YouTube not just for laughs, offers

sophisticated publishing

Kansas City Business Journal - March 16, 2007

San Jose / Silicon Valley Business Journal - May 4, 2007

by Mike Lundgren

If you are feeling behind the curve on the YouTube trend, don't.

I'm in the business of tracking key trends and emerging technologies -- in other words, change. I'm also fortunate to work with a number of like-minded technophiles and armchair futurists -- we stay tuned to the latest blogs, conferences, podcasts and so on, and we all have our own blogs and podcasts and speak at conferences -- yet, not a single one of us predicted the meteoric rise of YouTube.

A few short years ago there was little talk about the transformative effect social applications and Web 2.0 phenomena such as the open source movement, sharing, collaboration and consumer generated media would have on the internet. 

Certainly no one was talking about how brands would need to leverage these technologies in order to keep pace with audience fragmentation and the proliferation of new channels of brand engagement.

Learn from the Past and Approach the future with EXTREME pragmatism

Yet, there was a key moment in 2000 when a door to the future cracked open and told the story of 2006 with startling accuracy.  That door was the music-sharing community called Napster.

Napster signaled what was possible when a breakthrough social application (in this case music sharing) empowered individuals with choice and lowered the barriers for self-expression and easy access to desirable content.  The legality debate over Napster made headlines and obscured its social significance.  In hindsight, the meaning of Napster was crystal clear — the forces of human nature (especially when super-charged by technology) reign supreme.

The daunting task of predicting the technological landscape for brands in 2010—much less next year— requires the lessons of extreme pragmatism that break-out hits like Napster (2000), iTunes Music Store (2003) and last year’s YouTube, facebook, Flickr and MySpace offer.

Napster’s footprint suggests we not only should have seen MySpace coming, we shouldn’t be any more surprised by its popularity than its potential demise.  Why?  Because applications and services enabled by new technology will come and go; the forces of human nature – of individual identity and interpersonal connection, in particular—are constant.

Learn from the past
Over a decade ago Alan Kay, a preeminent computer scientist and Apple Computer Fellow quipped prophetically that, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Fortunately, we don’t have to invent the next MySpace or YouTube; as marketers we only need be prepared to understand and appropriately leverage their respective Web 2.0 roles.

For its part, MySpace significantly lowered the bar for creating a great personal brand online.  In other words, MySpace made it easy to look cool to others and (strangely enough) to yourself.  For marketers, the MySpace challenge is to create desirable content and features that members will want to co-opt and place on their own pages to enhance their personal brand.

YouTube on the other hand has made it supremely easy to upload, tag and find entertaining, inane or informative video.  However, YouTube is much more than a catalog of viral video, YouTube is an entire video publishing platform.  Chief among YouTube’s sometimes overlooked features is the ability to embed a YouTube video on a blog or MySpace page. 

The rise of portable content
In this new model, a sports brand can place a soccer tips video on its website and make it just as easy for a coach to add that video to the team’s website, as a player to lift it from the team website and place it on their MySpace page.  This is called portable content.  The role of portable content is to create a persistent brand presence wherever it is that people can be found digitally.  This is not just limited to MySpace or blogs—portable content extends to the desktop through technology like widgets and even to the gaming console and mobile phone.

Looking forward to 2007 and beyond
These days, a major brand’s marketing plan that doesn’t at least have a nod to social media, social applications or social networks could be viewed as sluggish.

However, just a nod is the beginning of the end.  Brands expect a kind of leadership today that is one part breakthrough marketing and creative, one part technology and equal parts futurist and social anthropology.  The surprise unseating of a well-entrenched marketing executive or advertising agency by a major brand may well have been the result of lip service (or) underestimation of this new requirement.

In some measure, all brands want protection from the disruptive technologies and discontinuous innovations that have the potential to wreck their world.  For the most part that protection begins with an understanding of forces at work in the Web 2.0 / “World is Flat” economy. 

