In the unlikely event that you haven’t yet heard of this nefarious noisemaker, here are the facts: it’s loud; it’s indigenous to African sporting events; and it’s droned so loudly at every World Cup match this year that programmers have built custom filters that remove its sound from games, and many fans have called for its abolishment.

So Google put a Vuvuzela button in Youtube.

Not, as you might expect, to filter it out. Instead, the button adds the unmistakeable droning to any video clip for which it’s enabled.

Changing Youtube isn’t something that’s done lightly. For one thing, every time Google changes the Youtube interface, millions of visitors’ browsers need to re-download its components, generating a flood of new traffic that would otherwise be cached in browsers if the interface hadn’t changed. That Flash plug-in is 132.61 KBytes, and Quantcast estimates Youtube receives around 100M unique visitors a month.

Bandwidth consumption aside, as every good web operator knows, changes are bad simply because they break things. There’s also testing to consider. Google probably has clever ways to minimize the impact of new components, but however you slice it, changes to a popular part of the UI cost the company money.

What’s more, this is a feature with no real utility. It’s an annoyance, a trick, a novelty. It doesn’t add anything to the viewing experience — in fact, it outright ruins it.

As a marketer, would you have allowed this?

Imagine that you’re an executive in a multi-billion-dollar public company. One of your employees suggests that she modify the user interface of your site with a feature that makes things worse. What do you say?

If you’re a traditional marketer, you say no. And maybe put a disparaging remark in her employment file, or place a concerned call to HR. There’s no ROI, no business justification. It’s a risk that can easily be avoided.

But if you’re a modern marketer, you might just do it.

Consider: Google is facing criminal charges in three countries for violation of privacy, as part of its misguided attempts to map the world’s information as it drives past unsecured wifi networks. The case is prompting some countries to make unencrypted wifi illegal. At the same time, they’re rumoured to be building a direct competitor to Facebook, armed with far more information about each of us than Zuckerberg’s mad dream ever had.

And yet Google’s fanbase largely overlooks such gaffes because, well, Google comes across as a harmless college roommate, playing the occasional prank.

The importance of rhetoric

Let’s talk for a minute about rhetoric. As an excellent article on teaching kids to argue effectively reminded me, appeals within rhetorical debate come in three forms:

• Logos, or logic. This is the appeal to rationality, using arguments that are consistent and based on facts and reason: “You should drive to the restaurant because it is far, and travelling far by foot is likely to cause blisters.”
• Pathos, or empathy. This is the appeal to the audience, tugging at their heartstrings: “Cool people drive cars; you want to be cool, don’t you?”
• Ethos, or reputation. An authority on the subject, or someone respected, can appeal to that reputation to convince others: “I’m your father and I said so,” is a (possibly ineffective) argument based on reputation.

All rhetorical appeals are based on one or more of these strategies. You employ them in order to convince someone else of your point of view.

Social networks and the “flatness” of the Web have changed two things for public relations. First, PR is increasingly about reputation (ethos) of the organization — BP versus Google, for example — than the logos and pathos. And second, the message isn’t what you put in a press release; it’s what the mob infers from your actions.

Playfulness puts deposits in the Ethos bank

I can’t say whether Google understands this explicitly. It may be that they have the best parts of Rove, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu trapped in a giant computer, some Illuminati Frankenstein plotting dystopian machinations from the shadows. More likely, the company has grasped the humanizing aspects of mischief through its culture, and knows intuitively that a spoonful of hijinks helps the medicine go down.

Others are grasping this, too. The Superbowl ad is fast becoming the Youtube ad (Old Spice, I’m looking at you.)

Some ads don’t even make it to the Superbowl, and still get widespread attention while adjusting your perception of a brand (the Sienna Swagger Wagon is a good example.)

And some aren’t even ads. Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Collegehumor’s Dumbdumb is a great example of this. Just watch their first project.

Go on, watch it. Trust me.

But those are just advertising. What Google, and others like it, are demonstrating is cultural. When Zappos got the price wrong on some products, it lost $1.5M. By honoring that price, despite the loss, the company earned goodwill, free press — and the benefit of the doubt in future; despite this, cynics speculated that it was just a PR stunt.

Traditional marketers want to control the content of the message, and the means of distribution. They like their story told in predictable, contrived soundbites, saltered with hyperbole and peppered with meaningless adjectives, blanded by committee. They love their press releases, their positioning statements, their careful constraint of who talks to whom. But a press release is the worst way to start a conversation. In addition to bringing nothing to the conversation, it distances the author from the audience, rather than building rapport through humor and dialogue.

Fortunately for the rest of us, traditional marketers and the fluff they produce are fast becoming irrelevant.

