Chill Out with @McCafeYourDay and Iced Coffee

While a great Fourth of July was due in part to a grand fireworks display from my lake cottage pier, a letter postmarked by McDonald’s McCafe division really hit the spot. It was a note from Jessie @McCafeYourDay providing me with a free drink coupon for any McCafe beverage-- because I do enjoy a once a week binge on McDonald’s newest brand craze, and I just so happened to tweet about it.

It’s really no secret that iced coffee is 2009’s hottest summer (or should I say coldest) beverage. With that being said, a number of gas shops and mini cafes, including 7 Eleven and Dunkin Donuts, are tapping into its saleable exponential potential—particularly among the teen girls and moms demographic. This report shows iced coffee has surpassed iced tea sales as a morning breakfast drink, and at 68%, iced coffee is clearly a women’s creme de la creme.

Realizing iced coffee’s double-digit sales growth ability, McDonald’s opened up McCafe in a big way. Everyone has seen the ads tailored to different ethnic demographics, and of course, the infamous accent mark that boasts a better day being ‘possibl-ay’. Now who helped put that accent mark together?

And they’ve launched BIG on Twitter. In popular day-association fashion known to loom about Twitter and Twitter’s trending topics, McDonald’s is rolling out Free Mocha Mondays. Each Monday starting on July 13, McDonald’s will be giving away free mochas until August 3, 2009. Though, I’d think that, since a major demographic of theirs is teens and moms, they might want to extend this into the back-to-school period. Nothing says a new school day like a big iced coffee beverage to awaken the tired senses.

If you’re interested in coffee-- hot or iced-- and you’re looking for something more quaint, check out this Nashville coffee joint and their lovely aromatic tweets.

I have to say that I admire McDonald’s interest in segmenting their brand entities and getting @McCafeYourDay out there to compete with the tweeting likes of Starbucks and Caribou Coffee. McDonald’s as a global brand has underwent ‘reinvention testing’ time and time again, and once again has come out on top with the ‘I’m lovin it’ principle. And while they can’t own the Twittering coffee space entirely (that’s Brad @Starbucks), they can sure own a hefty cup of it, thanks to Jessie and the many other McD’s associates involved in the company’s social media strategy. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go pick up my free iced mocha and try to retain what's left of my manhood.

I’m a Social Media Rat-- Get Me Out of Here!

Lou Diamond Phillips may have won the not-so-hit TV reality series, “I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!” But when it comes to determining the winner of the social media rat race, the chances of finding “one”—let alone a frontrunner—are slim.

If you’ve been trekking the path of social media tools and analytics research, social media webinars and conferences, and flat-out social media involvement in every Web space imaginable, you’re one of the rats that is eager to find more stars in the caves and sewers. While we see reports on executives saying they don’t have time for social media, my realization of time is just that, too: how many hours can I spend conditioning myself to be the frontrunner for all things social media? What does social media director, manager or consultant mean anyway if we’re all on the same path of knowledge evolution? Some of us are farther along than others, but never in the lead. Repeat. Never.

While I don’t want this post to come off as a half-glass-empty opinion piece, it may remind us all that, while we’re sojourning the Web, making connections, building communities and linkbacks, accessibility is what makes the space remain very small. Eventually you’ll end up at Kevin Bacon again, thanks to a very tight-knit community of social media rats.

This couldn’t be more apparent than with the number of LinkedIn updates I receive. It’s not just connectivity within region, it’s nationwide connectivity and unfortunately, you’re probably not a ‘fave 5’ if someone broadcasts more than 500+ connections. If that’s not enough, my Twitter account, as well as my PR friend’s Twitter accounts, boasts the same name followers. Don’t even get me started on Friendfeed; it’s a community-driven paradise and the professional/person grouping tags don’t help the cause. If you haven’t figured it out by now, we’re all sharing our connections whether on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, FriendFeed, etc (enter site here), so play nice on the track everyone.

