Top 10 Tools
The Return of Friday Funday!
I missed doing Friday posts, and since I am working on building the business back up, it’s the return of Friday Funday!
Today’s post is one I have been wanting to write for a long time but because I of what I was doing workwise and because I wanted to see it play out a bit, I held off on writing until a good time. Today I want to talk about intelligence, and it feels like everything has come together on this.
Thanks to my experiences with First Health Associates, I have a better appreciation for not only establishing clearer marketing goals in campaigns but truly understanding what your product offers. Without the right intelligence that provides clear understanding on what you offer and where you need to go, developing a successful campaign is harder and less likely to provide the results you are looking for.
Product intelligence is essential because you have to not only understand what you are selling, but what the consumers think you are selling. Offering the world’s best gazpacho is no treat for someone who only thinks you sell salsa. To continue to tell that person how great the soup is only makes it worse; asking instead about what kind of tomato dishes they might be interested in and how daring they are in new cuisine is a better way to create a fan.
Perception is also a key ingredient of intelligence and if a customer perceives your product to be for something other than what you say it’s for you will again find resistance to your pitch. If your gazpacho is perceived as a health oriented product, it will not do as well as one that is gourmet that is also healthy. The difference is small but important.
Intelligence is also something that you need when responding to outside forces that may or may not affect your brand. During the fall a politician from my home state of Kansas made the mistake of singling out a teenager for a disparaging comment made on Twitter (Full Disclosure: Governor Sam Brownback beat my father in 2010 for his seat). The comment itself wasn’t worth the effort, but the response from his office took on a life of its own and caused a bigger incident than I’m sure anyone in the office meant for it to be.
Reacting without some knowledge or intelligence is a good way to find yourself in a similar situation, and as a gesture to those of you who have made it this far 
I wanted to talk a bit about Klout. Klout is an online tool that measures the online activity of one’s social media influence. For an example you can see mine here: http://klout.com/#/gthomasholland.
Had the staff of the Governor used Klout before forming a response to the situation, they would have seen that this was a High School Senior who was barely active on Twitter and not worth the effort. Operating with a bit of intelligence about the situation before hand would have saved that office some work.
Klout is also great because it shows the activity style of the person you are researching. I can look up a reporter on Twitter, plug them in on Klout and see some information about how they act online, how effective they are and what kind of audience they reach. This helps in determining how influential someone is and what kind of effort I should look at using.
That’s it for today. I am getting back to writing the new e-book and bracing for the Chicago snow storm we are supposed to see today. Lake effect snow is my word of the month.
Chicago Social Media: Ebert’s Two Thumbs Down
Roger Ebert is an idiot.
I’m not trashing his opinions of cinema in this case, but questioning his motives for a tweet that caught some serious hell this week. For those of you who don’t know Ebert pissed some people off this week after tweeting following the death of Jackass star Ryan Dunn.
Dunn died following a car wreck in Pennsylvania on Monday, and Ebert tweeted shortly thereafter that “Friends should not let Jackasses drink and drive.” A large number of followers called Ebert out, and even his Facebook page was taken down for a bit following the ruckus. Ebert goofed up in this situation, and I wanted to give my take for your future reference.
The biggest question I would ask is “Why does Ebert get to give an opinion here?”
If Ebert was the spokesperson for MADD, or a charity that dealt with drunk driving, his 2 cents would be appropriate but maybe still a bit too soon. Ebert is not though. Ebert simply tweeted something that he felt from his heart without understanding the need to divide his public self from his personal self.
And that’s why he got himself into trouble. Ebert didn’t realize that there are some people who would take offense to what he was going to say. Ebert was basically what EVERYONE was going to say in the aftermath of Dunn’s death. Who was going to say the opposite? No one.
Ebert’s mistake was tweeting something that was not his business. Because it was too soon, because he was not someone not normally commenting in the drunken driving prevention space, because it was so soon after the passing, Ebert caught hell. In my mind he deserved it.
Anyone I work with would be told to not comment or tweet anything other than a quick message of sympathy. There is something to be said for commenting on, forwarding or tweeting on current material. That material can always be a double edged sword and the down side is you want really know if you’ve crossed a line until you hear about it later.
I remember working for an ad agency during 9/11. I watched the second tower fall at work, and during the entire day we had not idea what was going on, and much less how we would move forward. At about 3 pm that day, we saw a press release that went out using the attack as an excuse to be life insurance. Not only was the release in bad taste, but plenty of colleagues attacked the people that sent it out.
Which brings us back to Ebert. Whether or not he has learned something from this episode remains to be seen; the bright side is that this study does provide you an example of when holding back on a current event outside of your space is the right move.