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I have an iPhone and I frequently tweet from it. When I’m at @target or @oinkadoodlemoo or when I am drinking a @jonessodaco green apple soda, I’ll tweet using their twitter accounts because I know them. But when I am at #kroger or #acehardware, I am not really sure what their twitter accounts are, so I just hashtag them and move on. There is no elegant way to look up companies or brands using mobile apps, especially with the pokey AT&T 3G. So, I just don’t bother.

I saw this tweet from @alotofnothing come across in my twitter stream tonight:*

and it occurred to me that the test of true brand loyalty and awareness was if a user was able to type in the twitter account of a business or brand flawlessly on a mobile device as part of a natural conversation in twitter. (I would have struggled with @TijuanaFlats and even had I looked it up, they have a Flash site, so iPhone would not have been able to see it. Besides, they only show a Facebook Fan Page.)

Think about that for a moment and realize what awesome power that means for your company or brand, good and bad. Then think about how much you need to brand your twitter account.

*Used with permission.. Thank you Angie!

It’s Monday and my twitter stream is filing up with tweets from business people just getting into the office and tweeting out news and links that I’ve been seeing all weekend. These folks work for companies that shut down on Friday afternoon and come back into work on Monday. For most who are connected into twitter, these tweets are really, really, really old news.

Social media works 24/7/365. That means nights and weekends. And it is creating a donut hole for small to medium-sized business, making them seem out-of-touch instead of connected. Follow me on this.

For twitter to work well, someone has to be at the switch pretty much 24/7. The old adage, “A lie will make its way half way round the world before the truth even gets out of bed” is fairly accurate. Ask Dominos, Amazon, Target or any other brand that has suffered a twitterstorm (though less in vogue nowadays) if they wished they worked weekends. Amazon does, but their lawyers don’t, at least not for the normal day rate.

For one-man shows like most of the twitter and social media elite, social media is not an issue. They are on 24/7/365 anyway. The cost of their labor is cheap and they are able to monitor their brand whenever, wherever it is being discussed. They are also the ones quick to berate brands for not responding sooner, by not making their brand more human, etc, etc. For the very large brands who have money to staff up 24/7/365, the issue goes away just by making someone a Community Manager and staffing up a department.

But for small to medium-sized companies, we’re out here kinda screwed by the Social Media donut hole. Sure, you can hire someone to be “on call” and mandate they check the social media accounts regularly on evenings, weekends and early mornings and many will gladly do it, relishing their flexible work conditions. But, as anyone who has ever work “flexible hours” knows, it becomes apparent that the flex is all about the flexibility for the company, not the employee. If flex favored employees, then they would have the option of NOT being available to respond.

And resentment builds and somebody somewhere has enough of being taken advantage of and calls in a State labor board who has an entirely different view on what constitutes “working hours.” That flexible position that you created in response to the market need quickly becomes about the most expensive you’ve ever created with lawyer fees, labor board responses, unemployment hearing and eventual back taxes and overtime pay. What you see as flexibility, the State see as indentured servitude.

The current expectations of social media are unsustainable by small to medium-sized companies. In response, most just do nothing as the return is not worth even the labor investment. And labor laws are not flexible enough to make human 24/7/365 social media monitoring a viable option for many. Some resort to automated response which exacerbates the issue in the minds of the social media purists.

I’d love for some of our brands to be more real-time with social media, but until labor laws catches up with the real world realities of the modern workplace, those social media plans are on hold. Monday mornings will just be very busy here for a while.

NB: As I was writing this, a tweet came over from @JenKaneCo on twitter customer service. Thanks, Jennifer!

I was wheeling my cart through the shampoo and body wash aisle of my local Kroger when I was stopped dead in my tracks by a familiar voice. He said:

Look at my body wash, now look in your cart, now look at my body wash and take a bottle and place it in your cart. You are standing on my abs.

And I looked down and I was standing on Mustafa’s rock-hard abs!

Nice story, only it didn’t happen. I made it all up. This is what the last ten yards of a well-executed Old Spice social media campaign would have looked like.

