What’s the last ad campaign that stopped you in your tracks?

There aren’t too many around that can do that, are there? Billions of dollars spent on advertising each year and we can count on just one hand the number of ad campaigns that get above the static. Than makes a brand scoring big worth notice.

I’ve been in Portland a lot lately, where Wieden and Kennedy’s “Just Do It” campaign for Nike is legend. (Here’s a nice case study on that.)  You can also find a copy of David Ogilvy’s best work on my desk, when it isn’t being borrowed. This is marketing at its best. What makes up your cannon of great work?

Guess what, I’ve found another that’s scoring big.

Some of the absolute best social media work anywhere is being done by a century-old firm you probably already know. The Hartford’s Achieve Without Limits, is taking cause marketing to “at-scale success”. They are gaining real social media credibility and capability, and they’re building a sizable engaged tribe of followers. And what makes it work, is this is authentic and aligned with their corporate zeitgeist, or as marketers would say, their brand architecture. This alignment is the table steaks for  moving from good to great.

The Hartford launched a multi-year campaign, Achieve Without Limits to celebrates the firm’s long association with U.S. Paralympics, and the example its athletes set for dedication and achievement.

How would you build a platform based on dedication and achievement? They recruited the talent of Janusz Kaminski, the Academy Award Winner who filmed “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindlers List” to create breathtaking vignettes that introduce the Paralympic athletes. Then, they dedicated their ad slots in the NCAA’s March Madness finals to debut the ads – which carried calls to meet and support the athletes through a robust Facebook Fan page and specialized Twitter account.

Hearing Melissa Stockwell say “no, I would not give back my disability if I could” simply is a remarkable moment. It earns comments and engagement. Great advertising campaigns share four attributes: they are  tangible, approachable, personal, and memorable. This platform gets around those bases well.

The Hartford also pledged to donate $1 to U.S. Paralympics for every “Like” or “Share” that the Facebook page receives.  And, they backed this promise up with innovative paid advertising on Facebook. But most importantly, they delivered prospective fans to social media experiences worth liking. There are parts of this campaign that are transfixing – as in, pausing it to show the rest of the family.

The edge of Sam Kavanaugh’s Excuse Converter has perceptible snark that recalls Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like“. Team members share indepth profiles and some of what they’ve  learned through their Paralympic journeys. And The Hartford promotes meeting them on the road to the London 2012 games.  If good marketing is a story, there’s a rich and long enough story arc to hang a novel or series off this platform.

What has the Hartford learned? The created a lessons learned document which they shared as Social Media 101 for the entire Paralympic movement. While competitors were inactive, preachy, commercial, or just chatter, The Hartford did something good to advance a social cause they’re part of. And along the way, they built a social media audience of 105,000 members who are willing to join them in their support of these athletes.

The Hartford treated their social media and cause marketing as long term assets. They avoided being caught up in the tactical questions of lead generation and attribution, and instead did what marketing does at its very best. They used the brand and its values to create a campaign that aggregated and moved an audience.

With another year to go on this story arc, I’m looking forward to cheering on our Paralympic team for the first time, and enjoying the art and spirit The Hartford marshals to take this work across the finish line.  Greatness is within reach.

It’s a pleasure to hold up a relatively unsung campaign as an example of what brand marketers do at their best in cross channel campaigns. Congratulations to everyone at The Hartford, and to Team USA.

Now that you’re in the race, what will you show us next?

The best innovations sometimes come from the ground up. Here are three stories I tweeted about this week on the @UsefulArts Twitter feed.  Each is a super-short story of  a self-empowered sales pioneer who went just a bit off the beaten path to created their own new personal sales channel.

Best Inbound Marketing Ever!
Beer Vendor Takes Twitter Orders for Beers at Seattle Mariners Games
I love the pluck of stadium beer vendor Kevin Zelko (@Msbeervendor), who decided to try having people text their orders and seat numbers, so he could focus on delivery. He may well be the first stadium beer vendor to have his own organized following of fans.
Thanks to @LouisGudema

Getting Your Dream-Job Agency to Notice You
All Boston University undergrad Katelyn Stokes @kstokes28 had to do was post her plan on how she’d get attention from her dream employer, Digitas. She used the names of the firm and its staff repeatedly.  Pretty soon her post was triggering Google alerts and showing up in staff members’ vanity searches on Google.  It just took a day for Digitas to contact her by Twitter to arrange surrender an interview.

Killer Shirts in Just 140 Characters
Last time I saw Edward Boches he was wearing a wild business shirt at the MITX awards. I wondered where he scored them, but I’d never have guessed Twitter. Of course, back then, he wouldn’t have guessed that either. Here’s the story of @NordstromDave who, like Kevin and Katelyn, took 140 characters and created a mobile/social strategy for his little corner of Nordstrom’s.

