Lots of people sharing a Harvard Business Review blog about what it means to be professional in the social media era. It begins with a compelling example of how the Susan G. Komen Foundation bungled its recent image problems, while Planned Parenthood used social media to handle their controversies with aplomb. Nice case.

Then the article spins out of control…

It uses that one case and the usual tired cliches, stats and “experts” to argue that everyone should be “transparent” and embrace social media. It includes this table of old professionals vs. new professionals:

Source: Allison Fine, "What Does 'Professional' Look Like Today," HBR, 5/9/2012

Cute. My response?

• In 2009, John Mackey of Whole Foods wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal stating his opposition to Obama’s healthcare plan. Whole Foods customers (who tend to be limousine liberals) responded in anger with an organized (but short-lived) boycott using social media. That was Mackey’s reward for revealing his personal interests and passions. Given who most of his customers are, perhaps he should have reconsidered being so “transparent.”

• Apple, which has enjoyed enormous success, is one of the most secretive and least transparent companies in the United States, despite operating in the hotbed of social media startups, Silicon Valley. Apple does not use social media to any great extent. Meanwhile, one of Apple’s retail partners, Best Buy, wholeheartedly embraced social media, and the CMO, Barry Judge, was seen as a pioneer and visionary, blogging regularly about social media. Today, Best Buy is downsizing, and both Barry Judge and his blog are gone.

• Pepsi abandoned the Super Bowl to fully embrace social media with its “Refresh” campaign, attempting to bond with its Millennial customers over social and environmental issues. This generated a lot of buzz, but it didn’t generate sales, and Pepsi wound up losing market share to Coca-Cola, and its flagship soda sank to #3 in its market for the first time (behind both Coke and Diet Coke). Pepsi has since abandoned Refresh and gone back to advertising during the Super Bowl.

• Finally, this current political season shows the hazards of expressing one’s true interests and passions in any kind of media, since partisan extremists will insist that candidates toe a hard line, no matter how honest and competent they are. (See “Huntsman, Jon.”)

My point: there are just as many failures when it comes to being “transparent” and “social” as there are success stories. We can’t just use a few examples to prove anything; as advertising executive Bob Hoffman notes, “the plural of anecdote is not data.” Regardless of the hype du jour, we must conduct critical analyses of what works best for our brands in our markets.

So what is a professional?

A few years ago, I wrote my own take on the word “professional.” My key points involved respect, dedication, and being appropriate. On this last point I wrote:

“A true professional understands the environment, audience and occasion, then comports herself appropriately. Yes, this sometimes means wearing a suit, but at other times, it might mean wearing jeans and an ironic logo T-shirt. (Though at no time does it ever mean wearing Crocs.) She speaks at the level of her audience, never over their heads, but without pandering to their slang or mannerisms. Joking around is totally fine — even encouraged — as long as her tone is appropriate for the audience. (Some groups don’t mind a strategic f-bomb.)”

Note that it’s not about being “transparent” or “authentic.” Indeed, I have found the whole “authenticity” movement to be flawed, hypocritical, even reckless. Call me cynical, but instead of being “authentic” we need to be realistic about what works in a fiercely competitive marketplace. This notion of “just be yourself” is cute and idealistic, and perhaps it’s the way to go if you’re seeking a spouse; but when it comes to business, “be yourself” is the biggest lie that adults tell young people, since the adult world requires a lot of posturing, positioning and posing to get the job and to keep it. (Do people put on acts and cover up their flaws to get a job, a client, a promotion, a raise, or a foundation grant? People do.)

In today’s marketplace, you need to emphasize your expertise, not your peccadilloes. Why do you think people write for the Harvard Business Review in the first place?

• Related Article: Business Journal Makeover: Enter the Harvard Obviousness Review

Image source: MilkYourMoney.com

WalMart threw a wrench into the system…

My father runs a plant nursery up in Oregon, and for years he enjoyed a steady business with few disruptions beyond the weather. Then one day WalMart lumbered into town, and like a scene from a Godzilla flick, it began crushing everything. Mom-and-pop shops that had served the community for decades were flattened.

Some store owners heard that the best way to beat the low-price leader was through customer service – after all, that’s what every business guru was saying:

“It’s all about relationships.”
“Customer service is the new marketing.”
“Don’t be product-centric, be customer-centric.”

Of course, none of that worked. As my father observed at his nursery, people would come in for his expert advice, which he would patiently and generously dole out. He would walk them around the nursery and point out the perfect plants for their yards. The people would listen and take notes and thank him profusely — then drive to WalMart and buy the same product for a lower retail price than what he could buy it for wholesale.

Sure, customers want great service, but some like low prices even more.

My father’s solution was to stop selling anything WalMart carried. He redid his entire inventory to focus on obscure plants and niche products that were too localized and specific for a mass-market chain. Yes, he went product-centric, and his sales aren’t what they used to be, but he’s still in business today.

Well, the big boxes like WalMart are getting a taste of their own medicine from a more formidable behemoth: Amazon.

Target, for example, stopped selling the Kindle because it no longer considers Amazon a complement or collaborator, but a fearsome no-holds-barred competitor. They’re right.

And then there’s Best Buy.

For years Best Buy enjoyed a steady business with few disruptions, and its big-box buying power enabled it to crush small retailers as well. Then came Amazon, which was able to sell electronics for even lower prices because, as an online-only retailer, Amazon didn’t have the expensive retail spaces, sales clerks, and (at least for a while) the sales tax burdens that Best Buy incurred.

So Best Buy looked for a solution, and it heard what the business gurus were saying:

“It’s all about relationships.”
“Customer service is the new marketing.”
“Don’t be product-centric, be customer centric.”

Indeed, Best Buy’s CMO Barry Judge fancied himself a guru in his own right, blogging about the new marketing and its focus on customer “dreams.” He even made a video about it:

Overnight, Best Buy was hailed as a social media pioneer. Self-proclaimed social media gurus, visionaries, thought leaders, and other snake-oil peddlers cited Best Buy as a “best practice” and a “case study” in how to do marketing. Best Buy employees were encouraged to tweet and Facebook and have conversations with customers, to learn about their dreams, and to foster relationships.

Well, you can already predict what happened next, right? That’s right: all those customers would listen and take notes and thank Best Buy profusely — then use their mobile phones not to get Best Buy deals (as seen in the video), but to check prices on Amazon, where they ultimately made their purchase.