For all the adulations Old Spice received from blogger after blogger, media show after show, tweet after tweet, somehow everyone forgot to actually sell something. The Old Spice display at Kroger in Englewood, Ohio — just a mere sixty miles up the road from P&G — looked the same today as it did before the campaign started on Wednesday. I took a picture in case you didn’t believe me.

In addition to the whiz-bang marketing that Wieden + Kennedy did for the social media campaign, they could also have easily contracted several merchandising service organizations to execute at retail with shelf talkers and floor mats. Even a simple cut-out and case pack at the end of the aisle would have worked; probably better and easier to execute.

Perhaps the next brand will get it right and carry the ball at a full-run across the end zone for a touchdown. It’s time for social media to get out of marketing and media and into operational execution. Eyeballs and clicks don’t buy product; bellybuttons do.

And that just leads to another vignette featuring Mustafa’s rock-hard abs starring his manly bellybutton.

Your thoughts? Leave them below.

Seth Godin wrote a blog post today about being slick. He claims the way people judged high quality was the degree of “slickness” that was put into a piece, like a business card, website, brochure, etc. I think he is wrong.

I think it is and always will be about craftsmanship, i.e., how “tight” the piece is. Was the logo crafted or was it grabbed from a clip art book and had some extrusion slapped on it? Does the brochure tell a story or is it merely a collection of color photos with a bunch of words wrapped up in a glossy cover? Are the lyrics tight (American Pie) or are they sloppy and lazy (Tik Tok)? Do the blog posts contain typos, split infinitives, jargon, tense shifts, subject-verb disagreements, unnecessary words and half-developed ideas or are they edited and tight? Is the CEO always on time for meetings, does he always knows the numbers and can he clearly articulate the vision?

A good plumber will be proud of his solder joints. Rarely will you see uneven globs of solder or drips on the pipes. A painter will practice for years to be able to cut in on a corner and make a straight freehand edge. Mike Holmes is very proud of his ability to caulk even as he runs a contracting empire because he knows that a straight, even caulk line is the crafted touch that points to everything else he does as solid. I’m certain you can find all sorts of “caulk lines” in companies you’ve done business with. Most were probably uneven. Most were abutted to expensive slick tile or trim.

We’re not now seeking “transparency and reputation and guts” as a replacement cue for slick as we have always been seeking craftsmanship. Poor craftsmen will always wrap bad work up in slick packaging just as they will attempt to pervert and subvert “transparency, reputation and guts.”

But you can’t fake craftsmanship.

Dear Apple,

Congratulations on selling over 600,000 new iPhone4s! As an avid supporter and customer of Apple since 1984, I was always confident that I backed a winner and am happy that you are enjoying such prosperous returns on a vision so many predicted would have died off a long time ago.

Yesterday, in my exuberance, I attempted to upgrade my iPhone many times throughout the day. I was unsuccessful and notice now that you have suspended all pre-orders. This was probably a prudent thing to do given the volume of traffic that was hitting your servers.

In 1984, I found myself needing a personal computer. I was looking hard at the IBM PC-AT and was in the process of securing enough cash to buy one when I passed by a Macintosh running a demo program at the University of Minnesota. From that chance meeting, I realized I was seeing something special and several days later, I visited a store in the mall selling Macs and bought one. When you came out with the Macintosh Plus in 1986, I upgraded for $2,600.00. Shortly afterward, I upgraded to 1meg of RAM and a 20Meg external hard drive.

In the ensuring 24 years, I have purchased a Mac II, Mac IIvx, (2) Quadra 900s, (2) G3 towers, (3) iMacs in bondi blue, tangerine and grape, a Mac Mini and the latest iMac for the desktop. In addition, I have purchased a Powerbook 170 and 165c, Powerbook G3 (Pismo and Lombard) (4) Powerbook 15″, (2) Powerbook 17″, (2) MacBookPro 13″ and a MacBookPro 17″. I have also purchased (8) iPods, an iPad and (3) iPhones. I even bought a Newton and several Imagewriters.

On top of that, I have spent hundreds in the iTunes store and thousands in software and peripherals to support the Apple hardware, mostly at a premium. On top of the personal purchases I have made above, I was also a champion for outfitting my various departments with Mac video editing and desktop publishing equipment, mostly by convincing my superiors and the IT departments that the PC world had no such capability. I probably lied more than I should have, but you were the superior platform and I need to attract the best people. The best people at that time worked on Macs.