Do you know someone who has taken their career or brand into their own hands and found a faster route to revenue? Or have you had a Twitter “ahhh” or “ca-ching” moment? Fill us in below!

A friend of the blog emailed this question last week.  He’s new on Twitter and wants advice on getting going. What would you say?

Q: How does anyone know I’m on Twitter?  Spam?!

A: People know you’re on Twitter because you use it
Okay, let me put some meat on that bone.

Why do you want to tweet?
You ask how does “anyone” know.  You probably don’t have enthusiasm to communication with just anyone though.  So think some about groups you care about. Are  there shared topics, experiences, businesses, or geographies that connect the people you want to talk to? Would these audiences prefer your personal and professional comments separately, or mixed together?

Think in terms of what groups matter to you; where you have something to say. Where do you want to be part of the buzz?

At some point the number of followers is meaningless. There are studies that show little difference in impact between people with thousands vs. tens of thousands of followers.  So, think about what audience matters to you, and what you can do that matters to them.

People often first find out about you because you follow them
Anyone who is seriously using Twitter has a nose for “follower spam.” Here’s what a few Twitter friends said they look for before returning a follow:

1. Relevance. Is the Twitter stream of interest to them? Relevance might not just be topic, but perhaps shared location, network, profession, etc.

2. Engagement. Does the person retweet and interact, or just spew links? Have they updated the account in the last day or so?

3. Humanity ( Not an ass / Not a ‘bot)
Do you get the sense this is really a person, and one you’d like being acquainted with?

In short: be generous, or interesting, or focused on something people care about. Any of these is a win.

Don’t think followers, think audience
The social media terms “follower” and “friend” are terribly forced.  I prefer to think in terms of everyone being in the hive together.  The people I read and talk with put ideas in my awareness, and they set my expectation for this medium.  You have to join, you have to listen, you have to give a damn about people you read, or Twitter quickly becomes irrelevant.

The whole idea of followers is a bit bogus.  Buddha has followers. So do communists leaders.  In social media, we have people we share with, enjoy, and learn from.

Search for interesting users
One of Twitter’s strengths is that it is highly searchable.  Recent data suggests it processes as many search requests daily as Bing or Yahoo.  This debatable fact aside, search on Twitter is huge.  Following a #tag’s stream creates an ad-hoc BBS.  So use #tags, lists, and people’s @names.

I tweeted about the Boston Pops with other people who were at the event, as well watching as locally and nationally on TV. We shared an interest in Boston and the 4th of July, and a desire to talk about it.  Some of the people I followed — those who wanted to — followed me back.

You can also see who people follow, and who follows them. So that’s a source.  And public lists gather similar people together. Directories such as WeFollow provide more ways to discover interesting users.

Finding people isn’t hard.  Being worth their interest is. That’s what the medium is about at its best level: engaging.

People you tweet about will notice you.
It’s not much of a jump to believe that people will engage with you  if you engage them first.

So that’s a second path of discovery.  Tweet about people referencing their @name, and either they or the people who pay attention to them will see your tweet.  If it’s remarkable (and sometimes just being noticed is remarkable), you’ll get a response.

So, how picky or promiscuous should you be on finding people to follow?
There are good reasons to use some judgment about who you follow.

1. There are implications. Your mix of followers to follows says something about you.  I recently noticed that famous communists follow nearly nobody in return — they sure look like monolithic  leaders that way, but not like friends who will engage and reciprocate.  Of course, the opposite, someone who follows 1,000 and has few followers back, looks like a spammer who merits no interest or encouragement.

2. There are rules (right here).  Twitter punishes or restricts those who bulk add, delete, or act in spammy ways.  For instance, there’s a 2,000-follow limit — you can’t follow more than 2,000 Twitter users until 2,000 users follow you.  It’s a barrier to keep bad actors small.  That’s another reason no to follow just any one back; it keeps bad actors under this threshold.

3. There are tricks. You can add people to lists and see what they have to say without following them.  This is anonymous and lets you read them without following if they’re not likely to reciprocate.  There are also tools that show the people you’re following who haven’t followed back, so you can then unfollow them. (Always do so gradually, as bulk follows and unfollows look spammy to Twitter.)

4. There are consequences. What’s the punishment for seeming spammy on Twitter?  Well, you’ll miss meeting its smartest and best users, and Twitter has a sort of probation spammish users sometimes find they suffer.  Their Tweets  show up to their own followers, but not in the search stream for anything.  If you go to a conference and use a #tag, you won’t show up in the Twitter stream to anyone who isn’t already following you.  Twitter can undo this, and will do so automatically over time or by request.  It’s another way to deter bad actors.

