Snarkist -

Hey Pfizer, Facebook made a page for you. You (and other companies) should be concerned.

Imagine you are a huge pharma company (Pfizer, for instance), and you've been waiting for the FDA to finally present some guidance on the use of social media before creating an "official" Facebook Fan Page. You just want to be certain that you aren't on the hook for every complaint, adverse effect or random interaction. For instance, would you (in your Pfizer persona) need to report someone who likes ED? Most pharma companies are being cautious before fully exploiting the potential of social media, and that's a good thing. 

Now imagine you are still Pfizer, and you discovered that Facebook went ahead and made a page for you. In fact, not just one page, but a whole bunch of them for your products and your brand. Now imagine if those pages pull together random updates from people too foolish to adjust their privacy settings and 'credible' sources like Wikipedia.Would you   go bat-shit-crazy at the chutzpa (hubris? balls? insanity?) of Facebook to package a collection of random content and call it a Community Page? If I were Pfizer or any other pharma company, I would be on the phone with my lawyers right now. The spamification of Facebook puts pharma (and other industries, companies and celebrities) at risk. The conflation of Fanpages, (real) Community Pages and Community (SPAM) Pages is clearly deceptive and benefits no one except Facebook. 

Look at all these pages Facebook built for Pfizer.


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CNN Money Covers "You Need Doug Winfield"


CNN Money published a story about my You Need Doug Winfield social media job search campaign. It was great working with Jessica Dickler. It's always exciting to be recognized for doing something right.

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Blockbusters aren’t just for theaters any more, but maybe they should be.

The tools of simulation have become very refined over the years. Using animation software and detailed data capture and environment maps, it’s possible to produce accurate and compelling recreations of events like the collapse of the World Trade Center or the assassination of JFK or to produce over the top cataclysms for a movie like 2012.  Erring on the side of accuracy would lead to a very boring Summer blockbuster; and turning the knob to 11 when trying to inform the public about a real world problem, leads to disinformation and deception. 

Case in point, The Washington State Department of Transportation’s simulation of what would happen to Seattle’s antiquated Viaduct and beautiful waterfront during an earthquake. The animation shows a scene of total destruction of the area. The problem is that they state that the simulation was based upon a “similar” earthquake. The truth is that they used data for a quake that is much closer and two levels of magnitude stronger. It’s certainly possible that such an event could happen. It’s far more likely that the area will have a smaller quake that will cause plenty of damage but nothing that will have the biblical punch of what they produced. Their goal was to soften up the public, not to inform it. Credibility is exchanged for the necessity to make a slam dunk.  Why let the truth get in the way of your agenda.

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Crowd sourced videos: Cultivated Creativity?

I'm seeing more and more "spontaneous" displays of grass roots virals, of course spontaneity requires planning. It’s clear that these examples weren’t truly improvised, but they do show how creativity can be sparked to encourage folks to do great work. The first example was produced by the staff at Gap Store 1604, Roseville, MN. It’s a really clever, car crash of a music video. It’s a hot tranny mess that was instigated by a contest promoted by CP+B and Cheer Factory. It’s quirky, weird and entertaining; and it show’s a very human side to the Gap brand. From an execution standpoint it’s probably twice as long as it should be, but it’s still a lot of fun to watch.

On the other hand the video of a spontaneous group dance routine (is such a thing possible?) at a Micrsoft store felt staged and a bit stagnant. In fairness to the Microsoft folks, the Gap has a much larger collection of stores. This increased the chance that at least one of the routines could break out of the mold of predictable line dances . I’m also glad that they allowed comments and responses (including a fun video produced by a kid in an Apple Store) Good viral crowd-sourced experiences require planning and an understanding of human psychology. They also require a Johnny Appleseed like approach to cultivating great content. Create frameworks for inspiration, resources (The Gap sent cameras to stores as part of their contest) and encourage as many people as possible to participate. For every 100 (or perhaps 1000) attempts you may only find a single truly brilliant result, but the relatively low cost for these efforts should be leveraged to generate multiple attempts. While I don’t necessarily believe in the one million monkeys with typewriters producing Shakespeare approach, but perhaps it's possible produce a Steven King novel this way.