I have endured taunting and teasing from my peers in meetings for being a “Mac boy.” I have endured passive aggression from hotel meeting planner and engineers for having a Mac that needed “special plugs.” I have spent more money than I should have on peripherals that supported Macs. And since I live in Dayton, Ohio, I could not pop into the local Best Buy to purchase software or peripherals that worked with a Mac, though USB changed that.

And yesterday, I felt that I did not matter at all to you. Yesterday, I felt like just a battery to fuel your lust for profit. Yesterday, I did not feel at all like I was part of something special.

Perhaps I am just a bag of money to you after all. Perhaps I’m old enough to know that you are just a company looking to make a buck. Perhaps I should have been smarter all these years and realized that while I was taking part in a vision to change the world, you were just grifting on us poor, clueless bastards.

But your products worked well and they enriched the quality of my life by allowing me to create in ways that were not possible with a clunky PC.

If you could do one thing over again, I wish you would not have forgotten where you came from. I wish you would not have forgotten that each one of those iPhone sales yesterday was not only just a phone, but a piece of a vision that you begged us to trust so many years ago. I wish you would make us feel special once more.

Yours sincerely, though not as wholly as I once was,

G.

I had the opportunity to speak at the 15th annual NARMS Spring Conference last month. It was a workshop on using social media to leverage a membership with the association. Check out the agenda; my slides and workshop recording are linked up there. (Sunday, April 18 1:00pm)

Over a month has passed and I still have one question a participant asked, playing over and over in my head. It went something like;

I don’t have the time to wax philosophically about the retail marketing industry. Why do I need a blog?

I answered his question as I do anytime someone tells me they don’t need a blog or have time to write a blog. The short answer goes something like this: Your blog is your web site and your web site is your blog. Quit making the distinction.

Your primary audience is now a machine
It used to be you marketed your web site to customers and other human beings. Now, you market to search engines (SEM — Search Engine Marketing) as most searches now start on Google or Bing. Your primary audience in the search engine and your end audience is a C-Suite executive. In order to be a visible business, you have to show up first on the search engines and then punch your way out of that to a human being. If your website can’t do that, you just don’t make the short list of vendors.

It turns out that blogging software like WordPressor MovableType is set up to easily work with search engines by being SEO and SEM-friendly. It is also easy to quickly and prolifically add optimized content to your website. In fact, if you go out to the Internet right now, it is hard to tell a “blog” from a “web site” any more as many “blogs” function primarily as CMS (Content Management Systems) ICC/Decision Services (iccds.com) is one such site. My employer’s web site Rivershark Inc (rivershark.com) is another example.

It’s all about the keywords
How do potential clients describe what you do? In plain language, please. For example, a plumber does not “provide a comprehensive whole-house fluid distribution and waste removal solution.” He unclogs drains and toilets, installs faucets and fixes leaks. When determining keywords, think like a potential clients trying to find a solution to their problem in ways they identify the problem.

Everything you write for your website — from press releases to about pages to articles — focuses on those keywords.

Adding content rapidly and frequently is critical
A search engine indexes pages, not web sites. Once your services, about us and contact us page is indexed, that pretty much it. With nothing left to do with your site, the search engine indexing robot moves on to your competitors’ web sites. And the sites that keep adding content and keeping the search engine indexing robots busy by adding new stuff wins. The easiest way to jolt a search engine robot out of dormancy is to add new stuff.

And you don’t have to wax philosophically about your industry. You can share your opinion on a recent news story that affects you. Your can write a news release. You can welcome a new client. Whatever you do, focus on keywords and keep the content flowing. Building your web site on top of blogging software allows you to do that easily, all the while creating content that search engines know how to process quickly. 100-300 words is all you need for most articles.

But stepping away from the defining what is a web site and what is a blog is the first major step.

Name and product was removed to protect the guilty.