The best way to ensure that your messages are clear and targeted is what we call a message map. It’s essentially a flowchart that shows the stages a prospect goes through until they become a buyer, along with the objections they have at each stage of the process and the content needed to overcome those objections. It borrows from the concept of a sales funnel, which should be familiar to anyone in sales or web analytics. It works best for bigger-ticket purchases that involve several decision makers, rather than for small, impulsive buying decisions.

This is some of Rednod’s secret sauce, but in the interest of openness and conversation, we figured we’d show it here. It’s a process we’ve developed over the years, and we use it in most of our client engagements. If I could do only one thing with a startup, this would be it. In some cases, the message map exercise sends companies or investors back to the drawing board to reconsider their entire offering.

I’m going to show you how it works using the example of someone buying a new car. You can use this approach for nearly anything; the point isn’t to learn how to sell cars, it’s to think about the messages and collateral you’re creating in the context of your target customer.

Step one: identify the stages in a purchase

The first step is to understand the major milestones that a buyer must go through in order to decide you’re the right choice. Consider, for example, that you want to sell a Honda Civic hybrid. You have many arguments to make — that Honda makes nice cars; that a hybrid is better for the planet; that driving is a liberating experience. But if you simply spew out all those arguments, your efforts will be wasted.

In the case of a car, your buyer probably faces several stages from prospect to purchase. For example:

We know you’re not selling cars. Pay attention; this is about the process. Your product, and the milestones a prospect must clear in order to become a customer, will be obviously be different. But you must get this step right for your target customer.

If you don’t understand the clear mental stages that separate a prospect from a buyer, get out of your office and don’t come back until you do.

Step two: define the stakeholders

Now you need to know who the audience is at each stage of the purchasing process. Early on, you’re using broader messages, since they have to satisfy everyone who hears them. Let’s add the stakeholders to our car message map:

The complexity and format of the message you can deliver at a particular stage in the map changes significantly. Early on, you’re telling the world it needs a car — possibly through broadcast advertising. Later, however, you’re putting detailed specifications about a particular make and model into a printed brochure or web page.

If you’re selling a technical product, you may find the stakeholder in the early stages is an IT operator or a developer, but later on it’s a CFO or an investor. The sales materials you offer them will be very different: a detailed white paper for the technologist, but a business case or an ROI calculator for the person signing the check.

In other words, as the prospect moves from interest to purchase, the information they want and the tone you can take changes significantly.

Step three: identify the motivations and objections

Prospects have different objections at different stages. In stage (c), for example, the main objections are things like, “hybrids are too expensive” or “I don’t think a hybrid is powerful enough to drive.” So marketing messages need to focus on the affordability and power of a hybrid vehicle. As your target audience moves down the message map, they become more narrowly defined, and your messages can be more specific.

Your goal at each stage of the message map is to deliver the message that moves the prospect to the next stage by  providing arguments–both rational and emotional–that overcome objections and encourage progress. It’s a good idea to write down what you think a nay-sayer will claim. This helps to make the stakeholder more real, and can be updated as you hear new objections during the sales process.

Here’s our message map with the objections, and the positions of those who agree and disagree with the sales proposition:

As you can see, we have a much more concrete understanding of the sales process and the required arguments already.

Step four: overcome objections

Now that you know what’s stopping you from selling your product or service, it’s time to overcome those obstacles. Continuing with our car example, here are some possible responses:

(You can right-click and view the image to see it full size)

To be clear, we’re not endorsing all of these — predatory lending and making up stories on the dangers of walking aren’t a good idea. Any marketer has to create messages that are consistent with their overall brand.

Notice how essential it is to match a response to a prospect’s specific objection. There’s no point telling someone stuck at stage C that hybrids are fast and powerful if they’re actually concerned about battery safety; in fact, it may hurt your marketing efforts. Targeting the right objection with the right message is critical.

Step five: reinforce motivations

It’s not enough to overcome objections–you also need to reinforce motivations. That means understanding why prospects move towards the purchase, and creating urgency around those steps.

Here’s how we might do that:

Remember, we’re using the example of a car purchase to make a point. Cars are something most people are familiar with, so you can likely condense many of these messages into an ad. But when you’re selling a new product or service — or even introducing someone to a new website, from first visit to engagement — you can’t overlook this process of steps, objections, and encouragements.

Step six: create the right collateral for each stage

If we’ve done steps one through five properly, the collateral will pretty much write itself. We’ll know, for example, that we need to commission an independent test of road handling; or that we should launch a premium car brand, or that we may want to change financing terms.