The social media rat race in perspective
Picture this: The whistle blows and you’re off. You’re jumping the same hurdles that 100 other participants have already completed, though some of you are approaching those hurdles differently. While some of you make it over, some fall or lag behind. Your heart is pounding and you can hear a similar beat—about 500 human heartbeats coming up from behind you, passing you, because you decided to skip conditioning for a couple of days. You’re tired, run-down, and overwhelmed by the rushing crowd. You only have two options: announce you’re a social media rat and cancel yourself out of the running OR stay in the game realizing there is no finish line.

What do you choose?

It's Complicated with Peter Shankman (Facebook pun to prove a point)

UPDATE: This post has been modified, as I have come to find out from Peter himself that he researches and engages with the services he promotes. In particular, Peter has used both MyMediaInfo and Vocus at one time or another, and when HARO took off, he was no longer in need of their services.)

Relationships have their good days and their bad ones, and let me start off by saying Peter Shankman is a great man. His superpower, according to his Google Profile, is talking really fast. Believe me, he does, as I’ve seen him in-person up on stage wowing hundreds. But I have a gripe, however. While I appreciate HARO and all of its media goodies pertaining to Axiom’s client base, I don’t much care for the sponsored product touts in the start of the e-mail.

This is the kind of thing that turns people away from social media. I’m not referring to prospect PR clients or businesses here. If anything, monetization is good for business (WE ALL KNOW THAT)… but not for the many users outside of the frame of mind of commercialization, or wanting to drive revenue from it. These are the ones who use social media for networking, entertainment and information-sharing purposes—its original tenets. While I understand that innovation is what turned Facebook into a moneymaking platform for companies, we have to remember that Facebook was first and foremost a community for college-age kids, and HARO started as a service to “help a reporter out.”

But product touts in a mass e-mail send-out to a bunch of PR practitioners (or whomever is the communications world this is sent out to) is not exactly on point with some of the mentioned brands’ target audience-- though millions would pay for this type of exposure. That leads me to believe that being on point with brand messaging is no longer a concern; that is if done in a social networked-type space. People just want the exposure, period. Seems like a bad pitch to me.

[paragraph omitted]

I really wish these product touts would be toned done a bit. [line omitted]. I feel such a disconnect lately that I think I might end the relationship, but I’m scared to leave. He’s independently wealthy, very responsive, and has a got a great sense of humor… I just don’t know.

What do you think?

Involver Answers the Need for Facebook Page Bliss

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting 3-time entrepreneur Rahim Fazal. Fazal came into our offices here at Axiom, along with a venture advisor friend of my boss’s, pitching us the capabilities of Involver.com. What started as a video platform for social networks now includes the first complete brand marketing suite for Facebook.

Involver’s new suite for Facebook includes RSS feed, Twitter, photo gallery and polls integration, among many other rich and engaging mini applications. So why do you need this? Well, if you’re like me, you want aggregation because it saves a lot of time, offers the most potential for link-luv (that’s what we call it here), not to mention overall buzz spread. With its new suite for Facebook, Involver has given me a remedy for my biggest pain on Facebook: applications that have yet to effectively work on Facebook Pages. I tried BlogBox and after about an hour of trying to configure everything with Feedburner URL and errors popping up, along with it never uploading to the Page, I got rid of it. If that’s not enough, in order to get a quicker real-time uploading for blog posts using BlogBox, you have to upgrade; otherwise, subject yourselves to a vast amount of hours waiting and wasted.

True, Involver Facebook Suite’s most customizable “bang for the buck” comes at the price of an upgrade, but thankfully, the service offers just the right amount of free tools to get the job done on your Facebook Page—enough to pitch it to prospects and create your own space on Facebook.

Here’s to Rahim Fazal, Tyler Willis (outstanding customer service guy), and the rest of the Involver team on a job well done in providing a streamlined and easy-to-use service. If you’re looking for Involver’s video application, check it out here—a one-stop shop to identifying your brand’s biggest fans as well as creating viral-viewing potential.