I think too many companies just walk away from a provider without giving them any real feedback as to why. It is really, really hard to lose me as a customer. Once a system is in place and working — unless there is a major feature shift somewhere else — it is always a hassle to change. Whether they want it or not, I tend to write a quick email, letting them know exactly why they lost me as a customer.

Here is my email. Is it too direct? I don’t think so, but weigh in if you disagree.

I tried to renew everything on Friday, but nobody was answering my live chat emails, your system was spitting back every other login as not being correct, you said my records did not match — even the previous one — and then I got to thinking:

We don’t really sell the type of product your service supports anymore. And, if we ever did in the future, there is so much more competition that is would not be that hard for some over-eager salesman to walk my paperwork through the system. Consumers aren’t as knowledgeable about privacy and security as they once were, so the bar is a whole lot lower than when we first starting using your company.

My corporation has not moved in the sixteen years we’ve been in business. If I was to define a corporation that is easy to find, easy to verify and easy to trust, it would be us. Yet, you have made the renewal process so egregiously cumbersome by asking us to verify everything again to a minute detail that it is just easier to do nothing.

You guys used to be great, but what the heck happened? You are just kinda average like everybody else.

So, not seeing any real competitive advantage, I just decided — after trying for about three hours to get this renewed — that I would just not.

Thank you for being there for our last six renewals over a span of twelve years. Good luck with everything you are doing in the future.

G.

PS Please don’t try to win me back. It is too late for that as I have already decided to move forward without you. Please take me off all your mailing lists and do not send me sales material.

Chris Brogan coined the phrase “grow bigger ears” and for the past two years or so, as brands got comfortable with social media, it was more important for them to listen more than it was to jump out and converse with us. For those brands that got social media early on, they are already listening in more places and with larger ears than their customers are probably comfortable with. For brands that are just starting out on the social media path, start running; you’re already behind.

But it might be time to stop growing bigger ears and start growing bigger hands. It might be time for brands to start integrating social media within their operations and not just their marketing or customer experience departments. We don’t really want brands to “converse” with us; just do for us.

What do I mean by this? A couple of examples.

CPG Brands at Retail
Many brands pay merchandising service organizations to go into retailers and perform audits, new product cut-in, restocking, point-of-purchase placement, etc. What if one of the point of purchase placards just had a @twitter address and said something like: “Tweet you are here, take a picture of the 8oz bottles of BrandX and get a coupon for a buy one/get one free.” How many time-stamped, geo-tagged photos and fan tweets do you think that CPG brand would get? Would this create more demand for at retail service due to an increased turn on the product? Maybe, but until someone tries it, we’ll never know.

Pizza
On Tuesday afternoon, about 4:00pm, Papa Johns sent out a tweet something like “Hungry? Order a Papa John’s pizza.” Oh, man was I ever. It was a long day and I did not have time to eat. So, I clicked on the link. Bang, right to the front page. So, from there, I had to log in.. can’t remember my password… looked it up.. got to the order page, had to decide… oh, y’know what, I’m just not that hungry.

What Papa John’s could be doing is give me the option to save a Twitter preference. Next time they send me a tweet, all I have to do is reply to it and my preferred pizza has been ordered, paid for with my save credit card, in the oven and on it’s way to my front door; all just by replying to the tweet. (I know, there are some issues with privacy/security and such, but maybe they could send me a DM or an email confirming I did indeed reply to and order a pizza.)

What’s missing in social media right now is that last ten yards of connection to the customer. Sure the smart brands are listening with big ears but until they start growing bigger hands and integrate social media into their operations, social media will be the stuff of late night jokes and CNN scare stories instead of Harvard Business School case studies.

UPDATE: @Neenz just published the Paralympics page at Alltop.com last night, Mar 5. If you know of or write a blog on the Paralympics, submit it here to be included.

I first got schooled in the Paralympic Games from Kim* during a telephone conversation my first week on the job back in 1996. For those who don’t know, I used to sell exercise bikes to paralyzed people. True.

“I am a tennis player,” she said.

“You mean you used to play tennis?” I asked.

“No, stupid. I play tennis. Wheelchair tennis. And I’m training for the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney.”

“The Special Olympics?” I said.

“No, I’m in a chair, not a f***ing r*tard!” she shot back angrily.