In each case, we know what objection we’re trying to overcome, so we can also test that hypothesis. Did the independent test change public opinions of the performance of hybrids? Did the financing terms lead to more people considering buying a car?

The collateral will be different for each stage. A motivated buyer in the later stages of purchase will seek out information, and they’ll want details. They may also prefer impartial studies, such as reviews or testimonials. Earlier in the process, subjective, brand-oriented appeals to lifestyle and self-image will work better. Larger fonts, different print publications, and a unique tone are probably appropriate for the campaign to grandparents.

Putting it all together

We often get asked to create a “marketing library.” This is usually a slide deck, a white paper, a positioning statement, some boilerplate copy for press releases, product spec sheets, and case studies. It’s as if everyone’s been programmed to ask for this list. Often, it’s wrong to do so.

We usually bring such companies back to the message map process before we work on any collateral. Here’s why:

• It forces them to answer the real question that’s so often overlooked: why are you doing this?
• If they do it right, the collateral and marketing materials become obvious.
• If they don’t know the buying process, the customer’s motivations, or the objections, it becomes painfully apparent. There’s no point making marketing collateral if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish with it.
• The message map reminds them that there’s no “silver bullet” that will magically make a prospect buy: it’s part of a process of engagement.

Why should you use message maps? Simply put, because they help you sell things better, which is, after all, the point of marketing.

Using a message map, the first thing you have to do is find out where in the process a prospect is at. You should quickly fire salespeople who don’t do this.  Telling someone the advantages of a hybrid engine when they have no desire to buy a car won’t help; extolling the virtues of green when someone’s concerned about acceleration will hurt;  explaining to someone how nice driving is when they’re already in your showroom is a waste of time.

Great salespeople have an almost preternatural intuition about where the prospect is at in the buying process. They can often tell with just a few sentences where someone’s at in the buying process. Bad ones sell by rote, spraying messages at a prospect in the hope that one will stick.

You should insist on a message map for every product or service you offer, and you should make it as up to date as possible. That way, every time you see a piece of marketing collateral, you’ll ask yourself, “which stage is this supposed to move prospects through, and does it accomplish that goal?” You can tie sales funnel reviews and web analytics meetings to it, too.

Message mapping should be a fundamental part of your product planning and marketing communications efforts. Every piece of collateral — from calling scripts to web design to press releases to promotional videos — should fit within the map, and you should constantly seek to validate or correct the map to adjust to how your prospects buy your products.

But what if you have something more complex to say — a business plan, for example? What if you’re giving a colleague a competitive analysis? Or proposing a new product? How long should that document be?

In my experience, you should follow the seatback rule. This is the time between when a pilot asks passengers to put their seatbacks up and tray tables away, and the time when it’s safe to use portable electronic devices.

I like this rule because it suggests several things:

• The document has to get to their seatback. It probably has to go through an admin, or a to-do list that says, “print this for reading on the flight to Boston.” Make that obvious, and be aware not only of the document’s contents, but also how it gets in front of the intended reader.
• The document must be short. You have roughly ten minutes of their attention — less, if they decide to watch the video explaining how to do up their seatbelt.
• What you write must be easy to consume. That means short sentences, a good up-front summary, bulleted lists, tables, and diagrams. Long prose will make them tune out. Lighting won’t be perfect, and it’ll likely be stuffed in a folder with other papers, so use good line spacing and column widths to maximize readability.
• Hide supporting material near the back, or better yet, in a separate document for a follow-up. If you have a summary of revenues, put the detailed work in a separate spreadsheet they can have someone else review. If you’re painting a picture of a market, compare competitors on a few important dimensions, then put the detailed descriptions of them in an appendix.
• Don’t assume access to online materials. While it’s tempting to embed hyperlinks in a PDF, many readers won’t follow them. I’m always astonished at how many early-adopters of technology have their assistants print out documents for them to read.
• Have a clear call to action. The perfect outcome for many documents is a scrawled, “we should do this” or “set up a meeting” on the front page, which will then be handed to an administrator. Make it easy to achieve this.
• Address the reader’s basic questions: What’s this about? Why should I care? What action is required? Why should I take it? Most time-impoverished executives have some form of personal inbox processing (borrowed loosely from Getting Things Done) that encourages them to decide, very quickly, whether something should be Done, Delegated, Deferred, or Discarded. Understanding their mindset and making it easy for them to act appropriately is priceless.

Next time you’re writing a document — whether it’s a white paper for a prospect, a business proposal, a market analysis, or any other message you need to get to a busy, time-poor audience, use the seatback test. For that matter, next time you’re on a flight, print out a few documents (such as competitors’ collateral or analyst reports) and see how fast you tune out. Most written documents are lousy. It’ll make you realize just how much of an advantage clear, concise communications can be.