Where marketers can’t (necessarily) provide brands the protection they seek, we can diminish their exposure by helping them understand where the world is heading, socially and digitally. To some extent we also can help brands future-proof their investments in digital marketing infrastructure by informing an attitudinal shift for how that infrastructure should be built going forward.

Lessons from the Web 2.0 innovation bellwethers

- Give people what they want, and make it supremely easy for them to do what they are going to anyway.  It’s that simple – and it’s that hard.

- If you have an idea, execute it (cheaply / quickly)

- If the idea sticks, then invest in it and build it out.

In closing, predicting the future has never been more intimidating because the new “digital-world” is heavily incentivized to generate disruptive innovations.  Additionally, the barriers to open-source collaboration and co-creation are minimal; and thanks to an always-on broadband Internet there is no longer any distance between what is possible and a mass audience.  The safe bet: facilitate human nature. 

An Inconvenient Truth debuted last night in Kansas City at the Tivoli in Manor Square. The “buzz” about the film is spot-on, as it is as powerful as it is persuasive. No matter where you currently stand on the continuum of global warming, this film will almost certainly jar your sensibilities and shake away your tolerance for the status quo.

It would be socially irresponsible not to urge our readers in the most insistent tone possible (even at the risk of sounding impolite) to not only see this film—but, to also bring friends with you to the screening.

Unfortunately, the brushes haven’t quite lived up to our expectations. The short of it, is that they are perfect for your briefcase or purse should you need some emergency brushing, or even for a camping trip; however, if you travel quite a bit (and for extended periods), the following shortcomings become quite evident:

1. The toothpaste reservoir doesn’t hold enough toothpaste for more than a few days on the road.  This is a big dissapointment as my trips often last 5 days or more, requiring I bring along replacement toothpaste; which partly defeats the purpose of the design.
2. The brush-head cover (which doubles as a rinse cup!) seals in moisture/keeps out germs (which is good); except that the bristles end up staying soft (because they are kept wet) and, though I haven’t experienced this yet, I’m guessing that eventually some form of mildew / nasty smell will eventually be the result. In any case, the effect on the brush is to render it about as effective/satisfying as the el-Cheapo toothbrush you get on an international flight or at a hotel when you forget your brush.  My "hack" around this problem is the leave the brush uncovered overnight.
3. I purchased both the clear plastic model and the chrome model. I definitely prefer the clear model. For starters, the chrome model bears a creepy resemblance to a women’s personal “massager,” and the chrome-painted plastic is already showing scratches and looking a bit shabby where the paint has worn off.  On the other hand, the clear is very cool and it is much easier to know how much toothpaste you have left at a glance than the tiny window on the chrome model.
4. More "hacks" and tips: should you choose to buy an OHSO GO!, when twisting the handle to dispense toothpaste onto the brush, point the brush towards the ground so that gravity helps do the trick of pushing toothpaste onto the bristles. Also, when loading the resivoir handle with toothpaste, I found it quite helpful to squeeze the toothpaste tube lightly to create even pressure / help fill the reservoir when you are turning the handle (this tip is in the instruction manual as well).

I think if OHSO fixed these problems, they would have a hit product. Indeed, they would have the iPod of (travel) toothbrushes. Where I wouldn’t buy another OHSO for myself, I would recommend it as a gift, and wouldn’t discourage anyone from buying one if their intent was a back-up brushing system for their purse/briefcase or car… or even for backpacking.

I have an interminable case of the giggles caused by Chevy’s Tahoe campaign (circa The Apprentice).  Chevy asked consumers to create their own Chevy Tahoe commercial.  Chevy’s ad agency (Campbell-Ewald) must have know (at a bare minimum) environmentalists would use the platform to fire anti-Chevy missives.  It’s doubtful they expected to incite a full-on mêlée of ever-more creative brand defamation drive-by’s.  It took me about 3 minutes to create my own commentary on the Bush administration’s inability to see how near we are to the tipping point of global climate change. 

I’m certain (at the time of this writing) that I have shown my metallic sarcasm to at least 100 people, who have in turn commented they have shown my entry to their friends.  Then I posted it on a political blog I maintain called Smart White House (check out the story).  

