RonAmok!

Last Wednesday evening, I attended a local Linked Orange County meetup that was sponsored by Bryan Elliott of the SoCalSportsActionNetwork. The crowd consisted of everything from unemployed folks looking for jobs, to consultants, marketeers, personal coaches, nonprofits, and of course, one New Media Evangelist

One gentleman was there to promote himself for a new job. He described himself as a 20-year veteran of the apparel industry and when I asked for specifics, he rattled off manufacturing facts for all kinds of apparel, from sportswear to denim.

Impressed with his knowledge, I asked, “Do you have a blog?”

Sheepishly, he said that he didn’t. His next words were something that I hear often. “I should, but I just don’t know what to write about.”

Grrr…this answer really gets me going, because too many people sell themselves short. Everyone has a unique perspective on the world and Apparel Guy is not the exception. With 20 years of experience, he obviously has unique knowledge that a very specific audience would love to tap into.

About five minutes later, a trendy looking, twenty-something wearing a sports jacket, white shirt and stone-washed bluejeans, wandered over to our little group.

Somehow, the subject of denim came up and Apparel Guy transformed before our very eyes. The same dude who earlier claimed that he had nothing to write about launched into an enthusiastic explanation on how Trendy Guy’s pants were manufactured. Without taking a breath, he did a similar analysis of another guy’s jeans–guessing that they were probably cheaper because they hadn’t gone through as many processing steps as Trendy Guy’s had.

Apparel Guy was PASSIONATE about DENIM. He knew more about denim than anyone else I’d ever met and he loved to talk about it.

I interrupted him midstream. “I thought you didn’t know what to write about,” I said through a sarcastic smile. “You need to write a blog about denim.”

“I could do that!” he said, before jumping back to thread counts, weave patterns, and softening techniques.

What are you knowledgeable and passionate about? Do you have a blog?

Photo Credits:

Flickr Photostream from Six Revisions

Flickr Photostream from Chris Lorenz (@chrislorenz on Twitter)

Tags: blogging resume job-seeker passion experience denim New Media Evangelist

They’re talking about you. Your fans are discussing your products, your services, and your brand.

Can you hear them?

These conversations aren’t happening behind your back. Instead, they’re occurring publicly, transmitted through the use of blogs (text), podcasts (audio) and online video. Within minutes of posting, their content is diced, sliced, indexed and made available to anyone around the world.

Are you listening?

Fans come in all forms. They can love and hate. For example I’m a fan of the New England Patriots, yet I hate the New York Jets. And the more successful the Jets are, the more I hate them…and the more I talk about them…and the more interested I am in what they are doing. Putting this observation into writing has brought me to the horrifying realization that I’m a Jets fan. An anti-fan, yet a fan nonetheless.

Fans identify with you, your message and what your organization stands for. Because fans are so emotionally involved, if you disappoint, they’ll turn on you with brutal honesty. Just remember: only your friends (fans?) will tell you that you have bad breath.

So, are you paying attention?

Are you tapping into these fanversations through free tools like  search.twitter.com, Google Alerts, Google Blog Search, Technorati or Google News, all which notify you whenever a fan talks about your company, brand, products or services? And rather than cramming these important results into your overcrowded email inbox, are you subscribing to them via RSS?

Are you gathering valuable insights, ideas, and attitudes from your fans without forcing them to complete yet another self-serving customer satisfaction survey? Are you visiting your company’s fan sites, which are either built upon privately-owned domains or publicly-available third-party platforms such as Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, or Ning? Do you check photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, or video-sharing sites such as YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo or mDialog for examples of fans using, describing, praising or belly-aching about your products?

Can you get over yourself and let fans describe your products and services in their terms as opposed to regurgitating your pithy little marketing messages? Will you let them bastardize your products through innovative uses like dropping mint candies into your soft drink product to initiate the soda pop pyrotechnics of nucleation? Or, are you just waiting to swoop in like a storm trooper with legal guns a blazin’?