Help, I’m a Twitter Fail Whale!
I’m one of the few live bloggers at the International Trademark Association’s annual meeting, but you wouldn’t know that if you were an attendee.  My posts haven’t been entering the show’s tweet stream, and it turns out that my account doesn’t appear in Twitter search.  This is a drag, because I’ve been trying to share news and local resources with people who mostly can’t see me (though when my friends retweet my tweets, those are visible).

Sounds like Twitter hell, right?  Here’s the story.

Before the conference I cleared out inactive people on my follow and followers list.  Apparently, using a mass unfollow tool may put my account on the wrong side of Twitter’s use guidelines.

If you’re ever in the same boat, you can avoid having to wade through help pages by remembering this post or link. Twitter has a help page if your hashtags aren’t working.

Do you have this problem?
First, test to see if you have this problem.

Do a “FROM:your_twittername” search, like this. Click this link, and in the twitter search input box, replace the name “usefulars” with your Twitter name (no spaces).

If you see “No results found,” then bingo, you’vebeen banned by Twitter!

Getting “unbanned” so your posts can be seen.

1. Open a Twitter trouble ticket by “Submitting a Help Request here.” Say that your reason is: “Can’t find myself in search.”
2. Send a polite tweet to @twitter by tweeting this text (with YOUR ticket number where indicated): @twitter I’m being filtered out of search. My ticket number is #____. Thanks!
   

In May, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa filed suit against Twitter in California Superior Court, essentially claiming that someone using his name was posting comments that damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress. The suit also claims damage to La Russa’s trademark rights.

Ordinarily, I would have thought little about the case, believing it would get thrown out due to the legal precedent that says those who provide such services are not liable for the content that gets posted on them.

But there are two angles worth considering here. One is called the “right to publicity,” and the other is the evolving notion of digital identity.

The right to publicity is not a federal law, but many states do have it on their books, including California. The California law states:

Right of Publicity — California Civil Code Section 3344:

Use of Another’s Name, Voice, Signature, Photograph, or Likeness in Advertising or Soliciting Without Prior Consent.

(a) Any person who knowingly uses another’s name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness, in any manner on or in products, merchandise, or goods, or for purposes of advertising or selling, or soliciting purchases of products, merchandise, goods or services, without such person’s prior consent, or, in the case of a minor, the prior consent of his parent or legal guardian, shall be liable for any damages sustained by the person or persons injured as a result thereof. In addition, in any action brought under this section, the person who violated the section shall be liable to the injured party or parties in an amount equal to the greater of seven hundred fifty dollars ($750) or the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the unauthorized use, and any profits from the unauthorized use that are attributable to the use and are not taken into account in computing the actual damages. In establishing such profits, the injured party or parties are required to prove his or her deductible expenses. Punitive damages may also be awarded to the injured party or parties. The prevailing party in any action under this section shall also be entitled to attorney’s fees and costs.

Skipping down to paragraph (f):

(f) Nothing in this section shall apply to the owners or employees of any medium used for advertising, including, but not limited to, newspapers, magazines, radio and television networks and stations, cable television systems, billboards, and transit ads, by whom any advertisement or solicitation in violation of this section is published or disseminated, unless it is established that such owners or employees had knowledge of the unauthorized use of the person’s name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness as prohibited by this section.

Now, whereas the Twitter postings (“tweets”) were not commercial in nature, two points remain:

1. One can claim damage to one’s right to publicity through usurpation of identity and subsequent abuse.
2. Supposedly, Twitter was contacted repeatedly about removing the offending Twitter account but did nothing before the suit was filed. (The account is now gone.) Therefore, the owners of Twitter did have knowledge of the unauthorized use of La Russa’s name.

So, Twitter may not be liable for the content of an user’s posting per se, but it could be liable if the user is impersonating someone else and making comments objectionable or damaging to that real person.

And if Twitter was notified about the impersonation and took no action, they are on the hook. The tweets were, in fact, very offensive, which could be seen as damaging Tony La Russa’s reputation and right to publicity.

Whither Digital Identity?
Can anyone claim to be someone else on the internet? Yes. Anonymity works both ways. Will Twitter develop some user identity authorization mechanism? It’s already underway.

This is not only important to avoid liability issues relating to content, but also in the arena of financial transactions. Twitter is working on a payment system, and without some form of user authentication, such a system would be unworkable. Hopefully, such an authorization will serve to address financial and content liabilities at the same time.