Cue Queen, “Another One Bites The Dust.”

Today Best Buy is downsizing, going to smaller stores with limited stock, and shutting down other stores altogether. The smaller stores will serve more as showcases than retail outlets. And Barry Judge? Oh, he resigned today. His blog, where he used to write about social media and the marketing of the future, now looks like this:

BarryJudge.com? Learn all about the power of social media here.

We’ll also see how long that video lasts on YouTube. (If it disappears, let me know.)

Now, I’m not picking on Barry. I like a lot of what he said in his video. Those are some nice tactics that could actually work — in the right market for the right company and the right customer. Like, say, in elective surgery, where the combo of a customized solution and total transparency and close customer relationships does have value, and where price isn’t all that matters.

But those social tools and tactics don’t work all that well in big box retail. Why? Because we all know why we go shopping at a big box. It’s not for help or insights or relationships. It’s not to have a minimum-wage clerk or commission-based sales rep actualize our “dreams.” We go shopping at a big box because we want massive selection and we want it at the lowest possible price and we want it now. That’s the only reason we tolerate these massive blots on the landscape. Yo, Box, yeah we’ll let you drop a freakin’ warehouse in the middle of our parkland and neighborhoods, but you better give us variety and mega-discounts — or else why bother?

We don’t have feelings for big boxes. We don’t have loyalty to them — hell, if we were willing to let mom-and-pop fend for themselves, why should we care about a mega-corporation?

“Social” is not a strategy; it’s a tool.

If your fundamental business model doesn’t match your market, then no amount of tweeting and Facebooking, blogging and pinning, will help. Indeed, going social could hurt you if you’re wasting your time and money mucking around in it instead of investing in what might actually work — like creating products that are completely different from what your competitor carries or would even want to carry. (And, yes, that means paying attention to your competitors, not just your customers.)

So please do learn about social media. But also learn about other marketing options. And by all means learn about your customers AND your competitors AND your community AND your own company strengths and weaknesses. Then select tools because they’re right for the situation, not because some YouTube video tells you they’re the future.

After all, many of those people who were predicting the future are now history.

Update 5/16/12: Apparently, Best Buy wasn’t very good at this “transparency” thing either.

Ads that appeared on my Facebook page. Why do I feel like these ads are related, and that clicking any of them will get me into trouble?

In part one of this series, I talked about the aesthetic MySpacification of Facebook: how the popular social network’s design went from clean to pure cornea gumbo.

Now let’s talk advertising on Facebook.

I used to buy Facebook ads because I was enamored by the targeting capabilities. For example, when promoting a local theatrical production, I could easily target the zip code and even a surrounding area, the right age group, actors and directors and other theatre types, fans of the playwright, and people who might like the play’s subject matter. In addition, I could easily test ads and make changes, and switch payment from cost-per-thousand views (CPM) to cost-per-click (CPC) at the touch of a virtual button. The tracking data showed me what was working and what was not. This seemed like the perfect ad platform.

Then I noticed that “not” was becoming more common than “working.”
And I’m not alone in this discovery…

The Great Disappearing Clicks of Facebook

Click-through-rates on Facebook have plummeted to 0.01%–0.05%. For those who don’t like percentages, 0.01% means that you get 1 click for every 10,000 views. And according to researcher Dr. Augustine Fou, that 0.01% may just be rounding, since Facebook doesn’t go beyond two decimal points in reporting rates. In other words, the actual number may be 0. As in zip, nada, the big empty.

But what about those 10,000 views? Those have to be worth something, right? That’s branding and awareness! At least, that’s what Facebook’s own sales reps are now saying. (Something I ridiculed in a previous post.) But like most advertising, “views” are more theoretical than actual. Yes, the ads appear on a user’s page, but with all the clutter and distracting content, we web users have developed ad blindness. The ads are there — we just tune them out.

That’s nothing new: long ago it happened to banner ads on other sites, such as MySpace. Indeed, we consumers became so blind to ads that, in order to get our attention, ads became annoying: flashing, jumping, telling you that you had won a free iPod. Marketing stupidity in full effect. Facebook’s ads haven’t made that suicidal leap to annoying… yet. But wait till that IPO goes through, and the shareholder demand for quarterly growth kicks in.

Also — and this is key to remember — unlike a magazine ad, those 10,000 views on Facebook do not mean 10,000 people. I complained to Facebook when I saw that my ads were being shown to the same people 17 times. While some ad repetition is necessary to register with consumers, anything more than 3 usually crosses the line from “Alright, I see you” to “WTF is your problem?! I hate you and will never buy your product again!”

Facebook wouldn’t let me limit the frequency of exposures. Why? Because when you’re buying an ad, Facebook entices you with a large number that counts all the people in your target market. But that number reflects registered users, not active users. The actual number of active users is much smaller, so in order to charge you for thousands of views within the timeframe of your ad campaign, Facebook jacks up the frequency of exposures to a single active user.

And that number of active users on Facebook? Oh, they’re declining, too.
(Did I mention that Facebook is becoming MySpace?)

While the number of registered Facebook users is quickly approaching 1 billion, they’re like visitors to the Grand Canyon: some stay and hike around; others get out of the car and say, “OK. I see it,” then get back into the car and drive away.

According to Dr. Fou, more people on Facebook are driving away:

“From Compete data, we can see that pageviews are down 54 percent at 48 billion, from a high of 100 billion pageviews in August 2010. Average stay is down 35 percent at 17 minutes from a high of 26 minutes in January 2011. Visits per person is down 34 percent at 20 per month from a high of 29 per month in January 2011. And pages per visit is off 60 percent at 15 pages from a high of 35 in February 2010. These declines have been in nearly a straight line and have been consistent over many months, not a temporary glitch.” (from “Facebook’s Achilles’ Heel” on DigiDay.com)

Abandon ship! Or at least shop around…

source of infinite wisdom unknown

In my earlier post, I mentioned that we Facebook users are the product, not the customers, so we have to just take whatever Facebook imposes upon us. Of course, we do have a choice, and that’s to stop using Facebook. And many are making the choice.

We may not outright delete our accounts — it took a long time to accumulate all those friends and post all those photos, and we don’t want to completely drop out of the world’s largest social network — but we are exploring options.