Cashing in on Social Media Ambiguity: What Every Company Should Know Before Signing on the Dotted Line

A while back, I wrote a post regarding how monetization was an ambiguous area, and while ambiguity seems like a negative thing, it’s reaping handsome rewards as an unsaid associate term of social media.

What do I mean by that exactly? The term social media has yet to really be defined (Honestly, ask any person and each will give you a different answer as to what social media is), so a lot of PR/marketing type folks are charging an arm and a leg simply for comment moderation, hashtag set-ups on Twitter, and my personal favorite—editorial calendars for blogs. The selling point: brand engagement. Engagement. Ah-- music to a client’s ears that has been trying to integrate social media ever since BlendTec increased sales 700%.

While a need to develop social media 101 kits for internal communication purposes is certainly legitimate, I think these add-ons (such as the ones mentioned above) are really just a way to a guaranteed long-term retainer with the client. The advantage is knowing enough, because it’s impossible to know it all due to social media’s continuing evolution, and that's a good thing for cash flow.

Funny enough—people do claim to know it all. We call them social media “experts,” and in my opinion, they’re overrated and they overcharge. Social media isn’t black and white like ad equivalency rates; there is a multitude of ways to measure, to define measurement, and to put a price tag to it. Fortunately, clients waver on the higher side when integrated, and that’s a good thing for PR/marketing agency revenue.

Overcharging isn’t anything new to building investment estimates. It happens ALL the time, BUT I’d say that social media experts are indeed the biggest perpetrators of this.

What companies can do to avoid social media overcharge

• Assign one person internally to social media comprehension, integration practices, and overall research.

• Read social media blogs by leading interactive and emerging media contributors that offer up wisdom against social media experts, such as Amber Naslund, Jason Baer, or Sarah Evans.

• Investigate the person who’s pitching you their understanding of social media. If you visit their self-titled Website and their Web bio says “expert”…. RUN.

• Set up a month-by-month project pay and base compensation on the results. After all, the focus is not engagement, but engagement that leads to click-throughs, positive commentary, and increased Web sales or those earthly cash register rings.
  

What do you think of social media ambiguity? What are some other ways companies can avoid pitfalls or ambiguity traps set by experts?

Thanks for reading!
Tim

Seeking a second opinion for my viral condition

Axiom's resident videographer and special projects coordinator Dave Sniadak weighs in on the reality of creating viral videos. Watch this controversial viral video below and read on...



Viral videos. Everyone wants one. But how do you make one? Is there an easy formulaic process for producing a spot that will set fire to laptops around the world? Simple answer - no. Yet there are people, programs and companies that claim they can provide viral results with little to no investment. Really? That may be true for bloggers with webcams who have millions of followers - one in particular comes to mind, though this person will remain anonymous, since he got more than enough attention for a pointed question aimed at a certain West Coast beauty queen - but what about us regular folks? What makes a good ‘viral video’ and how do you monetize it? Two questions I’ll try to address as quickly as possible.

Defining viral
First of all, let’s define exactly what a ‘viral video’ is. Visiting the Encyclopedia Britannica of our generation - Wikipedia - I found that a viral video is defined as a "video clip that gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through e-mail or instant messaging, blogs or other media sharing websites." Viral videos usually are topical glimpses into society, covering recent news or entertainment events. But viral videos are also random acts of anything - I particularly found ‘Whack-a-Kitty’ (see above) to be modestly amusing - and are usually produced with nothing more than the camera on your cell phone or webcam.

While you can find just about anything imaginable in video form on sites like YouTube, Facebook, Squidoo.com and even Photobucket.com, how do you turn internet video magic into money in the bank? Ken McCarthy has a great take on this subject. He says that regardless of how great a video you have - on your site, a video hosting site or otherwise - video on the web is like playing the lottery.

