Almost every car built today has Blue Tooth capability. Ford, for instance, has a hands free system in its cars. I was in a Lexus the other day that had the same thing. The systems allow a cell phone to be locked in to a cradle, so it would not go flying in an accident. A call could be made after an accident.

However, I have yet to see either Ford or Toyota, or other car companies, talk about how you need that Blue Tooth system in case of accident.

Plus, I am not sure I want people to be able to find me when I am in my car. Maybe I have read George Orwell’s “1984” one too many times, but I don’t like the idea of someone else being able to track my car. I don’t want someone else, no matter how benevolent they are now, to have the power to stop my car.

Frankly, in both cases here, and all of the other companies that do the same thing, I would rather hear about the product’s features and cost. I don’t want to think I end facing prison for tax evasion, or left to die an accident. That is just not the way I want to be approached.

I would like to thank the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater Public Relations Student Society of America for inviting me to speak April 24^th. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. There were a lot of very bright students from UW-Whitewater, UW-Lacrosse, UW-Stephens Point and UW-Oshkosh at the PRSSA regional meeting. Thanks again.



My wife and I get a lot of emails – both personal and professional. Between us, we have four addresses. I am talking about receiving perhaps 200 message a day or more. Many of them are for me. I monitor a lot of different social media trends and belong to a lot of different sites. I follow those sites via either RSS feed or email.

There is no problem with that part of my email load. In fact, most of the professional sites to which I belong has policies limiting themselves to one message a week or one a day. What bothers me is the retailers to whom I have given my email address.

I am a very picky about where I shop and what I buy. I have rules about comfort, style and ingredients. As much as possible, my wife and I shop at stores headquartered in Milwaukee or Wisconsin. Because Wisconsin produces everything from cheese to underwear to cleaning products, it isn’t hard.

We also tend to be loyal to the companies who produce what we view as good things. Because of that, we follow those companies on their social media sites. We also used to sign up for their email lists. We don’t do that so much anymore.

Why? Because these retailers don’t seem to understand there’s a limit to how many emails should be sent. It get’s very annoying very quickly. What’s really annoying is when the same retailer sends multiple copies of the same email. I know this is an automated marketing tool these retailers use. I also know that times are tough for retailers right now. I know they are desperate to drum up business anyway they can. The recession has hit them particularly hard.

I also know they are not going to dig themselves out of it by annoying their customers. I get so many emails from some of them that my spam filter kicks in. That’s annoying because I then have to go through my spam filter to sort through the messages.

I know these retailers are not spammers. They are not trying to sell me a timeshare in Kuala Lumpur or tell me I won the Irish lottery. (Don’t ever try that last one on someone who knows Ireland. It ain’t gonna work. My grandfather used to buy me Irish lottery tickets. I know how the Irish lottery works.) Yet, sometimes they act like spammers – they send out multiple emails each week trying to get me to buy something.

I try to be a careful shopper. I check online reviews, talk to friends, and compare prices. I am a very good collector of information. I don’t need five emails in one week from a retailer.

What usually ends up happening is that I will skim the message line. If it doesn’t grab my attention right away, I just delete the email. It never gets opened. I am way too busy building my business. I don’t have time to wade through 20 or 30 emails from companies that want me to buy something.

That means the company loses a sale. I suspect I am not alone in this.

I have been watching the debate over Royal Caribbean’s cruise lines decision to continue to cruise to its private beach. I have been thinking about what I would tell the company’s leaders if I was the company’s media and marketing maven. So, here it is:

From: Media and Marketing Maven Jeff Cole

To: The Royal Caribbean C-Suite

Re: Again cruising to our private beach at Labadee, Haiti

There has much internal debate about whether we should again take our cruise ships to Labadee. I have read the memos about going back. Frankly, there is not one argument that convinces me that this will not be an unmitigated public relations disaster.

My concern is that our thinking is too short term. We need to think how this decision will look five or 10 years from now. Yes, people will forget much about the incident in a few years. But, it is selective amnesia. What they are they liable to remember is that we cruised to Haiti during a disaster – not that we donated money and brought relief supplies.