What is interesting to me is how far this will go: Twitter as a payment and identity gateway? Blecch.

It raises the red flag of digital identity squatting. At the moment, anyone can use your name as a Twitter username (with all due sympathies to all the John Smiths out there).

By no strange coincidence, Facebook is also looking at a payment system. In addition, as of midnight June 12, users were able to create a more human-friendly link to their pages or profiles using their name. For example, if you are Zoogle McFillibuster, you can now be identitifed on Facebook by www.facebook.com/zoogle.mcfillibuster

It appears that each social networking service is establishing the framework for payment systems, and therefore, user authentication systems. It’s the threat of digital identity squatting — either for gain or for annoyance — that is the next tempest on the internet radar screen.  So, whether or not the La Russa law suit goes anywhere, at least it uncovered the issue of digital identity squatting.

At the Quad Cities Ad Federation in Moline we discussed how sometimes related drivers combine to precipitate market trends, and ended up with a diagram that I’m calling a “bankshot.”  The general pattern is that a predictable driver causes a predictable outcome, and a modifying outcome builds on that to create a  second condition, which extends or modifies the first result.

Here are a few examples that I used to discuss online marketing macro-trends with the Quad Cities Advertising Federation. This was a fantastic gathering of practitioners, who are bringing home marketing campaigns to real-world clients in every medium. Anyway, here are some of the macro-trends in online marketing that we discussed.

Trend Analysis: Mass Market Adoption of Lead Generation

The less-forgiving economy has increased accountability for Chief Marketing Officers, who now experience an average tenure of 2.3 years.  This demand to demonstrate results intersects with improved analytics and marketing automation technology. This trend seems likely to continue; I’ve recently spoken with several venture capital firms doing due diligence on investments focused on the lead generation marketplace.  So the result of better systems and and more demanding business environment is a greater mass-market rush to adopt lead generation programs.

Trend Analysis: Social Media in Business

With its arrival on the cover of Time Magazine, Twitter has reached the top of Gartner’s hype cycle. If I see one more “Should Your CEO Twitter?” article I’ll just get silly. Still real businesses are very focused on figuring out how they can use social media, such as Facebook, viral video, blogs and the like to connect to customers. I’ve visited with several hotel and restaurant chains who are actively sorting out these issues.  So what’s driving this need?

Traditional media is being redefined: mass market interruption is being displaced by new media on the Internet. This is disrupting traditional media business models. However, businesses that pay for media coverage still have business models that require them to aggregate audiences for expanding their markets and, increasingly, expertise to reach them directly.

This need (and a fair amount of “me-too marketing”) brought many firms online with their first websites. The best example I’ve seen of self-publishing is Deliver Magazine. The US Post Office prints and distributes an online magazine to encourage marketers to market to emerging segments and to make direct mail—using the post office, of course—part of any new campaign.

This self-publishing trend is extended by the popularization of self-made video and audio. See the CWS Self Cleaning Toilet Ad. As I’ve noted, users increasingly expect rich media on sites (see my earlier post, Reading is for Suckers). Now some companies are more like specialized media channels. This means they need to feed the content monster more regularly, which creates a business  opportunity for those journalists displaced by the Media Redefinition that is the premise for this process.

Extra Credit Example: Why Are There So Many Tied Elections?

Okay, I didn’t use this one yesterday with the Ad Federation. But it’s another example of how this kind of diagram can work.

There’s a trend in very close elections that make it to the courts. This isn’t limited to Presidential and Senatorial races in Minnesota.  The local mayoral race in Rock Island, Illinois, where I’ve been staying, is in the courts. So is a referendum for library construction in Walpole, Ma.  Why does it seem there are so many races that are “too close to call”?

Obviously, it starts with a winner-take-all system, which makes the establishment of commanding majorities an inefficient use of resources. For district-based elections, winning by .1% and 40% is the same electorial result.  Computational power and political practice have improved polling so campaigns are able to manage to smaller margins. Plus, if you accept there’s a more polarized political enviroment, perhaps due to more politically colored narrow-casting, candidates have less reason than ever not to fully assert their recount privileges. Result: Our system encourages these narrow electoral margins.

In each of these examples, technology is in the third position as the kicker that magnifies a trend already in motion. It seems like a good way to show how a confluence of causes power trends that might otherwise seem arbitrary.

I was back at RISD having a discussion with some online marketers, and I found myself rattling through a list of my favorite online marketing tools.  Sometimes just knowing where to find a few good tools is a resource, so in that spirit, here are a few online tools I like to keep at the ready.