I’m helping to judge and counsel the participants, and in doing so I’m remembering just how hard it can be to explain what you do from within your own company.

• You can’t hone your pitch: At an event like this, you’re speaking to investors, employees, competitors, and advisors.
• You want to explain it all: You’re convinced that you have to offer a tour of your whole product or service, which makes you rush.
• You’ve got the curse of knowledge, something Made To Stick talks about a great deal. Basically, you know your own product so well, you forget that others don’t know anything about your market or technology.

In a pinch, here’s what I usually advise people to do if they have no idea how it’ll go. You can break a presentation up into five chunks of a minute each, and use 2-4 slides for each minute, to get your point across.

Minute one: How big is the pie?

The first thing you need to do is set the stage. What industry are you in? What market are you servicing? Why is this segment of the world growing, or poised to gain attention? This part should feel like a TED presentation, telling the audience something surprising that inspires them to continue listening.

As you’re explaining this, remember that many of the people in the audience won’t know what you do. Give them analogies, or concrete examples from their daily lives. When I’m talking about cloud computing, for example, I often ask people, “do you use GMail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail? Where are all your mails stored?” They may not know clouds, but they grasp that concept quickly when it’s made relevant to their lives.

This is where you mention comparables — other companies that did well in an adjacent space, or who have had success in this space but aren’t competitors. Lucrative comparables make investors drool.

Minute two: Why is there still a piece of the pie left?

Now that you’ve told the audience about a huge opportunity, where’s the gap? What’s the shortcoming? Hopefully, this is a major disruption: The broad adoption of mobile devices; economic pressures changing budgets; consumer understanding of web applications; concern over healthy eating; etc.

You want to show a hard problem. If the market gap is easy to overcome, then the audience will question whether you can build any kind of sustainable competitive advantage. But if you state a hard problem that’s genuine, it’ll be interesting. Your problem doesn’t have to be technical, either: you might say that it’s hard to reach consumers, but you have a partnership that bundles your product in with something they already use.

This is where you can drop the names of competitors to show you know them, and know why you’ll beat them.

Minute three: Why will you claim that piece of the pie?

Now the audience is ready. There’s a change coming, and there’s an opportunity. At this point, you need to prove that you can fill the need. This is the only part of the presentation that should include a demonstration, and it should demonstrate only that you can overcome the big challenge. Don’t bother showing me the login page, or the account administration screen, if your key feature is a dashboard.

Also, if your value is the viral loop or the process, show that. Make it personal. If your target customer is a small business owner, for example, then give her a name and follow her through a day in her life. Making your product concrete will help others put themselves in your customer’s shoes and understand the benefit you offer.

Minute four: How will you make money from it?

Now that you’ve shown value, explain how you make money. This is simple accounting:

• What are your initial costs?
• What are your marginal costs (i.e. how much does it cost to deliver product or service to one more customer)?
• What are your revenues? Are they recurring or one-time?
• How do people find out about you? How will they spread the word? How much does this cost you to encourage?

Remember Sergio Zyman’s definition of marketing: Selling more things to more people more often for more money. How do you do that?

Don’t get into financial projections here. You’re not expected to use real numbers; instead, you’re helping the audience to think about the fundamental equation that drives your business. Revealing your business model happens in stages.

If you were Netflix (or in Canada, Zip.ca), for example:

• For a broad audience, you’d offer, “we have a monthly subscription model, and delivery is done via post initially. As networking becomes cheaper, we’ll switch to a download model that will slash our costs dramatically.”
• For your first meeting, you’d say, “customers pay us a monthly fee to ship them movies from a list. Our analysis of the cost of DVD purchase and the frequency of rentals shows we make money because people don’t watch as many movies as they think they do, and because ground-shipped mail is cheap.
• In a one-on-one discussion with an investor you might explain, “the average person watches 6 movies a month. We can rent out a DVD that costs us $50 fifty times, and shipping is $1. If someone pays us $25 a month, we make $13 a month.” It costs $0.06 to download a movie today, and that’s dropping by 50% a year; and a digital copy of a movie won’t get destroyed in the mail, so our margins will increase as costs go down and re-use increases.”

Don’t get into this kind of detail in an open forum unless you’re directly asked. But when you are asked, answer quickly, clearly, and without hesitation. Prospective investors are testing to see whether you really know your market. Also, if you have a convincing way to get the word out or drive down costs, emphasize it here. Remember — this is about your business model, not your technology.

Minute five: What do you want from the audience?