Many have found Twitter’s simplicity more appealing (though Twitter is regularly adding more Facebook-like features). Others, primarily women, have flocked to Pinterest because of its more authentic and aesthetically pleasing experience (though marketers have already begun their invasion by bribing top Pinterest users into becoming their tools). Yes, MySpacification is happening to those platforms as well.

But regardless of the merits of competing social options, the writing is on the Facebook wall: it’s no longer the promised land for either consumers or advertisers. With Facebook’s IPO around the corner, Zuckerberg blew $1 billion on Instagram, which has no revenue. (How Web 1.0.) He saw the writing, too, and needs to show activity and growth and vision before unloading Facebook to suckers investors.

The impending Facebook IPO is being seen as the mother of all Web 2.0 IPO’s. It’s anticipated to be valued at over $100 billion. Certainly nothing to sneeze at. And even after the IPO, I suspect that Facebook will keep going for years, perhaps decades to come…

Just like AOL.

In fact, maybe my comparison to MySpace is wrong: rather, Facebook is becoming AOL. At one point, AOL was valued at $226 billion and seemed unstoppable from both a consumer and advertiser perspective. AOL keywords for brands were just as common as branded Facebook pages are now. And unlike Facebook, millions of consumers willingly paid about $20/month to use it; some still even have an AOL email address.

But by trying to be all things to all people, by trying to replicate the Web instead of complementing it, by focusing on quantity of features instead of quality of features, AOL rapidly became just another platform. And the competitors kept coming. Sound familiar?

AOL. MySpace. Facebook. Web 2.0 looks at lot like Web 1.0 – call it a comedy of eras.

Update 5/16/12: Apparently GM also finds Facebook ads to be worthless.

***

Read the first part of this series: MySpace, Part Deux (And Yes, I’m Talking About Facebook)

***

Dr. Augustine Fou’s “Facebook Ad Scam”

[Thanks to Jon Burk, Marketing Brand Manager at JBM Los Angeles, for inspiring this rant.]

Easy on the eyes, yes? Signature gumbo from Bozo's Seafood Restaurant in Metairie, Louisiana. Photo by Jason Perlow via Wikimedia Commons.

There’s a great term in the book Jargon Watch, a small dictionary published by Wired magazine back in the Pleistocene Era (circa 1997): Cornea Gumbo. It refers to “a visually noisy, overdesigned PhotoShopped mess,” as in, “Gawd, we’ve got to redesign that page, it’s become total cornea gumbo.”

Cornea gumbo aptly described the hot visual messes that constituted many websites in the mid-90s. In a pique of nostalgic democratization, MySpace launched in 2003 and enabled everyone to capture those halcyon days of web design. Where web development once required an overpriced HTML-jockey who had taught himself PhotoShop, MySpace provided the tools to stew up your own gumbo, spiced up with social features borrowed from Friendster which had borrowed them from AOL. (Anyone who thinks social media is a modern phenomenon obviously skipped WWW history class.) Using MySpace on a heavy basis (as I frequently did) required frequent scraping of one’s retinal cones and rods to remove all the accreted and burned-on images.

Then came Facebook…

I joined Mark Zuckerberg’s ant farm in 2007 — wow, I just realized I’ve spent 5 years Facebooking — and back then Facebook looked clean, simple, easy to use. It was relatively ad-free, spam-free and creep-free. In other words, the anti-MySpace. We users rejoiced. We indulged. We had no idea what was coming next.

That’s a lie — of course we knew what was coming next: greed-driven bloat. It happens to every mass-market website. We just hoped that Facebook wouldn’t follow in the footsteps of Excite and AOL and Yahoo and MySpace, which all took their simple, appealing platforms and grew them and grew them and grew them to offer more features and more content in hopes of generating more appeal to more types of consumers. Remember when Yahoo was just a directory of websites? And when MySpace was mostly a place to check out bands and new music with your friends?

Facebook turned out to be no exception to feature creep. First, Zuckerberg opened the gates to everyone, which seemed like the fair thing to do. Then he started adding features from every competitor and even indirect competitor that came along:

• Twitter has a real-time scrolling wall? Well then, so must Facebook!
• Foursquare allows check-ins, which annoy everyone but the user’s closest friends? Well then, so must Facebook!
• Games? Check.
• Chat? Check.
• Music listen buttons? Check.

The result? Yes, cornea gumbo.

Ad Gumbo: Facebook is starting to look like a NASCAR vehicle

Facebook grew from a couple of clean columns to the multi-column sprawl that it is today, evoking the aesthetic pleasures of suburban minimalls and L.A. freeway interchanges. As if that wasn’t eye-jarring enough, Zuckerberg then forcibly imposed the useless, unnecessary, unappealing “timeline” format on everyone. We users griped (as we do with every Facebook change), but since we’re the product being sold to the true customers (the advertisers), we just had to groan and accept Facebook’s changes as usual… Well, maybe (more on this in my next post).

Oddly, even Facebook’s true customers, brands and businesses, were forced to adopt the timeline, even if a chronology didn’t fit a brand’s marketing strategy, and even if the brand’s customers couldn’t care less about their histories.

Like many businesses, I ignored the invitation to go back and flesh out my page’s timeline, but some feel compelled to invest in the fruitless labor. That makes the brands more committed to Facebook, but what does it do for the customer? Given that the “engagement” rate of Facebook pages is already abysmally low, how many consumers will take the time to read through those laboriously constructed timelines, from the company’s founding to the present? (And I’m not talking to those of you who develop Facebook pages for a living.)

Of course, something has to pay for this massive frothing feature-filled sprawl, and that’s advertising, advertising and more advertising. Facebook once had 3 ads cleanly positioned on the right; now you’ll find as many as 10 (yes, TEN!) ads along with sponsored stories and branded apps on your wall, all competing for attention with the ticker, the event announcements, the birthdays, the menus, and the links to your Facebook settings. Oh, and the posts from your friends. Almost forgot those.

In aesthetic terms, the MySpacification of Facebook is now complete.