“It's foolish to equate sheer volume of communication or that fact that the communication spready quickly or the fact it cost nothing to the original publisher with commercial value,” McCarthy stated in a blog post back in 2006. “The only communication worth anything in business is a focused message sent to a targeted individual that leads to that individual taking a commercially meaningful action (opt-in, inquiry, or purchase).”

I agree with him 103%. While it’s nice to think that your $1 video could result in $1,000,000 worth of views, the reality of the matter is that unless you’ve executed an incredibly compelling message and targeted your exact audience - and that audience is comparable to the Oprah Universe - most of your work will simply take up virtual space in a virtual landscape of forgotten videos. Don’t take it personally, your message probably just wasn’t that good.

Or, here’s a thought, it wasn’t directed to the right people. Just because 124-million people have watched Susan Boyle knock ‘em dead on Britain’s Got Talent, doesn’t mean 124-million people are going to buy DirectTV and request ITV so they can catch all the action this season.

Cashing in on viral
Monetizing viral videos is a slippery slope. JCPenney commissioned UK-based ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi to help get husbands out of the ‘doghouse’. BusinessWeek lauded the creative team for viral video done right. While this long-form commercial resonated with target consumers, it still had mass appeal and made men around the globe rethink gifts for their significant others. In addition to the video, JCPenney supported the message with a microsite and utilized social media networks through effective new-media strategies. The retailer also cited unanticipated success - servers crashed and incurred unexpected costs to reboot computer support systems - but in the end, “Beware of the Doghouse” is a brilliant case study in how videos, viral or not, can boost brand awareness in a positive way...well, for the intended audience at least. (Writer’s note - I know I’m a lot more conscious of what I buy my wife!)

If you set out with the mentality of making a ‘viral video’ for the sake of winning business, you’re setting yourself up for disaster. Take Agency.com, for example. You all remember this, they set out to produce a viral video in order to win Subway’s lucrative advertising campaign. And as everyone in the Blogosphere learned, made the pitch more about themselves that the clients’ desires. AdRants.com had a great take on the debacle, saying Agency.com attempted to “hipify (themselves) with viral goodness in front of the industry all in the name of cool factor and winning business.” Big mistake.

But who’s to say that producing a video for the sake of having video is a bad thing? If you’re setting out to produce videos that promote your product or service, that’s wonderful. More power to you! Just keep in mind that if you’re expecting a video posted on YouTube to translate into stacks of cash lining the walls of your office, you may want to reevaluate your creative process.

How have you utilized video to promote your business? Had any videos go ‘viral’? Tell us about them - we’d love to hear your viral stories.

Pink Porsche CEO Knows a Thing or Two about Twitter Engagement

News is out that a smattering of CEOs are on Twitter, but are they actually holding to Twitter’s unsaid golden rule of engagement?

Seven of the eighteen CEOs mentioned in this article hold their update numbers to a miniscule double digit showing—with thousands of people following them. The question then is: What’s the point of following? Is it really for the tweets or for the fame and possible fortune of being replied to by a CEO?

That leaves us with 11 CEOs who do understand engagement on Twitter, and even though their follower numbers may be shoe-ins for the next Ashton Kutcher, we can’t forget about those up and coming rising Twitter CEO stars who offer quality conversations microblogging style.

That’s where my Twinterview with @AmandaVega comes in. Ms. Vega is a CEO on Twitter who operates and owns Amanda Vega Consulting. While her Twitter page just recently hit the 1,000 followers mark, she understands the purpose of transparency and engagement— and in this case, quality beats quantity. Among the things that I envy about her (besides the fact that she’s a CEO who manages 87+ workers): she owns a "pink" Porsche, though, I’d prefer "speed yellow."