There’s always an ask. If you just present without a goal, you’re wasting your time. Some examples include:

• I want customers, beta testers, or referrals
• I’m looking for investors
• I want to recruit new talent
• I’m looking for service providers (lawyers, ISPs, etc.)
• I want feedback, criticism, and suggestions

Know which of these you’re after and leave the audience with a clear call to action. This conveys the impression that you’re confident, and you know what you want to achieve, which is a good thing.

I’m really looking forward to next week’s event, and to hearing what marketing veterans like Chris and Tara take away from it. Let’s hope the participants have a short, pithy explanation of their companies so we can understand them quickly and provoke some healthy, challenging discourse.

But that backfires when tight focus is used as an excuse for sloppiness. One thing taking all of the attention at the expense of all the other small things can backfire — specifically, when a user doesn’t have a well-formed understanding of the product or service and is searching for cues.

Small things matter a lot

I recently opened up a bag of arugula, that bitter green of haute cuisine and yuppie punchlines. As I was about to pile it haphazardly on plates, I spied a single wilted leaf. This prompted me to dig further — what if I’d bought a bad bag? What if it had spoiled in the fridge? Sure enough, closer inspection revealed others. Even the slightest imperfection reinforced my perception that something was amiss.

This happens every time your users see a mistake.

As product managers, we use the application or product we make almost every day. We’re going through a normal, familiar pattern. We know how we’re supposed to use it. We’re focused on the task and process. We’re not judging quality, or trying to decide whether we like it.

On the other hand, new users are in a different mental state.  They are exploring and evaluating – meaning they’re open to even the tiniest suggestion that something’s wrong. They’re searching for cues, and incredibly receptive to new information

New users are open to suggestion

In Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis, the hypnotist can often make a subject enter a state of increased receptivity to new ideas by interrupting an existing pattern of behavior. Confused by the sudden interruption, they become unusually receptive to suggestions. One form of this is a Handshake Interrupt which “establishes a waiting set, an expectancy.”

Have a look at this to see what I’m talking about; it happens around 2 minutes in.

The point here is that with no existing patterns your new users are in a different mental state.  Until they’ve formed an opinion of your product’s usefulness, they’ll be looking for reasons why it’s not for them. Tiny mistakes suggest to them other problems, and ultimately, to dismiss you outright. And with little else to go on, they’re likely to rely too much on these perceptions (known as an Anchoring Trap — thanks, Alex!).Fresh eyes during usability testing are vital for just this reason. Similarly, small errors such as bad punctuation, improperly resized graphics, backgrounds that don’t quite line up, and inconsistent font sizes — shouldn’t be dismissed too quickly. Buy your most critical Font Nerd a pizza and listen carefully to their criticisms. New users will derive similar impressions from your product or service.

[Update: Beth Kanter has re-posted this piece over on her blog; she's had some great guest posters keeping things moving over there while she makes the move from Boston to San Francisco. If you're looking for other resources on social networking and nonprofits, there's no place better than Beth's.]

Last week, we helped out our friends at Visible Government with their Beers for Canada campaign. In the end, the campaign raised just over $1,000 in two days; donations will help open government data to citizens and promote transparency in public offices.  We learned a lot about what did and didn’t work, and in the interests of transparency, we thought we’d share some of the lessons we learned along the way (and see if we can collect some ideas for next time.)

How it worked

A week before Canada Day (July 1) we built and tested a simple site that encouraged donors to “buy their country a beer” — basically making a donation. We told a few key bloggers and Twitter personalities about it beforehand; then, on June 30, we started talking about it online. We continued to mention it, and amplified what others were saying, until midday on July 2.

From the outset, this was a short-term campaign built around a single day. We did this to give it urgency and purpose. We chose to start talking on June 30 because so many people were out the office (and away from their computers) on the holiday itself. But it’s important to realize the differences between a short-term campaign (minimal upfront work, strong word of mouth, modest goals, and real-time virality through Twitter) and a longer one. The timeframe also meant that most blog coverage only hit on July 1st (and thanks to all the bloggers who covered us!)

What worked? What didn’t? What would we have changed? Here’s a quick list.

What worked?