So, is this Chevy campaign brilliant or blunder?  I have to go with brilliant blunder. 

Sure there is some brand damage… yet, some small voice inside my head is telling me---wait!  People are spending about 9 minutes on average interacting with the Chevy brand at the site and returning countless times to view others commercials.  Chevy Tahoe talk is everywhere now.  Last week if asked to name three SUV’s, I’m certain I wouldn’t have thought of Tahoe; whereas this week Tahoe would top my list.  Is that bad? 

Further, environmentalists are way too polarized to be effected by this campaign to even consider a Tahoe purchase.  On the other hand, SUV buyers probably don’t care enough about the environment to (not) buy a Tahoe.  I suppose Chevy need only worry about fence-sitters.  Definitely not as cool to buy a Tahoe this week as perhaps it might have been last week, the question is, who is really affected here?  I can’t wait to see if there is a corresponding bump (or downturn) in sales as a result of this campaign.

Of late, I have heard some marketers discussing WOM as a panacea for activating marketing messages in the face of market fragmentation and shifting channels of brand engagement.  I don’t buy it.  Either does my friend Mike McCamon.  Though my views are a little more tempered than Mike’s, I also do not believe that WOM is as an efficient marketing channel as others believe / tout.  You know, the 1 person tells 7 people and they each tell 4 people etc.  Below are my thoughts on the efficiency and efficacy of WOM marketing (enjoy):

Though most people on the planet have at least one topic they are a transmitter for (at least offline). The WOM message must (first) land on the right transmitter to even be considered for pass-along; and then we have to assume the transmitter will transmit the message to a receiver that cares enough—for even the first-line handoff to be a success (much less subsequent pass-along). Certainly online (blogs, email forwards and portable content increase the probability… but, still the one person tells three and so on is the pipe-dream of many a pyramid marketing scheme. The real world simply is not this efficient. Even with massively efficient social networks… we just have to accept that certain topics and delivery techniques are great for wide dispersion but have low frequency, and others have high frequency with low dispersion. Telling a friend that Google is awesome requires little explanation and carries a very low barrier to entry for the receiver to verify for themselves, just how awesome Google is (in a couple of clicks). Woooosh!

Now try that with financial services… or a new Bluetooth enabled headset and we are back to low efficiency (i.e. the benefit is more vertical than horizontal and not readily experienced or validated).

Another myth is that WOM is so much more effective than advertising… well, though it is widely cited that people trust WOM like 76% vs. their own actual past experience 63% or advertising 15%. Transmitters still rely heavily on advertising and PR for initial awareness. Taking this a little further… effective WOM makes the transmitter (somehow) look better in the eyes of the receivers (more knowledgeable, cooler, in-the-know) and most WOM content is simply corporate-speak that takes much effort to repurpose for effective pass-along.

WOM is an important channel. But it can rarely exist as a standalone discipline without at least some support from traditional PR and traditional on and offline marketing. Today, a solid marketing plan for a large initiative includes at least a nod to WOM, social networks, content syndication and consumer generated media—that, is integrated with so-called traditional tactics.

Familiar backstage faces... Charlie, Keith, John B., Jamie and the band etc.  Working for Aerosmith for over 3 years was the most fun you could probably ever get paid for...  Have you seen Aerosmith live?  They will make you lifelong fans with just one show.  Even if you think they are not your genre, the energy, musicianship and connection to the audience rivals any other band touring now, or in the past 3 decades.  My favorite tour was the year they went out with Run DMC (RIP Jay Mizel) and Kid Rock (another surprise live) -- Unless you were there, you just can't imagine how cool it was to see all of these great musicians and Rock/Rap pioneers on stage at the same time performing Walk This Way in homage to the first true mash-up.

Rockin' out with Aerosmith

Jan. 19: NBC's Kerry Sanders takes you behind the scenes at an Aerosmith concert, as part of the "How It Works" series.