But wait, there’s more…

Click here for part two of this series: Ad Nauseam: The MySpacification of Facebook (Continued)

I confess: I clicked an ad on Facebook today. Really. Now, you know that Facebook ad clickthrough rates are so dismal (about 1 out of every 2000 views), that even Facebook execs are talking more about “branding” and “awareness.” But I couldn’t help myself. I love me some gadgets and marketing, and this ad for the iTwin featured both…

Mmmm: toys… marketing toys… so I clicked, and this is what I got…

Uh, iTwin, didn’t we just meet? Shouldn’t you at least flirt with me first before asking me to like you? I see from your ad that 15,686 people have already liked you, but what can I say, I play hard to get. And at the least, shouldn’t you have used this page to show me how your product works, as your ad promised?

But Wait, There’s More…

Were it any other product or company, I might have just bailed at this point, but I sensed a teachable case study here, so I went exploring. I Googled the iTwin website, which was much more informative. Apparently, the $99 device enables a user to remotely connect any two computers. Cool — but I’m not sure how I’d use it, nor do I see how that relates to public relations. It’s apparently selling well — the green one featured in the ads is already sold out — unless that’s just a marketing ploy to make the item look popular. (Hint to startups: your first batch of anything should always “sell out.”)

And that was the extent of my shopping trip.

Now, some marketers would call everything I did some hardcore “engagement”: I interacted with the brand at multiple touchpoints. I’ve also provided all this free publicity and an SEO-enhancing backlink. But I just can’t help but think: this relationship could have been so much more, no?

Hmm, I'm suddenly craving human brains... not sandwiches

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC + Sucker for Shows about Advertising

Just saw AMC’s “The Pitch” — a new reality show about ad agencies going head-to-head to land an account. Although it contained the usual heavy-editing and over-dramatization of most reality shows, it was fun to second-guess real agencies in action…

My thoughts? (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD)

• WDCW had the better talent. Their writing was clever, and even their stock-photo selection was funny. And that goes to show that creativity alone doesn’t always win accounts.
• Even if it wins accounts and awards, creativity alone doesn’t always work as marketing. The Subway executives knew that — the “zAMbie” concept was entertaining, but it evoked Crispin-Porter-Bogusky’s freaky ads for Burger King, which generated buzz but not sales. Plus, “zAMbie” is not clear at first glance — and wouldn’t that be a requirement for people who are morning zombies?
• McKinney nailed the target market with the rapper — and the rapper should get nearly all of the credit. McKinney does deserve some credit for researching and finding a relevant influencer for the target market. Although rap-based commercials to target young people have been done by everyone, they still work. To round out the concept, McKinney should have also pitched a “Breakfast Wrap” to go with the ad.
• Neither agency talked about the actual product! I kept wondering, when are they going to say what makes Subway sandwiches better and different than the competition? Sure enough, that’s what the Subway execs complained about. Right off the bat, both agencies focused on creating a wild concept that could have been used for ANY restaurant. Hide the Subway logo, and the concepts could have worked for Wienerschnitzel.
• When were the creatives going to eat at Subway? The episode contained an odd segment about the McKinney creative director trying to make breakfast for her kid. I was waiting for her to take him to Subway. Did that scene land on the cutting-room floor? If so, why include this bit at all?
• The agencies needed to think beyond themselves. All their concepts targeted themselves as young professionals or hipsters, who think that zombies are a cool way to sell breakfast. I grew up in a working-class town, where young men are wide-awake and heading off to work before 8 am. They’re hitting up fast food because it’s quick, cheap, easy and tastes good, not because they’re morning zombies.
• It was a lose-lose situation for WDCW. The bigger agency in L.A. is expected to slaughter a mid-size agency in North Carolina. As the underdog, McKinney stood to gain even if they had lost the competition.
• With “Mad Men” and now “The Pitch,” AMC has hit on a smart self-promotional formula. Who cares how many people overall watch these shows as long as the agencies watch them? After all, the ad people will sit and watch all the commercials, and they’ll see ads for other AMC shows that they might want to sponsor.

The next “premiere” episode is April 30. Will you be watching?

Don't know what kind of player it is, but that's sure a lot of bull...

Imagine that you own a basketball team, and you send your talent scout out to find a new player. He comes back and presents two options:

• Player A: averages 9 points a game, including 1 three-point basket per game
• Player B: averages 24 points a game, including an average of 2 three-point baskets per game

Both play the same number of minutes per game, and both want the same amount of money. To your surprise, your scout recommends hiring Player A. “Why?!” you ask incredulously. “Because,” the scout replies, “Player A gets 33% of his points from three-point shots, and Player B gets only 25% of his points from three-point shots. That means Player A gets 32% more points from three-pointers than Player B.”

As you stare in stunned disbelief, the scout takes it as a signal to continue…

“Now you know that three-point shots are worth 50% more than two-point shots, so if we multiply the 50% by 32%, that makes Player A 1600% more valuable than Player B.”

Of course, that makes your choice easy: you fire the scout.

Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But that’s how some people are measuring social media “effectiveness.”

I came across this recently in an article that claimed, “Top B2B Firms Gaining 230% More Leads via Social Media Than Peers.”

“Best-in-Class B2B companies generate on average 17% of their leads from social media channels, roughly 230% more marketing-generated leads than other companies (5%).”

That’s some mad mathematical mayhem there – what my financial-analyst friend Ron Shevlin would call “quantipulation.” Where did that figure of 230% come from? I tried to do the math: 17 is 240% more than 5, so somewhere along the way, we lost 10% and…

Hold on there: this whole case smells like something beached itself and died. I find myself suddenly remembering Darrell Huff‘s classic book, How to Lie with Statistics, which demonstrated how you can say anything you want with numbers — particularly if you use those ever deceptive percentages. But since I took graduate statistics from a professor who couldn’t teach a fish how to swim, I don’t trust my calculations.

So I contact Shevlin, who’s a professional marketing analyst in the financial services industry. He cuts to the chase:

“NEVER EVER calculate the percentage difference between two percentages.”

Thank you, Sensei, for dispensing with that nonsense.

But I wasn’t done with this article yet.

The So What Factor

As I tell my students, the most important question to ask when analyzing social media in business is, “So what?” It’s the perfect response to any of these statements:

• “I’ve got one quadrillion Twitter followers!”
• “My video went viral!”
• “I just became the Mayor of my favorite coffee shop!”
• “According to Klout, I’m the world’s most influential person in three categories!”

Ask “So what?” — and the answer better have a $ sign attached.