Does it bother you that fans don’t care about your mission statement? Does your blood pressure rise when you realize that they don’t care how much “value” you can add, how many “resources” you can leverage, or if your CEO can walk on water? Can you live with the fact that fans simply want your products or services to work well: to eliminate their pain, increase their happiness, make them healthier, or just get them through the day?

And can you listen…I mean REALLY listen?

Listen to your fanversations. You just might learn something.

Tags: fanversations

Photo Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/17748937@N00/2114500411/

On Saturday, June 3rd, 2006, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of Buckfield, Maine, released a clever video demonstrating the effects of dropping 500 Mentos mints into 101 two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. The video propelled the two soda pyro-technicians into stardom, as they performed their magic for David Letterman, Ellen DeGeneres, and were mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone Magazine, and the New York Times. The two men had become unlikely evangelists for two worldwide brands that they had no official affiliation with – yet.

The story illustrates how New Media is turning the world of traditional marketing upside down. Overnight, Coca Cola and Perfetti Van Melle lost control of their brands. On Friday June 2, 2006, brand managers at Coca Cola went to bed, assuming that they were in the soft drink business. Their counterparts at Perfetti Van Melle woke up on Saturday believing that they were in the candy business. Literally overnight, each company found itself thrust unwillingly into the entertainment business. It’s a lesson that every marketeer must learn in the age of New/Social Media: The only remaining control you over your brand is related to how you react to what others are saying about it.

Viral videos are like the month of March: They come in like a lion yet go out like a lamb. So what happened with this one? What affect did synchronized soda geysers have on these two international brands? Positive? Negative? No change? The great thing about New Media is that everything is measurable. From inside or outside your company, tools exist to track all sorts of things. I’ve found that the hardest part of measuring the effects of New Media is not the actual measurement, but agreeing on the interpretation of the results.

For example, let’s take a look at one of the outside-the-corporate-firewall tools at your disposal. Google Trends offers businesses a way to measure buzz, from two different angles: 1) It tracks what people are searching Google for and 2) it tracks what is found in Google News. Therefore, by typing your company’s name into the tool, a figure-of-merit is calculated that represents how many times people are searching for that term, or how many stories are being written about it.

So let’s perform a Google Trend analysis on “Diet Coke” (in blue) vs. “Mentos” (in red).

For the 125 weeks leading up to June 2006, the average Search Engine Index (SEI) score for “Diet Coke” was 0.74 compared with 0.48 for “Mentos.” One week after the initial release, as the story picked up even more steam, keyboards across the globe drove these SEI figures up 994% for “Diet Coke” and a whopping 3190% for “Mentos” — not because of anything the two international brands did on their own. Rather, because two New Englanders recorded themselves dropping candy mints into bottles of soda!

Both SEIs have finally settled back to an equilibrium point. Over the past 53 weeks, “Diet Coke” has averaged 0.80 (up slightly 7.7%), but surprisingly, “Mentos” is being typed into a Google search 129% more (1.02) than its pre-video score. Put another way, for the 125 weeks prior to the video’s release, the term “Diet Coke” was typed into the Google Search Engine 35% more than “Mentos.” Today, “Diet Coke” lags the search volume of “Mentos” by 27%.

Another way to look at the data is illustrated through the following table:

Two years later, the fun chemical reaction still holds substantial top-ten spots in both Google and Yahoo searches. And Eepybird.com isn’t the only site driving these results. A YouTube search for the term “Diet Coke and Mentos” yields 6870 videos. This story lives on as others record themselves performing similar feats.

Everything in business needs measurement and New Media is no exception. Many tools exist that can provide a glimpse of how the world is perceiving you. Individually they may not offer much insight. But together, by combining their measurements, you can piece together a very interesting picture.

So, what are you measuring?

Tags: Ron Ploof ronamok ronamok.com new media evangelist new media strategist eepybird eepybird.com diet coke mentos measurement youtube google news google trends brand brand measurement tools