But no matter if you own a pink Porsche or a ’99 white Nissan Altima (my car), @AmandaVega enjoys your company. Just because she’s rich, doesn’t mean she’s off limits to tweeting with you, which is more than I can say for the many unresponsive CEOs on Twitter). I asked Ms. Vega several questions regarding her reason for being on Twitter, and here’s what she had to say:

@AxiomPR: As a CEO, what are you hoping to accomplish by being on twitter?
@AmandaVega: I am hoping to extend brand and also provide education and ideas to everyone else trying to figure out monetizing social media. Idea sharing. I use my personal twitter share knowledge, help others extend their causes/brands, and push info to ppl that may miss otherwise.

@AxiomPR: Do you think microblogging is the next best thing? What 'next best things' will be coming to the social media realm, iyo?
@AmandaVega: I think next "best" things will be custom content delivery, extension of bus online thru social media, and more smartphone tools for life

@AxiomPR: Have you found ur being on twitter has led to business leads. If so, can you provide a ratio -- online (twitter) to offline leads.
@AmandaVega: No business leads. Some good PR, and sales for customers, but no leads for us. Those on here usually already have a team doing soc media

@AxiomPR: How would you say most company CEOs are using Twitter, and does the C-suite approach work?
@AmandaVega: Many CEOs are sadly using Twitter via a PR or mktg firm to push the same adv messaging, not really using social media as a 2 way convo. The small bus CEO's seem to be trying to extend brand and sell stuff, and reach out

@AxiomPR: Are ur employees on Twitter representing you or their own personal account, or r u one woman shop?
@AmandaVega: We have 87+. They are all on personally. We don't make them rep us through our brand - they make up our brand - so that's all that matters

@AxiomPR: What are the clients you specialize in and do you find their product/service types on Twitter?
@AmandaVega: We have clients of all types: organic, baby, nanotech, clothing, food. We use soc med tied into PR/mktg to extend brand and use transparent honest personas/brand zealots/moms/scientists/doctors on our team to help talk back and forth in many convos w/links

@AxiomPR: Are you forming what the new PR strategy is calls "Strategic alliances" to keep overhead and long man hours down?
@AmandaVega: Usually the agencies use us to do that. We have large contractor staff and been doing socmed for 15 years - so yes alliances, but flipped. The company has been built like that from ground up really to keep overhead low, profit high, and custom deliverables for each client.

Like Ms. Vega, I’m sure there are many up and coming Twitter CEO stars, and to help the little big CEOs, I’d like to create an ongoing list of CEOs you’ve come across on Twitter offering quality conversation tweets. While you're searching, check out what Amanda Vega Consulting can do for you here.

Thanks for reading!
Tim

Is Twitter Responsible for Typo-Filled Resumes and Poor Job Interviewing?

As microblogging continues to take a front seat for “hottest communication fad", it's also causing some stress among marketing and public relations employers.

Going through a number of informational interviews, career development sessions and my own family’s reflections on my resume, I learned the zero tolerance policy of “typos.” Yet, we are seeing it more and more on resumes. Could it be that this has something to do with how tweets on Twitter are composed? True, SMS or text came long before Twitter was introduced – though people have been chit-chatting it up and sharing information for centuries in coffee shops, sports arenas, office environments, and the online version of this is called Twitter.

The bottom line is this: Twitter wasn’t meant for typos; that’s just what happens when you have 140 characters to get your message across. But “Plz”, “thx”, a miss of the word “the” are not only seen on Twitter feeds. They’re in resumes and cover letters. The lack of consideration or professionalism is also manifested in the utterance of a young/Gen Y job candidate saying, “This is sweet!” instead of “Thanks I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.”

What’s more evidence of this concern? This article, and a number of university reports showing communications students graduating with poor writing skills, which has been an ongoing concern. Honestly, what is the other side of this argument? (I’d really like to know in order to be better informed on this issue).

If you are looking for a job at a communications firm, please remember that just because you are ripe on social media in your resume doesn’t make it a guarantee that you are good at communication. “Traditional” still stands, so avoid the typos and lack of consideration for grammatical missteps.

Thx 4 ur consideration!