RonAmok!

A few months ago, my friend Rob at countdowntofifty.com leaned over his cup of coffee and described his latest fixation–Arrowhead’s addition of a convenient new handle to its 5-gallon water bottle. The handle itself wasn’t the problem, its the design that bothered him–specifically the fact that the handle encroached into the container, leading Rob to question the new bottle’s capacity.

He looked on the Arrowhead website. He searched Google. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he called Arrowhead directly. The confident customer service rep on the other end of the call assured him that the new bottles still held five gallons, pointing out that the handle was hollow so it held water too.

But Rob wasn’t convinced. As I munched on my breakfast bagel, he described an experiment that the customer service rep suggested: to pour five 1-gallon Arrowhead bottles of water into one of the new 5-gallon versions. Before our breakfast was over, Rob decided to record the experiment and I offered to play cameraman for him.

The experiment’s conclusion matched Rob’s intuition: Five 1-gallon Arrowhead bottles of water didn’t fit into the company’s new 5-gallon container. There were 10 ounces of water left over!

The reason that I’m telling this story has less to do with the experiment and more to do with the online results. Before Rob published his video, he could find nothing about the new design on Google. After publishing it, however, the video holds the #2 spot in a Google search for “Arrowhead 5 gallon.”

Inquisitive minds are starting to find it. Two days ago, Rob’s video got its first comment:

This is priceless! My husband & I just got our Arrowhead delivery last week and wondered the same exact thing. I being the more cynical one said, “if I find there’s not exactly 5 gallons in there, we’re switching to Sparklets”. I’ve been too busy to investigate & now you’ve saved me the time…glad I Googled my suspicions first
Great job & very entertaining to boot!

Google is your company’s reputation manager. What happens when someone Google’s their suspicions about your products or services?

Photo Credit: tom.arthur

Tags: Arrowhead water countdowntofifty Google reputation

I love Improv Everywhere. Their three word tagline: “We cause scenes” is elegant and brilliant. Can your company describe what it does using only three words?

Their most recent video, High Five Escalator shows what a little creativity, a few friends and a video camera can do. At the time of this posting, it has 370,417 views in five days.

Businesses in a down economy can learn a lot from this creative group. Money is tight. So, here’s a thought. Instead of spending money that you don’t have, how about spending some time to create compelling/fun/thought-provoking/useful information/edutainment for your clients?

Bob Maples, CEO of Maples Communications has this saying: “Outta sight, outta mind, outta business.” So, is your company outta sight? Are you layin’ low during this downturn? Good luck with that.

Rob Shore of Shorespeak always asks: “What’s your Memorability Quotient?”  Are you being memorable? What is your company doing right now that makes it stand out from all of your competitors?

Social Media can help solve both of these problems. Your company can be “in sight” and memorable. Unfortunately, whenever I run this crazy idea by business folks, I’m greeted with “the stare” followed by, “We don’t have the time to do something like that!”

Our economy has been strong for so many years that businesses have picked up some bad habits. We’ve become lazy, creating corporate group-think that prefers throwing dollars at problems instead of spending the time to solve them. Perhaps our present economic conditions will help us reconsider our instincts.

• Do you have a product that makes people smile? Put together a video showing their natural response to it.
• Does it deliver services that can be demonstrated publicly? Do it — just make sure that the video camera is rolling.
• Is your product so complicated that nobody except a PhD can understand it? Record your CEO explaining it to a group of kindergartners.

Inbound Marketing firm, Hubspot does a great job with their online music videos that teach Social Media concepts such as Inbound Marketing (48,765 views in 67 days) and Link Love (3,359 views in 4 days.)

Don’t wait for Washington politicians; create your own Social Media Stimulus Package. Grab a few of your most innovative employees, a video camera and go make media that your customers will enjoy. If you do a good enough job, they just might send it to a friend who is looking for what you are offering.

Tags: improveverywhere high five escalator hubspot link love inbound marketing ronamok new media evangelist

Sometimes I get so wound up with my projects, that I’ll wake up at 3:00 a.m. and can’t fall back to sleep. The good news is that I’ve found an easy road back to dreamland. All I have to do is head to any corporate press room, read the press releases, and five minutes later I’m counting sheep again.

Because the traditional McPress Release looks like this:

COMPANY NAME, a world leader in SOMETHING THAT CAN’T BE DISPUTED, who makes seamlessly integrated, value-added, NAME OF PRODUCT FAMILY here, has just released SOME WIZZ-BANG PRODUCT. ADD FAKE QUOTE FROM EXECUTIVE HERE. If you have any questions, contact NAME HERE.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

And then I read one of the best press releases that I’ve ever seen. Take a peek at the first paragraph of this press release from IBM:

ARMONK, NY & WASHINGTON, DC – 09 Oct 2008: Munir is five years old, and he lives in a ruggedly remote, rural village in Northern Pakistan. For months, he has suffered from an aggressive and worsening skin lesion that, for want of medical care, has gone untreated. But now, his fortunes have changed for the better – as they have for a growing number of Pakistanis in the region. Today, as his relieved father would quickly tell you, Munir is on the road to full recovery.

How’s THAT for a hook? You can’t help but want to read more.

But my delight goes beyond the great writing. Your New Media Evangelist appreciates IBM’s use of online video in the press release.

The video is professionally produced and has a great voiceover — two ingredients that typically lead to disaster in online corporate video. But in this case, it works! The video not only tells a story, but it ties exceptionally well into the text of the press release. It focuses on people USING the technology — doctors diagnosing and treating patients remotely — instead of showing stock shots of flashing lights and graphical user interfaces.

The only nit that I have is related to the last three paragraphs. Paragraphs 7-9 fall back into traditional inane PR blather. It’s almost as if a human wrote the first six paragraphs, and an “Automatic Press Release Machine” wrote the last part. Checkout the first sentence of paragraph 7 to see what I mean:

“The Department of State, through the Pakistan Telemedicine Project, is demonstrating the transformative power of telecommunications technology under the U.S. Government’s Digital Freedom Initiative, which seeks to encourage the spread of technology to the developing world,” said Ferial Saeed, Deputy U.S. Coordinator & Office Director for International Communications & Information Policy.

Umm…who uses “transformative power” in every day language?

Independent of my minor complaint, there is so much to learn from this press release.

• It’s written in a conversational voice
• It uses the power of storytelling
• It integrates video that puts you face-to-face with the people who care.

So what if it falls off the wagon in paragraph 7-9, it’s still infinitely better than the “seamlessly integrated, value-added, NAME OF PRODUCT FAMILY here” version.

I can only see one downside to having more PR departments start producing content like this. My personal cure from insomnia will be severely jeopardized.

UPDATE: For some reason, IBM killed the original video that I embedded and re-posted another. I can’t see a difference, so I don’t understand the switcheroo, but it’s fixed now.

Tags:IBM Pakistan Press Release Press Room Telemedicine Wateen Telecom Motorola Medweb USAID U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Technology Research Center Pakistani Government Holy Family Hospital in Rawalpindi New Media Evangelist