So let’s look at our 230% overachievers, shall we? And let’s be good sports and grant them that number. So here it goes: so what if you got 230% more leads?

• What are the absolute numbers? 17% sounds like more than 5%, but you don’t need a good statistics professor to understand that 17% of 100 is a lot less impressive than 5% of 100,000.
• What was the ultimate value of those leads? Did they all convert into sales? And if they did convert, at what dollar amount?
• What was each of those firms selling? Some products and services are a lot easier to sell through social media than others. (Say, marketing consulting vs. nuclear accident clean-ups.)
• Are the top firms getting more leads because they’re good at social media, or because they’re top firms?
• If a higher percentage of a company’s leads comes from social media, couldn’t that mean that they suck at traditional media? Or, conversely, perhaps the 5-percenters are so good at traditional media, that they don’t need to bother with social. (There’s a company like that you may have heard of called “Apple.”)
• How much did the 17-percenters spend in time, money and opportunity costs to land those leads? What did the 5-percenters spend? Of course, EVERYONE knows by now that social media isn’t free and can be even more expensive than traditional media, right?
• If the firms had invested all that time and money into traditional media – from which 83-95% all leads in this case come from – what would the results have been?
• And, wait, if non-social media is generating 83-95% of all leads for these firms, why is this even a story? I know where I’d invest my time and money, don’t you?

Now don’t get me wrong: social media has actually generated leads for my own B2B agency, almost entirely through LinkedIn. So yes, it can be productive and lucrative. For some… at some times under some situations for some prospective clients.

The key is being able to discern what that “some” is, and we won’t be able to discern squat if we keep getting thrown distorted stats. Silly stats are no way to pick a basketball player, and certainly no way to run a business.

I’m 230% sure about that.

Freddy’s Intro: Why is there a diatribe about New Orleans Saints football, crime, and punishment in my marketing blog? A lot of reasons.

• First, it’s a knee-deep, Mississippi-mud-thick, Tabasco-and-vitriol-infused jambalaya about football, and I love me some spicy good writing about the world’s greatest sport.
• Second, I came this close to becoming a New Orleanian: I reluctantly turned down Tulane Business School to stay in L.A. and attend USC instead – two years before Katrina struck. Funny how life can be massively altered by one decision.
• Finally, for us marketers, this fan’s rant is a classic example of how one of the most powerful brands in the world, the NFL, is far from being “customer centric.” Customer-centricity is the trendy new strategy favored by almost no one but naïve marketing writers.

As the case of the New Orleans Saints bounty program demonstrates, brands have multiple stakeholders they need to consider. Realizing that it’s impossible to please everyone, the NFL went ahead and pissed some fans off – such as my friend here. The strength of a brand can then be measured by how many of those fans stay loyal despite being mad as hell. (And I know that Emir will continue to watch every Saints game this season and beyond.)

I agree with a lot of what’s in his post, and disagree with some of it. (I’m a huge fan of Peter King, who Emir maligns below.) But what matters here is the passion: a sign that a brand has achieved marketing nirvana (beyond sales, of course).

Warning: lots of semi-obscure football, religious, historical and literary allusions ahead, but that’s half the fun of this piece. As they say in New Orleans, laissez les bons temps rouler!

Who can argue that not all sins are created equal?

I have it on Good Authority that The Cheatriots committed a mortal sin and His Saints a venial one. Not only would all the Saints agree with me, but more to the point, so would St. Amani Toomer, a longtime Giants receiver now retired, who said he would place an asterisk next to the Patriots’ three Super Bowl victories. “I would, I definitely would without question,” Toomer said on the Jim Rome Show. “If you know what their adjustments are and what their signals are and you practice those signals, it’s cheating. I feel very strongly about it because this game is as much about the level playing field of the NFL, and the league has built up so much goodwill to let everybody know that what you’re watching is the real deal. The fact that the Spygate thing goes directly to the core that the NFL is, to me it is a big deal.” Some cretins might not see this insight as miraculous, but anyone who doesn’t heretofore refer to Amani as at least Venerable Amani (Blessed seems more accurate to me) is to miss a beatification right before their human eyes.

Undoubtedly, one such cretin with his snout-like parotid glands is our very own Peter King. And to think this nave was named after the King Apostle. Judas Priest would have been much more appropriate. And clearly, screaming occasionally discernible devil music his more suited vocation. He should never have taken those 30 pieces. They rattle when he writes. It bugs me. I am a fly to him.

Oh how glibly Peter King glosses over what the Cheatriots did. Spygate, we called it. The fact is, Coach Bill Belichick’s Patriots were caught red-handed in 2007 secretly taping opponents’ coaches’ hand signals and, presumably, matching them with video cutups of plays in order for New England’s defense to know which offensive play was coming. And on that day, not this one, the NFL FELL.

This systematic affront to the very core of the Spirit of the Game also happened to have violated NFL policy. The Law. And so on Sunday in the dead of night, Goodell fined Belichick the maximum of $500,000, fined the Patriots $250,000 and docked them a first-round draft choice in 2008. “This episode represents a calculated and deliberate attempt to avoid longstanding rules designed to encourage fair play and promote honest competition on the playing field,” Goodell wrote in a letter to the Patriots explaining his disciplinary action. And throughout Boston they did weep… from laughter.

From that “disciplinary” letter, who could foresee Roger Goodell’s head-twirling ghoulish possession by a red-eyed Richard M. Nixon. So much so, that this debacle would conclude with: Spygate=Watergate. Don’t believe me, ask Carl Bernstein. He’d tell you how the Nixonian Commissioner destroyed the evidence, the very tapes that prompted him to levy the punishment. Instead of initiating a Saints-like 50,000-page investigation into Spygate, Nixon had the tapes destroyed. I can hear clearly the justification to erase the tapes: “We have a cancer within, close to the Commish, that is growing.”

One theory (not from Peter King mind you) is that those tapes may have provided such clear evidence of cheating that to be made public would be to forever call in question New England’s three Super Bowl victories. So Goodell erased them — or did Liddy do it? Don Banks? Bob Haldeman perhaps?

Dean: “It is not going to go away, sir!”
Nixon: “It is not going to go away.”