While this was our first Twitter campaign, we did manage to get some things right. Here‘s what worked:

• We built analytics into the process. We used bit.ly (to track viral spread), Google Analytics (for goal conversions), Paypal audit accounts (to see donation amounts) and Clicky (for real-time web analytics.) Clicky is essential for short-term campaigns because it provides minute-by-minute visitor information, whereas most analytics tools only show traffic daily.
• We made the action obvious. We had one simple goal for people to accomplish on the donation site: donate. We even broke it into three different tiers (beer, pitcher, and round) to make it straightforward.
• We didn’t build it all ourselves. We used Paypal for donations; while it has its issues, it’s also a well-known and trusted brand, and we seem respectable by association. We also used free services like Google Groups and Clicky. This means we didn’t need to code too much.
• We set up tracking with hashtags and keyword searches. This meant we could watch the activity online and amplify it or respond to questions.
• We had plenty of ways for people to reach us. We had links to the Visible Government website, and generated enquiries there. We also linked to the Google Group discussion, which added new members and triggered conversations.
• We had a great cause. The simple fact is that without a decent motive, you won’t have much success. People felt they were doing their civic duty by mentioning us, which helped spread. If your cause isn’t just, people will feel icky promoting it.
• We tested it a lot. Even though we didn’t find every mistake, the launch was surprisingly smooth because we verified it properly and used real infrastructure (from our friends at Syntenic.)
• We had a simple, catchy message. “Buy your country a beer” was strangely patriotic, and people liked it. Made To Stick is the bible for clear, simple messages. Early on in the design process, we were tempted to overload the message–something like, “Buy your country a beer and promote open interactions between federal government and Canadian citizens.” That wouldn’t have worked because it wasn’t simple. But “buy your country a beer” is intriguing. Remember that the tagline’s purpose is to provoke interest. Once you’ve got someone’s attention you can do things with it.
• Set up Reddit, Digg, and other social news aggregators. We put badges on the Beers For Canada website encouraging people to Digg us and promote us on other social news aggregators. This made it easy for people to support us and spread the word.
• We set the right kinds of goals up front. How do you know you won if you don’t know where the finish line is?  One of the first things we did was set goals for the campaign.  We wanted to see donations, of course, but we also wanted to see unique visits to the Beers for Canada site and how many went further to the Visible Government site. When we started we had no idea how the campaign would do so we focused less on numbers (500$ or 5,000 site visits) and more on what we wanted to achieve (visibility and engagement.)
• We used calendar meetings to remind promoters. This was a neat trick. When we asked people to mention us online, we sent them a calendar invite as a reminder. This way we knew when they’d do it, and since most of the people we asked had an iPhone or a Blackberry, they could do it from wherever they were–particularly important on a holiday (though as you’ll see below, in hindsight we could have spread those out more over a longer period of time.)

What did we learn?

Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned, and the things we’d have done differently.

Beforehand, in the planning phase:

• A short timeframe limits others’ ability to build online context about you. When you’re running a fundraiser, people want context. It’s a catch-22: If you do something quick and spontaneous, you’ll build excitement and mystery, but you won’t have the time to inform bloggers and the press about what you’re doing far enough in advance for them to provide details and perspectives. If you tell bloggers too soon, you lose the excitement.
• Plan out your whole message before you send the first tweet.We carefully crafted website copy but didn’t think enough about who would tweet what, when. In a real-time campaign, your copywriting isn’t done when you publish the site. It’s constant, and it needs to be planned.
• Schedule things, and have a single coordinator for the life of the campaign. At noon on June 30th, one of us put out our first tweet–and forgot to use the bit.ly URL that would track the spread of the campaign.  This would have been avoided by having an initial schedule, and then having a single person adjust that schedule as things progressed and feedback came back from the analytics tools and the campaign. You simply can’t assume that ’someone’ will do it.
• Be transparent and obvious. Make sure the people affiliated with the campaign are clearly identified. I was personally thanking a lot of our supporters but my connection to either the campaign or Visible Government was not clear since it was coming from my personal account. Not only does this keep your campaign transparent it help you build you reputation and social capital making it more likely you will get those people back for a donation. One possibility would have been to temporarily change our avatars to include a visual cue–like the Visible Government maple leaf–for all those officially behind the campaign.
• Have a clear call to action. The website was pretty blunt about donations. We set it up, then told the world. What we quickly realized was that the Tweets themselves–not just the website–needed to be clear what we were asking people to do. Were we asking people just to tell their friends? To donate money? To watch the hashtag? To visit the site and learn more? In Twitter’s 140 characters, there’s only room for one call to action. You need to tell people what to do and make it easy for them to do it.
• Facebook is for slow burn, Twitter is for ADD. Twitter’s like speed dating: you see something, and quickly decide if you want more. By contrast, Facebook favors a groundswell of support: as more and more of your friends like something, you do too. The duration of your campaign affects which social networks you’ll rely on. We shouldn’t have wasted time on Facebook for a campaign of this duration.
• Define analytics goals better. We didn’t take the time to implement goal funnels within the system, which was a shame. What’s more, referral URLs are useless in a world where many Twitter users rely on Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, or the Twitter client on their Blackberry or iPhone. To address this, we should have segmented shortened URLs using Google’s URL builder to inject metadata into the shortened URLs so we’d get a better idea of visitor source.