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Using twitter lists to determine top influencers

As a follower of Jeff Clark’s Neoformix blog, I always discover something new and interesting about data visualization and analysis. Recently, he’s been looking at how twitter’s new lists function can be used to define and categorize topical relevancy and influence. Using this process he’s created a twitter profile dedicated to aggregating the top 100 in a series of topics. This is a far more powerful approach than the uber influencer ranking used in TweetLevel. Influence varies widely via topic, and the one size fits all approach is scattershot at best.  Follow @Top100in to stay up to date.

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More thoughts from the WOMMA FTC panel

From Jory Des Jardin, Co-Founder and President, Strategic Alliances at BlogHer  and Sean Corcoran, Interactive Marketing Analyst at Forrester Research

(download)

(download)

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Social Media as a regulated industry, The view from WOMMA's Tony DiResta

WOMMA counsel, Anthony DiResta, talks about some of the fine points of the FTC guidelines that will take effect on 12/1/2009. Key points:

  • Recognition that the days of the “Wild West” are over, this is now a regulated industry
  • Social Media requires a culture of compliance
  • Clarity on what constitutes an endorsement
  • Companies require up to date social media policies that enable engagement while minimizing risk
This was part of a larger panel discussion on Friday 11/20/09


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Clarification of FTC Digital / Social Media Guidelines

Chuck Harwood, the Assistant Deputy Director – Bureau of Consumer Protection for the FTC spoke about how the agency’s guidelines will affect social media and word of mouth marketing efforts.

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Clear is the new clever, telling the story of the Patagonia tribe

Rob BonDurant was the keynote speaker today at the WOMMA Summit. He’s the VP of Marketing at Patagonia, and he helps to tell their story across multiple channels (largely avoiding traditional advertising). His methods are social, digital and customer enabled. In fact, Patagonia’s customers provide the company with the lion’s share of the photos, videos and reviews published on their website.  Rob’s job is to give folks something to talk about, and he gives great insight into how he does it.

Of course, Patagonia is a truly aspirational brand, so I assume that some of his advice might be harder to implement at a waste treatment company (a coffee table book on effluent tidal flow?), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible.

Brains on Fire has a great recap, but here's a bit of the video.

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Is TweetLevel the new Flim-Flam-A-Scope?

I was recently thinking about the Flim-Flam-A-Scope. Not familiar with the FFAS? That's understandable, it’s a term that my old boss Rich coined to describe a product we were producing a video for. It was a device that, through the use of ultraviolet light and mirrors, allowed people to see every wrinkle, sunspot, freckle and pockmark.  This sounds like a medical device, right? Well it wasn’t. It was used in skin care salons to encourage customers to buy deep cleansing facials and other premium treatments. Of course those treatments didn’t fix any skin conditions. The Flim-Flam-A-Scope's sole purpose was to surprise or shock people. Then soften their resistance to unnecessary (yet soothing) spa sessions.
Recently Edelman released a new social media tool called Tweet Level. I won’t go so far as to call it a next generation flim-flam-a-scope, but it does have some remarkable similarities. Like the original FFAS, it reveals something generally invisible, In this case a ranking of twitter users. They do this by analyzing influence, popularity,engagement and trust to produce a numerical value to define a score. So far so good, those may not have been the exact factors I would have chosen but they are certainly a fair set of variables to work with. The problem is that the system produces results that are questionable. When an entertainment blogger who paints semen on the mouths of celebrities, Demi Moore’s boy toy and the most trusted name in news are all in the top five, I think something is seriously askew.  It looks random or at least less than rigorous. I assume that Edelman was expecting (hoping for) debate on the products and its results. The more conversation, the better.

 

OK, so where’s the flim-flam? If the FFAS was designed to convince you that your skin was a mess so that you would voluntarily pay money for a useless facial, TweetLevel’s goal is to get people to turn over information to Edelman so they can build a database that allows them to better target their outreach efforts. In exchange for a mostly meaningless score, users provide information about their jobs and industry focus. Is that a fair exchange? That’s hard to say. People pay for palm readings. Companies spend money on Myer’s-Briggs and other pseudo psychological employee evaluations. So where’s the harm? I think when asking people for information there should be disclosure about how that information may be used. It doesn’t matter if that information is being used to derive a more accurate score or if it will be used to help micro-target a future social media campaign. By not disclosing that information Edelman negates one of its ranking measures, trust. And, that’s not something easily regained.


PS

Here’s my Tweet Level Score. Not that really means anything.

tweetlevel3.png

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