Some say History repeats itself (usually tenured Professors trying to justify their tenure). But in this case…

By destroying the tapes, Roger Goodell is lying by omission. Please read St. Aquinas for further edification. When the NFL is long gone, who knows where in the Inferno Goodell will ultimately reside? Perhaps, only Dante knows. But more to the point, who will light a candle for his Purgatorial release? No Saint that’s for sure. Maybe Coach Belichick can ignite the mystical transformation in which one’s suffering can benefit someone else based on God’s ability to take any negative and turn it into good.

Problem is, Coach Belichick didn’t suffer. Not one iota. Unlike the ineffective “Bounty-system,” cheating worked. It paid off. Thanks to the very man for whom he’s now trying to light a purgatorial candle. Alas, Goodell shall remain in the mire to which he deserves. In fact, henceforth I can actually see our Archbishop publicly forbidding any New Orleanian from lighting a candle for any Cheatriot Fan, dead or alive. Sacrilege takes many forms, and we in NOLA vehemently oppose each one (except during Mardi Gras).

But unlike the Saints, at least good ol’ Coach Belichick didn’t lie. Well, since he didn’t have to endure a 50,000-page investigation, he really didn’t get the chance to strut his administrative dark side. His nasty streak was primarily confined to the Jets and Steelers. Their seasons were the deaths to which all sins flower. But of the two, it was my second favorite team (Terry Bradshaw is from Louisiana) that suffered most from the Dark Shadows of Belichick and Co.

“They definitely cheated!!!” decried Hines Ward, suddenly edified by a Black-and-Gold nimbus and whose opinion, like those of most Steelers involved in the 2001 and 2004 AFC championship games, seethed Apocalyptic Fury at how the Cheatriots won both of those games in Heinz Field solely because they cheated, cheated and more cheated. The Steel Curtain was shredded, impugned and trampled upon by illegal, immoral and nefarious means. (This always happens when Boston Blue-Bloods befriend Red-Headed New Yorkers). And the tapes to evidence this debacle are in ashes, and Peter King has typed it up like some parking ticket. It’s a well-known fact: Peter King does not own a Terrible Towel. Nor should he.

At that point in time, if perceived rightly, America lay in ruins.

And yet there was no Patriotic study on the Cheatriots. But the one on the Saints indicates the Saints were second in the NFL with 17 regular-season defensive flags for violating rules intended to protect players from being hurt, just behind the Oakland Raiders’ 18. The league averaged nine per team (really, who wants to be average?).

Hey stat genius, weren’t the Saints in pass defense much of the time, and didn’t the Saints blitz most? You are much more likely to get called for such flags when blitzing the quarterback and laying out receivers. Admittedly, we had no choice but to be in Pass Defense. You see, we are cursed by the Prince of this World for having the Greatest Offense in Sentient History (angelic and UFO teams included). By angelic, I mean Fallen and Un-Fallen. Thus, the Prince’s envy.

And so despite what a coach might think, it is not always good to always have the lead. Look at the tape of the game in SF where we won twice and lost. Alex Smith was possessed by the Devil in Cleats. Apparently at key times, the Spirit of Joe can be plucked from those Napa wineries. Damn that man. He ruined my childhood, and that of so many others. Jesus in Cleats my foot. But I will say this about Mountain Joe: he wouldn’t have whined about the hits the New Orleanian Favre took. (Kiln, Mississippi is within the cultural gambit of NOLA as with Memphis, Birmingham, Mobile, Little Rock. But for some reason we stop abruptly along the Sabine. I suspect Jerry Jones has something to do with it.)

And to think this entire 50,000-page investigation into the Saints reached critical mass when our beloved Brett Favre got hit on a play that was not penalized, and for which Almighty Goodell did not fine anyone in his Monday Morning Lightning Strikes from Mt. Olympus.

How many other NFL teams could survive a 50,000-page investigation into improper motivation to play aggressive, naughty, nasty, even wrongful (Think Raiders!). Answer: none.

But enough theology many moderns would consider medieval (everyone knows how much I disdain modernity). Peter King says (please genuflect) that Roger Goodell had to send the message out of concern for player safety.

What a crock!

If Goodell cared about player safety, he wouldn’t be pushing for an 18-game season. He wouldn’t have spent last off-season fighting the NFL Players Association on expanding health benefits or limiting “voluntary” off-season workouts. He wouldn’t be promoting Thursday-night games, which will accelerate injuries by giving players a shorter week to heal. Tell me, St. Peter, how honest was the NFL about players’ long-tern injury rates, the concussion epidemic and the history of sending concussed players back into games? Please, Pete, tell all. Only that, and more, could remove your toady status. In fact, when you come to Heaven for our Super Bowl, I hope you choke on the King Cake Baby.

Petra Rex, please parade before us each and every NFL player who was illegally injured by the wayward Saints… None. I thought so. Also, if the hit was illegal, it was flagged. And if particularly egregious, then promptly fined from on high by Roger Goodell. Did Father Zeus miss any illegal hits from the Saints Bounty system that he now deems should have been fined, as opposed to when these alleged criminal hits first occurred? If so, then Roger Goodell is admittedly incompetent in meting out punishment, and needs to delegate such Zeus-ness to someone who can effectuate the rules within 48 hours, and not 3 years. I nominate Sean Payton.

Conveniently enough, Roger Goodell now has decreed that all NFL teams certify they do not have a bounty system. As of today, who couldn’t and wouldn’t? Not even the Devil himself. Why doesn’t Goodell ask for a certification that no bounty system of any sort was in effect since the day the 50,000-page investigation commenced against the small-market Saints? Now that would be honest, even fair. Not gonna happen, is it, Mr. Toady Peter? Your legs would make a great appetizer.

Y’know, on further thought, I really think it was Ernie Adams who destroyed the tapes (mystery man and Director of Research on the Cheatriots who is not a coach, doesn’t really talk to players, but talks to his lifelong friend, Darth, after each practice. They say he sleeps in snowdrifts, fears garlic and is the sole reason coaches talk with mouths unseen during all games.)

The Saints and their QB Drew Brees under fire… Photo by U.S. Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. James Frank via Wikimedia Commons.

And still Peter King bullfrogs Spygate a venial sin. Enough!!!