During the campaign:

• Personal claims of action work best. Megabloggers like Tim O’Reilly, Om Malik, Austin Hill, Michael Geist, Tara Hunt, Mathew Ingram and others generated a ton of traffic and awareness. But the messages that generated the most donations–rather than just visits–were those where the RT testified to an action. Someone who said “I just bought a round – you should too” generated far more actual donations than someone who just said, “check this out”.
• Have an FAQ–and update it. We drafted an initial FAQ that had lots of information in it, as well as links to Visible Government. We were able to direct people here if they had questions. But we were missing certain pieces of information (for example, why donations weren’t tax deductible) and took too long to respond to questions and update the FAQ.
• Vary the message. Tweets about hashtag visualizations showing campaign growth, mentioning who was blogging about us, and retweeting others all kept the dialogue going, but they were done ad hoc and should have been better planned.
• You only get one chance to make an impression. We live in an information-starved world. People will only click on a link once unless they think there’s new news. So if your first message says, “check this out,” they will. If after that you say, “donate to this cause” they’re less likely to: they’ve already seen it. Only when there’s new information–”50 people have bought their country a beer”–will the audience consider revisiting things.
• Make the site interactive. If we’d provided people with somewhere to comment or share their thoughts–or even to suggest how the donations should be used–we’d have had more raw material for the campaign and could play back these comments to the online community that was discussing it. This also gives people a reason to check back and see how the discussion is progressing. Again, with a 36-hour campaign, this may be a lot more effort than you’re willing to expend, but we might have been able to use a Subreddit or some other already-built system.
• Spread your messages over time. Lots of people agreed to help spread the message, but it happened all at once and the initial message quickly lost traction. It would have been far more effective to have one person mention us, then let the second person tell the world all the great things that happened after the first mention, and so on. By firing all of our guns at once, we didn’t let the message “snowball” and build on existing momentum. A campaign like this needs lots of ’seeds’ to get the message out.
• Give donors a way to tell others automatically. We made it possible for people to tweet the site from a link on the site. But we should have had an option, selected by default, that made a tweet saying, “I just bought the country a beer and you can too.” This should have included a different shortened URL or analytics link, so we could differentiate first-visit traffic from viral donor traffic.
• Respond in person. You can’t plan for everything so make sure you are ready to answer any questions both publicly and promptly. Also, thank people for their donations — but respect their privacy; if you can thank them through direct messages, great. If they made a sizeable donation, you can acknowledge it by saying, “someone just donated $100″ (or in our case, “someone just bought the country a round.”) Don’t single out donors publicly as they may not want the attention.
• Keep people updated. If you’re tracking donations, tell people about the progress. Celebrate big donations or interesting blogs. The more you can show people that others are doing things, the more engaged they’ll be. Appeal to their inner lemming. We could have build a dashboard for statistics (donations, reddit ranking, retweet count, page views, etc.) We did discuss the amount of transparency we wanted (which is ironic for a transparent government initiative.) The real dilemma here is that you need to wait until the news is newsworthy. If we’d said, “hey, we have a total of $14 donated!” people would have discounted the success of the campaign.

After the campaign:

• Have a next step. There’s a lot of positive sentiment about Visible Government now. We have some great ideas for how to use the money, including the forthcoming Code for Canada contest and an initiative to get computer science students to develop transparency applications. It’d be great if we had this ready to discuss when the campaign ended, because it would allow us to continue and amplify the engagement that the campaign generated. Plus, it’d let people feel good about what they’ve done. In other words, every campaign is part of a bigger picture of long-term connection with donors, markets, and audiences.

The results

Even though we didn’t focus on the numbers too much this time around, we still set some goals so we’d know what we were measuring.  Not only did this give us a measure of success it helped evaluate the experience as a whole and focus us to come up with these lessons.  We could clearly look at graphs and numbers and say “Yup. Nobody talked about us for over 4 hours,” and then wonder why.

• Viral spread versus megablogger attention. This campaign was promoted almost entirely on Twitter and using our personal and professional networks to spread the word. We were fortunate enough to have some really influential people blog and tweet about it. But we didn’t see the viral growth among others’ networks that we’d have liked.
• Conversion funnels and donations. Though tens of thousands of people read the tweets (these people have over a million followers collectively!), we only saw 1,642total visits, but that translated to about $1,000 in donations. Conversion rates were less than 0.2%, which we attribute in part to the passive message we used at first. In other words, the tone of the campaign emphasized attention (“visit this page”) over conversion (“please donate”).
• Attention generated. Our bounce rate — the number of people who saw one page, then left — was only 51%, which is great: over 25% of visitors wanted to learn more about the campaign. What’s more, Visible Government saw a huge spike in attention.  Compared to the previous week traffic spiked by 300%!  We also have several conversations with the press underway as a result of the campaign.