She was not one to mince words. She had also served four years in the US Navy and she swore like a sailor.

By the time I left the company several years later, we had gotten to be pretty good friends. I wish I had kept in touch, but that wasn’t what Kim was all about. She was one who lived in the moment, curious and anxious for the future with no regrets for the past. She never made it to Sydney, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

That was my introduction to the Paralympic Games. They are held two weeks after the Olympic Games everyone knows about and gets broadcast on TV. Here is the Web site for the Games in Vancouver.

Eventually, I hope the Paralympic Games are played alongside the Olympic Games as paralympic athletes are every bit as tough as their able-boded counterparts. It seems to me that even when NBC doesn’t see the value in broadcasting the Paralympic Games, Social Media should be all over it. The Paralympics are like a really cool blog that you accidentally stumble into that you didn’t know existed, but changes your world view forever. If you want to see some real athletic ability, I encourage you to watch this year. And London. And Russia. And Rio.

Get involved on twitter. Encourage Guy and Neenz to establish a blog directory for the Paralympics on Alltop.com that doesn’t lead to disability. Write a blog article about how you feel about the Paralympics.

Do something inclusive. We’re all in this together.

*Withholding last name, but in case she ever reads this and I have permission to fill in the last name, I’d be happy to.
**Please don’t contact me about ELA being out of business. That happened way after I left.

I ran out of coffee filters the other day. Not a big deal, I’ll just hike to Kroger and get some more. When I got there, I saw the empty peghook that once held my filters. Moreover, there was a red tag on the hook informing me that this product would be discontinued.

Here’s why this is a big deal. A few years ago, the 53rd automatic drip coffee maker I have ever purchased in my life, died. Just quit. Arrgghh, there has to be a better way. And there was. Melitta makes this carafe and cone set that only requires hot water and gravity to make coffee. The only wrinkle is that it also requires a size 6 cone filter. But, since Kroger carried it, not a big deal. I adopted my new system. And it was great because it was so simple. It only really required gravity to work. And gravity was free.

Then someone at Kroger decided they were not selling enough #6 filters. And, without asking me, they just quit carrying them.

Amazon.com still sells the #6 and I just bought approximately 2.6 years worth of filters. Until my filters arrive, I am using paper towels to line the cone. In the event Melitta decides to quit selling the #6 cone filter altogether, I know I have 2.6 years to come up with an alternate solution to a perfectly good system. But, what I foolishly adopted outside of the normal 10-cup basket filter automatic drip coffee maker is now showing signs of that death-march to obsolescence. An inferior technology persists because it is ubiquitous.

We get change and new stuff. Really, we do. It excites us. It gets us out of bed every day. But we also have a library of 8mm reels our childhood is on that we can’t watch, a library of 8 track and cassettes our music is on that we can’t hear, a library of VHS tapes our children’s lives are on that we can’t relive and a mountain of Zip Drive cartridges our careers are on that we can’t share or pass on. We’ve seen the result of a system being brought to its knees when a tiny bit of the supply chain becomes obsolete right after we dedicate a large chunk of our lives to it.

We grew up in large families (which is why there are so many of us now clogging the ladder rungs to the top) where everything from dinner to clothes to mom’s attention was a competition with the people you lived with. Most of our families had one car and one income and choices were made based on the supply of resources. We got jobs that promised us work, retirement accounts and free benefits that seemed too good to be true. We took them and squirreled them away, believing that one day they would be gone (turns out we were right.) We’ve lived through and survived at least three recessions and a very large oil embargo. We’ve seen an explosive increase in the divorce rate. In short, we’ve been conditioned to know that free is never unlimited free. Free will run out. Free has a catch. The good times do not last. Commitments are broken every day without apology, remorse or obligation.

And now Twitter and Foursquare want to be the operations in our supply chains, somewhere between service delivery and invoicing. I can see the possibilities for several industries we do work for and it is very, very exciting. But Twitter is free, it has really no reason to be there tomorrow, no obligations, no contract with me.

As I reach for the coffee filters that are no longer there, between boiling the water and lining the cone with carefully folded paper towels, I pause and think, “What if Evan Williams decided to just quit doing Twitter?”