For disrespecting the Proper Order of Naughtiness in the World, you are hereby consigned to Purgatory unless you…

1. Say 50 Hail Marys and mean it…
2. Predict the Saints will win the Super Bowl…
3. Never-ever disparage the Lord’s Team (America’s Team may reside in Dallas, but the Saints reside in the City That Care Forgot as an Incarnation)…
4. And order Drew Brees to take the $90 million over 5 years, since his value is in relation to the Salary Cap and not the Federal Government’s ability to print money.

If Drew can’t live off the $250 million he will make from NOLA in pay and endorsements by the end of his career, then he is either a scalawag from Texas or a carpet-bagger from Purdue. This part of my diatribe is erased from print and from the Akashic record if Drew comes to his senses and takes St. Loomis’ offer. And to think I was in love with that 5’11 man.

By now, isn’t it going much too far to assume the New Orleans Saints are a dirty team on defense or otherwise?

In fact, the defense has been porous for years. We compulsively blitz because prepubescent zombies pass-rush more ferociously than our front four. Don’t believe me, ask Vernon Davis.

But enough denigration of the Saint’s defense. Let’s cut through the cannoli: truth is, not one single solitary NFL team could withstand a 50,000-page investigation as to whether they improperly motivated players to hurt players from the opposing team. For some reason, I kept thinking of Conrad Dobler. And he played offense!

Peter, you have glibly asserted that Roger Goodell’s friendship with Bob Kraft would amount to no more than buying him the first rounds of drinks. That relationship would have to be acknowledged in a Court of Law and would no doubt trigger an effective recusal motion.

But justice and legal procedure don’t have a lot in common — just look at the appellate process Coach Payton must undergo. Who can deny that Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Dennis Rader, David Berkowitz, Gary Ridgway, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez, Coral Eugene Watts, Dean Corll, Richard Angelo, Albert Firsh, Eddie Gein, Belle Gunness, Angel Maturino Resendiz, Derrick Todd Lee, John Allen Muhammad and Herman Webster Mudgett all belong to en extremely elite Hall of Fame? Each and every one of them without exception received more effective Due Process than Coach Sean Payton, aka: Lord and Protector against Nefarious Souls who would try to take the team Elsewhere (like San Antonio).

And by way, the Saints are not innocent, but let any other team sinless of any sort of Bounty-system cast the first stone… publicly. Yeah, I didn’t think so.

In the end, it is clear that to give up coaching is what Big Brother wanted from Winston Smith all along.

His spirit broken, Winston is released to the outside world. A year later, Winston meets NOLA but no longer feels anything for her. He has accepted the Party entirely and has learned to love Big Brother.

Or is this a ruse? For Winston also seems fixated on a powerful Party member named Parcells, whom Winston believes is a secret member of the Brotherhood — the mysterious, legendary group that works to overthrow the Party for whom Don Banks and Peter King re-write their History, so eloquently denying that football is inherently a violent game and that 99.99% of its worst injuries take place within the rules of game (just ask Pierre Thomas). I won’t even discuss the multi-million dollar incentive clauses DEs have to sack the QB. What’s $1000 when sack #10 is worth $1,000,000.00? But who discloses these salient facts? Where’s Bob Woodward when you need him?

But when it comes to yellow journalism, Don Banks and Peter King can’t compete with the scion of William Randoph Heart: Roger Goodell. In order to enable a better legal defense against the Concussion Class Action Lawsuits and deliver to the owners their billions via the 18-game season, Roger Goodell has donned the wig and rouge to hoodwink us into believing his Unholy Sanctions against the Saints, new and improved helmets, and some high-tech padding by the NFL empowers players to engage in the violent game of football WITH NO ILL CONSEQUENCE.

This multi-billion dollar deception (mortal sin) cost the Saints dearly, and will cost the Players when they take their millions, while the owners pocket their billions.

When you get old, you think you might pass the time by meeting an NFL player in your convalescent home. Given the shortened lifespan of elite athletes, not to mention NFL players, one can almost guarantee that such a meeting will be more rare than an honest NFL Commissioner.

I doubt you will reply to this Peter, since censorship takes many forms. One of which is: toady-ism. H.L. Mencken would agree with me on this.

Not yours, although truly,

Ignatius J. Reilly
(Who Dat member #43384903849317510292305490579573928. The burdensome numberage is a direct result of an active fan base existent in this world and the next.)

P.S. We are invincible. We actually live and breathe beneath the waterline, and our dead parade themselves above land, encaved beautifully. For all to see there they wait. For those who have faith, this is a transition, not an end. Sean Payton is nothing but a grain of wheat fallen to the earth. This will all bear much fruit.

Emir Phillips

About Emir Phillips: A Comprehensive Financial Planner and Asset Protection Specialist by day, Emir Philips is a history and football buff at all other times. For this former LA native now living in L.A., the Saints aren’t just a team – they’re a sect. Emir is also the author of Lucitan: A Christian Punk Novel, which tells of the Devil’s attempt to save New Orleans.

Freddy’s Update 4/2/12: Emir isn’t the only New Orleanian who’s upset. “Free Sean Payton” T-shirts are being seen on everyone from Jimmy Buffett to roadside vendors. As I noted above about passion, the scandal is actually leading to more ticket sales. In other words, Saints fans are pissed off at the NFL, and they’re showing their anger… by buying more tickets. Guess who wins? Now, who’s reporting all this? Emir’s favorite writer, Peter King, of course. In addition to the reports from New Orleans, King discusses the history of violence and bounties in the NFL.

How's white with markings? Is white with markings tasty enough for you? Photo by Bakasama at fr.wikipedia.

True story: A man walks by a pet store and sees rabbits for sale. He tells the clerk that he’ll take one, and she asks him what color he’d like. The man responds, “I don’t think the snake cares”…

I know, I know, not the most heartwarming Easter story ever told. (If it’s any consolation, the clerk refused to sell a rabbit to the man, who replied, “Snake’s gotta eat, too.”) The reason I’m blogging it is that, in classic business literature fashion, any unusual story can be warped into a business lesson. (Seth Godin has made millions doing it, so why not play along?)

And here’s your lesson du jour: The snake is the consumer. (Stay with me now.) And all he wants is lunch — just something to tide him over for a couple of weeks. Yet here comes some know-it-all (the clerk) foisting upon him some features he couldn’t care less about.

As consumers, we’ve all experienced this feature creep: products with capabilities we don’t need or even want…

• “No, I don’t need a TV with 3D…”
• “And when exactly will I use four-wheel drive in Santa Monica?…”
• “This textbook comes with a DVD? Can I get a $100 discount if I just go with the paper version?”