So, let’s look at the current arguments for cruising to Haiti and my responses:

• The Haitian government has asked us to continue our cruises because we provide a valuable source of income to their country. First of all, I would question how much thought the government of Haiti gave to that invitation. They have much more important things to worry about. And even if they did, we have to consider how the people of Haiti will view a bunch pasty white tourists frolicking while they are burying hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. Governments and attitudes change. The next government could use what they view as our callousness to kick out us and turn the Labadee over to a competitor. Do we really want to lose that access to for good?
• We employ several hundred Haitians at Labadee and support hundreds of others by allowing them to sell their wares to our passengers. We provide a valuable source of income for those people. So, why not pay these people to help in the relief effort? Continue their salaries, but allow them to go to Port Au Prince to help.
• Many of our cruisers are taking the cruise of a lifetime. They are honeymooners or elderly couples who have saved their pennies for years to make this trip. We would destroy their dreams. You mean to tell me we couldn’t simply reroute the ships to not stop at Haiti? We have other private beaches in the Caribbean.
• All those people who would be angry they didn’t get the trip they wanted will sue us. First, don’t we have insurance for that kind of thing? Second, I would urge if that happened that we post the name of every person who sues on our website. We send a press release to their hometown newspaper and television station announcing the lawsuit. We state in that release we decided helping Haiti was more important a vacation. Who looks callous then?
• We are a giving a $1 million to the relief effort. Ladies and gentlemen, I can hear Dr. Evil saying: “$1 million dollars” and the UN snickering. Our net profit in fiscal 2008 – our last complete year – was $573.72 million. Granted, it has been a tough five years. But, we could at least give say $5.73 million, which is only one percent of net.

Now, for some positive public relations idea:

• We have a deep-water port at Lababee that can handle our ships. I assume that means it could also handle relief ships. Why not turn Labadee over to the United Nations for say six months? Let them use it as a staging area. We could make it a condition that the UN hires the people we employ to aid in the relief effort. That’s another way to negate any loss of wages caused by the ships not coming.
• In addition, allow an organization such as “Doctors Without Borders” to set up a hospital at Labadee. As I understand it, Labadee has better infrastructure than 99 percent of the country. It is a perfect place for such a facility.
• If there is still insistence on going to Haiti, charge a $25 a head “relief fund surcharge.” Have the company match whatever is raised. With approximately 12,000 cruisers a week going there, we would be contributing $600,000 a week. Think about how much money we would raise in a year.
• Instead of carrying some relief supplies on each cruise ship, each week designate one ship as a relief ship. Pack it to the gunwales with everything and anything Haitians need.

These are my ideas ladies and gentlemen. I think you will agree we can turn into a winning situation for both Haiti and Royal Caribbean.

If you have been reading my blog, you know I am no fan of Microsoft’s marketing. The Redmond, Wash.-based company’s efforts come way too close to the line between truth and fabrication for my taste. Remember the commercials where a “real person,” who turned out to be an actress didn’t really go into an Apple Store, as she claimed.

Oops, they’ve done it again

Well, the company has done it again in the two commercials I have seen for Windows 7. In one, a very tall man named “Jack” claims he had the idea for Windows 7 while in the shower. They show him having his idea in the shower.

However, watch the commercial closely. The guy in the shower is not the same person who says he came up with Windows 7. If “Jack” is a real person, why the body double? Was he too shy to take off his shirt?

The same thing happens in a second commercial. “Steve” tells of having his revelation (complete with Angelic music). But, to me the problem is the “Steve” trimming the bushes when the light bulb is not the same man who is telling the story. Watch the commercial to see for yourself. The gardening one is taller and frankly more buff.

So what’s the big deal?

Why do I care, you ask? Don’t all commercials bend the truth?

Not all of them. In fact, most companies try to be honest. You find out quickly enough if they are or aren’t easily enough. In these days of social media, it is not hard to check claims. Companies who cheat are outed pretty quickly, I have found.

Frankly, given Microsoft’s record with the Apple commercials, I would think they would want to be very careful with their marketing. If they can’t even tell the truth about the people in their commercials, what else isn’t the company not telling us? This is why I am a member of the Apple cult.

I do have to say I like one Microsoft product – Excel. In fact, I love Excel. It is so easy to use and very functional. I also used to use Word because it is so ubiquitous. However, I am now using Google Docs more and more as it is easier to share information.

For almost everything else, I primarily use Apple products. I am writing on MacBook. As I said, I a member of the cult.

So, what do you think?

Okay, social media scares many C-suite people. That’s no surprise. Because if you are honest when you present, you should make them realize that using social media means acknowledging they don’t have complete control of their brand. Of course, they never really did. A brand’s identity is determined in the marketplace. It’s what consumers think – be they business-to-business or business-to-consumer – that defines a brand

It is hard for most senior executive to admit they really never had control of their brand. Facing that means acknowledging that all the money spent on marketing and advertising did not provide a failsafe way to ensure happy consumers and ever increasing sales.

Social Media will allow them to listen to what consumers are saying

Social media won’t do that either. However, unlike advertising, it doesn’t make that promise. What it does promise is a way to listen into and influence the conversation that is already taking place about a company or a brand. The odds are far better that there will be a positive outcome if a company knows what is being said.

Some executives will respond that they already know what their customers are thinking. After all, people will send emails when they have a complaint. That’s true. But remember, a person who is so upset that they are motivated to send an email is usually not representative of the customer base. Blog and Twitter comments will provide a far more accurate picture of what people are thinking.