Competitive Benchmarking and Measurement

• HubSpot can help you find low-hanging fruit for SEO improvement with its website grader.  It’s seductive in its simplicity: Type in a few URLs and the automated tool ranks them on a 1-100 scale.  The tool provides an easy-to-print report on where things seem to be working and where improvements are needed.  But be careful not to manage to this report – the trend line that matters most is increasing qualified traffic and converting it to business.  Not all websites are the same, but this is a fast, easy starting point that I’m glad to recommend.
• Alexa provides site info on a massive array of websites. Though I’d maintain that their “tool bar” collection method skews their data, you can get surprisingly useful insights from them.  I recently looked at the design on two competing websites – one was reassuring, the other was hard-edged and jarring. Alexa data indicated that men and women consume the two sites quite differently.
• Digging in by hand using the Google query “link:sitenamehere” returns to you the hundreds and even thousands of links to a website. You can find out quickly how a competitor is link building and if they are earning quality links to gain reputation, as shown in Google’s webmaster tools.

Tracking Buzz On and Off Your Site

• Email Data Source (yes, the other EDS) catalogues over 1 million new emails each month, and provides accounts of searching, or APIs for bringing that library in to your products. Would you like to know when someone used your trademark in email marketing?  How about getting immediate notice when your competitors launch online campaigns? It’s a paid service, and most marketers aren’t hip to it.
• Listen to Tweets too. Just over a year ago I wrote about using TweetScan to monitor brand reputations through alerts. You can also use Twitter as a source of information for product management.
• Don’t forget Google. Google Alerts and Google Blog Search are staples.  So are its webmaster tools, RSS reader, Google Analytics, and site-search products. Yes, they all track buzz: There’s nothing better than knowing the exact keywords purchasers use to first find your site, or what natural phrases they use on your site to find what they really want.

Follow you Competitors Intellectual Property, and Your Own

• tracking your competitors’ intellectual property, can provide huge tip-offs on upcoming products and capabilities.
• Tools for tracking image use and searching for video re-use on other sites can both help you protect copyrights, and track the flow of rich media through the web.

Invest Time and Money in Superior Operations

• ExactTarget, which has become a real leader in email marketing for organizations that want to go beyond batch and blast. They’re my choice for sending highly personalized emails.
• Marketo provides amazing lead monitoring and routing.  In my experience, it is fantastically flexible, cost effective, and rapidly growing demand generation platform.
• Salesforce is the data hub that helps my systems work together, and focus the care clients receive.  In my opinion, all three are really best in class for doing what 80% of corporate clients need.

Finally, once you’re making money through these online systems, it just makes sense to keep them running at their very best. That requires occasionally paying for data cleansing and email deliverty audits.  The combination of competitive knowledge, measurement, and solid execution is the foundation for a sustainable advantage that competitors will find difficult to beat.  And that I hope you find rewarding to manage.

Note to self: five things not to do on social media.

1. Never make a public Facebook group called: “Make-it-Rain Foundation for Underprivileged Hoes,“ especially if you’re a cop in DC.
2. Don’t Twitter plans for a massacre. Twitter crosses state lines, as does the FBI.
3. Don’t post collections notices on people’s kids’ MySpace pages, even if JP Morgan Chase really, really wants to get paid first.
4. Don’t describe yourself as feeling “devious” before you testify. After all, where do you think reasonable doubt comes from? The devious.
5. Don’t clean up your PC before submitting it to the court using a product called Evidence Eliminator. Product names matter.

Prof. Michael Scott of Southwestern Law School has started four microblogs that send out breaking headlines in law news categories.  You can subscribe to these via RSS, or use Twitter to get links as Professor Scott finds them.

Check out InternetLaw, CopyrightLaw, PrivacyLaw, and LawProf, his personal tweets. 

I narrowly escaped a Twitter invervention, aimed at getting me on the service this weekend.  Do you Twitter? Is it a benefit or distraction?

NPR suspended its skepticism and asked Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, how can Twitter change the presidential debate? Well gosh.

Here’s a short list of ways Twitter might change political debate in America.

1. It will delay the real political change that only debate in Haiku can provide.
2. Twitter abbreviations such as “They h8 us bcse we’re free” will politically re-energize fans of Prince lyrics.
3. It will focus the nation on the vital issue of improving Twitter’s uptime to more than six hours a day.
4. Obama aces the debate with: “We nd chng in wshntn, chng we cn belv in.”
5. Speed thumb-typing on cell phones will become a new political specialty. Consultants will add this to their resumes.
6. Everyone will finally get it. Complex policies are best summarized in 140 characters or less. Lesson from the 2004 election: nuance is for losers.

Have another change you’d like to add to the list? Add your comment below. (Use as many characters as you like.)