In her highly insightful and engaging book, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, Harvard Professor YoungMe Moon describes this mad proliferation of features — what she calls “augmentation-by-addition” — as a sign of creative failure. Rather than being truly innovative, companies just cram feature after feature into a product, since piling on commoditized features doesn’t take a lot of money or skill or imagination.

“It used to be that toothpaste offered the singular promise of cavity-free teeth: today, toothpaste offers the additional promises of fresh breath, tartar control, and a whiter smile. It used to be that laundry detergent offered the singular promise of clean clothes; today, there is static elimination, stain protection, and fabric softening.”

Such feature creep makes brands indistinguishable, so, as Moon notes, consumers stop caring about brands at all. Think about the low-end of the computer market: Toshiba, Lenovo, HP, Compaq, Dell, Asus, Acer, Whatever. “What does it matter,” says the snake. “They’re all the same anyway, so give me a deal.” The end result: companies start competing on the basis of price instead of brand in a disastrous race to the bottom.

This trend of imposing unwanted features on consumers is not limited to retail products.

Take Facebook’s timeline, for example. When did people start demanding to know their friends on a chronological basis? It’s even more nonsensical when it comes to business pages. How often do consumers want a year-by-year history of the brands they buy?

In fact, let’s take a step back and point out something that should upset all new-media marketers: most consumers don’t want interactivity in advertising. Video games? Of course they want interactivity. Ads? Not so much. In fact, way less than not so much. My favorite new blogger, The Ad Contrarian, points this out in a vicious but oh-so-true rant, “Interactivity: Get Over It”:

“Every experiment with interactive TV (ITV) has been a disaster. Click-through rates on banner ads are below 1 in a thousand. Engagement rates on Facebook are below 1/2 of 1%. It turns out that people on line react to ads the same way people off line react to them — mostly they ignore them. And when they do bother to read them, they overwhelmingly do not interact with them… In the digital world, people are passionate about interacting with each other — not brands, not ads, not you, not me. Get over it.”

And don’t get me started on QR Codes. (My other favorite marketing blogger, Ron Shevlin, recently pointed me to the ultimate QR Code analytics site.)

What’s this all mean? It’s simple: we marketers need to think twice – even thrice –  before hopping on every tech trend that comes out of the chute. Want to play with something new because it excites y-o-u? By all means, go play. You might get lucky, just as you would with a roulette wheel. Want to use new tech because it excites consumers? Yeah, well hold on there, Buck Rogers, and determine whether your target customers are truly excited, or whether they just want something to tide them over a couple of weeks.

The snake doesn’t care – but he’s hungry. What are you going to do about it?

And so the marketer got the toothsome fate he deserved...

Forget the 10-foot-tall 6-limbed marauding Martians – the biggest challenge facing John Carter is his name.

Or more exactly, the fact that Disney used his name as the title to his movie.

Creating the second-worst sci-fi movie title of all time, Disney named this $250-million epic about red planet warfare “John Carter.” Yes, really, “John Carter.” Think about it. I mean, how can you not feel your blood racing at the sound of it? How does it not simply evoke a flaming pageantry of exotic images?

Or are you thinking, “Isn’t that the brother of Jimmy Carter?”

Blame It On the Usual Suspects

How did this travesty occur? According to director Andrew Stanton in the L.A. Times:

“I was in the middle of reshoots, and marketing came to me and said, ‘Look we’ve done all these focus groups and not a single woman is gonna come see a movie called ‘John Carter of Mars’ … I was a little bummed about that (but) … I changed the “Princess of Mars” to “John Carter of Mars” because I thought no boy would go to the film. So I’m victim of the same exact thing.”

Let me translate a portion of that for you non-Los Angelenos. When someone in Hollywood says they’re “a little bummed” by a studio decision, them’s fighting words. Stanton’s really saying that he was pissed out of his mind and probably lost sleep for a week thinking about the one-kiloton dud of a name draped around his film’s neck.

Feel his pain: these so-called “marketing” guys – knowing Disney, a bunch of spreadsheet jockeys with MBAs – overrode the director and made a major creative decision based on focus groups (the worst source of insight ever) to avoid alienating a segment (women) who wouldn’t pay to see this movie even it was called “The Help Wears Prada while Having Sex in the City: New Moon.”

Yo, suits without balls: It’s a movie about a guy with a sword fighting giant green men on Mars. Get with the program. Young men are the target here. Make the boys come see it, love it, spread the word, then convince the girls to join them. Omitting “Princess” from the name made sense, but omitting “Mars”?

Let me guess: these faux marketers probably would have renamed “Star Wars” something like “Star Dysfunctions,” and “The Terminator” would be called “Daddy’s Back, and Look Who He Brought With Him!”

It Could Be Worse

“John Carter” should have been called “The Warlord of Mars.” But unfortunately, I wasn’t part of this almighty focus group.

But what’s done is done, and – surprise, surprise – Disney is encountering less than wild enthusiasm from the masses, despite $250 million in special effects, a classic sci-fi brand, and participation from Pixar wizards. Having a bad name – whether it’s for a movie or a Web 2.0 startup – just means you have to invest much more in marketing to get to square one. Good luck also selling the videogame called “John Carter.” Putting that “Disney” name (which just says “adult action movie,” no?) above the title should help…

If there’s any consolation, at least the film wasn’t called “Serenity” (the worst sci-fi movie title of all time). Yes, kids, once upon a time in a galaxy just around the corner, someone decided to make a brilliant sci-fi thriller sound like a tea house or feminine hygiene product.

And yes, it failed, but it wasn’t the aliens that shot it down in flames.

P.S. Finally saw the movie and found it thoroughly enjoyable. Yeah, the beginning was a mess, and the nonsense about the godlike Therns should have been killed on conception, but this was far better than any of the “Transformers” tripe. And other viewers, from my friends to reviewers on IMDB, enjoyed it, too. Apparently, the “word of mouth” on the film was not about its quality, but that it was a bomb, which only fueled mass avoidance. So given the inane title and the inability of Disney to control the message, I nominate “John Carter” for the worst marketing campaign of the year.

• Related article: “Like Tears In the Rain: How Sci-Fi Series Go All to Hell”