Also unlike traditional marketing, those using social media want to hear the negative comments. How else does one get better unless one knows what the problems are? The good thing about this method it is much more inclusive. Rather than relying a focus group or a marketing study, a company has opened up its comments to entire customer base. That is much more representative of what’s actually happening.

How does one listen to these conversations? By creating a Twitter brand, by blogging, by having a Facebook page and a LinkedIn group. In addition, videos posted on YouTube are good. In each of these cases, and in other social media applications, you are looking for people to comment. It is from those comments that you will find what people are thinking.

Eventually what you to do is convert those commenter’s into fans and eventually evangelists for your brand. I will talk about how to do that in another post. But, I have just told you the first step.

Social Media takes time

After you describe all of this, the next objection is going to arise – social media takes time. Writing a blog, maintaining a fan page on Facebook, Tweeting and responding to Tweets, answering questions on LinkedIn, posting videos and monitoring and responding to comments are not something that can be done in an hour once a week.

These are many executives who used to their agency doing all the work. All they have to do is approve the campaign and make sure the agency has access to whomever it needs to work with at the company. It is a kind of “fire and forget” strategy. Now, you are asking them to become an active part of their own marketing effort.

Remember, social media is not a tactic or a strategy. It is an entirely new way of marketing. It requires a commitment to stick with it. Nothing turns off a potential customer more than sporadic, unscheduled use of social media. Blogs especially have to be posted on a specific schedule. Nothing kills a blog following faster than making it hard to find. The same thing applies to a Facebook fan page or a YouTube video channel.

This is, of course, your opportunity. You are there to teach them about social media and maintain their accounts. You are the solution to their problems of time management. It why they will hire you.

One note though – do not, ever, write your client’s blog yourself. You can edit it; you can proofread it, but don’t write it. That’s dishonest. PR firms have gotten into trouble for doing things like that. Tweeting for them is fine, as is maintaining the Facebook page. Just don’t be a ghostwriter. You want those thoughts about the company or product to come from someone who really knows it. Plus, consumers react badly when they perceive something isn’t what it purports to be.

There is more to do on social media. I will discuss the most important element next week. Stay tuned.

I have to admit, some are clever. But, that doesn’t mean I ever would buy a product based on what some actor tells me. And as for car dealerships – why I would buy anything from someone who shouts at me? TV advertising just doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t matter that people are watching a lot more television than ever.

According to an August article published by MarketingVox.com: “by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990, according to a study from McKinsey & Co.

“That forecast assumes a 15 percent decrease in buying power driven by CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) rate increases; a 23 percent decline in ads viewed due to switching off; a nine percent loss of attention to ads due to increased multitasking; and a 37 percent decrease in message impact due to saturation, AdAge reports (via MediaBuyerPlanner). According to McKinsey, real ad spending on prime-time broadcast TV has increased over last decade by about 40 percent even as viewers have dropped almost 50 percent.”

I often give my new clients a little quiz: I ask them what is their favorite TV commercial. About half cannot name one. Of the remainder, about half of them cannot remember what company or what product was being pushed. Of that final 25 percent, most of them say they like the commercial, but wouldn’t buy the product.

Those commercials are a nice try on an advertisers part, but in real life, nice tries get you nothing.

Which brings me to my point

It doesn’t bother me that advertisers are wasting their money. It’s their business and their money.

What really bothers me is when a company shows the same ad over and over and over again. I cannot speak for all markets – just Milwaukee. And Milwaukee is often used as a test market, so maybe we get more commercials than the average metro area.

I will give an example. The Olive Garden is running a campaign positioning itself as a mid-range restaurant. If you haven’t seen it, the commercials feature various groups of people meeting at an Olive Garden to share good food and companionship. So far, so good.

However for some reason, the campaign has devolved into the same commercial over and over again. It features a mom and dad visiting their daughter at college. When I first saw it, I thought it was pretty good. It had a key element that made it realistic – it showed the parents taking their daughter – and her friends – out for a meal.  Speaking as the parent of two now college graduates, I think we fed half of Miami University of Ohio and Purdue University.

However, by the 20^th time I watched the family talk about eating pasta at Olive Garden, I was screaming at the television. Other companies have done the same thing – I love Southwest Airlines, but I was going to throw something at the television if I heard the phrase: “it’s on” one more time.

What I want to do to my television after one too many commercials.

I once read a study that after six or seven screenings, people start to resent television ads. After 20 or so showings, the reaction to the overplay can actually make people not buy a product.

You know, it’s nice when someone else makes the case for social media, even if they don’t mean to.

As said I Monday, I will not be publishing next week. The next blog will run Jan. 4^th. Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to all.