In the end this was a quick-and-dirty campaign that raised some well-deserved money and got good visibility on a national scale. Along the way, we learned a lot about campaigning in a digital world, particularly one based on real-time word of mouth.

Now we want to hear from you. What’s worked for you before?  What else should we consider for next time? What did we do wrong?

[Disclosure: Rednod's Alistair Croll is on the board of directors of Visible Government]

One of Rednod’s clients, FarmsReach, fits that bill especially well. They launched on Tuesday at the Green:Net conference. After ten months of hard work on a web platform that could actually transform the local, sustainable food industry, the company’s finally taking the covers off.

Best of all, the company won the inaugural People’s Choice award at the Launchpad event with CEO Lana Holmes’ great presentation. The buzz has been huge, and while FarmsReach is taking it slow, focusing on San Francisco farms and restaurants, it’s a model that can work across North America in short order.

Congratulations to the FarmsReach team.

Also worth checking out is Saul Griffith’s awesome presentation on the energy we use, which takes a decidedly engineering-centric view at the daunting challenge humans face in trying to slake our thirst for energy. Green:Net was an excellent — and thought-provoking — event.

Rednod has lots going on — much of which is related to Bitcurrent and the Complete Web Monitoring book — and it’s time to grow the team. To that end, we’re looking for a program manager. If you’re interested, let us know on Twitter or contact us online.

Here’s a detailed overview of the position.

Title: Program Manager

Location: Montreal, Canada.

Languages: Must be extremely fluent in written and spoken English, since most of the work involves managing and preparing content for U.S. audiences. French an asset, but not required.

Compensation: $30K – $40K, depending on abilities. Flexible work hours and vacations.

Summary: Event coordination, blog management, content research/creation, and content management for an early stage technology analyst firm based in Montreal.

About Rednod

Rednod is based in Montreal, Canada. The company is a “startup accelerator”, helping to plan, build, and launch new ventures with a particular focus on product management and product marketing. Rednod is also the business side of Bitcurrent, a technology research firm that produces events, publishes reports, and writes about emerging technology.

We also work on a range of technology events. We run the annual Bitnorth event, and help to produce Interop, the Enterprise Cloud Summit, Enterprise 2.0, and the SIIA Software Summit. We participate in many other events, including GigaOm’s Structure and Green:NET, Mesh, various DemoCamps, Web2Expo, and eMetrics.

While startup acceleration, event production, and technology research are our three main activities, we’re also actively engaged in new ventures of our own.

What we’re looking for

If that sounds like a lot of different things, well, it is. It’s time to grow the team. But as a small company, adding new people is the most important — and risky — thing we can do. Given the variety of work we’re doing, we need someone who’s just at home coordinating events, generating content, and using the Internet.

For the right candidate, this is a unique opportunity to dive head-first into the technology sector. But if this isn’t the job for you, it’s best for both of us that we know it up front. So we’re going to give you lots of detail about what we’re looking for — much more than you’d normally find in a job description. If you’re the right candidate, you’ll appreciate that. If you’re not, it’ll bore you.

The perfect candidate

Everyone’s got strengths and weaknesses. But here’s what the ideal candidate for the position will look like.

• Insatiable curiosity: You always want to know why. You believe in “as simple as possible — but no simpler.” You understand things by taking them apart, and then building them back up again. You’re constantly looking things up on Wikipedia, but you check the edit history to gauge how contentious the content is. When you see a graph, the first thing you do is read the axes. You inherently mistrust any graphic printed in USA Today. Despite a desire for the whole story, you still value parsimony.
• Superlative communications skills: You’re a flawless communicator. You read On Writing Well for fun. You’re a fan of Tufte, and the Lessig style of presentations. You know what works, what doesn’t, when to use long sentences, and when to keep them brief. You can’t look at a menu without correcting typoes. You think that Stephen Fry should be in charge of the English Language, but that Stephen Colbert should be Minister of New Words.
• Internet acumen: You have an opinion on whether Reddit, Slashdot, or Digg is better. You have an RSS reader, but subscribe to more feeds than you have time to read — telling yourself you’re a better person for subscribing to them. You’ve built websites to understand how they work, but you’re not a developer. You know Google hacks, like how to find things in a cache after they’ve been deleted. You suffer from social network overload. You know how long Twitter messages are –and why. And you’ve used analytics tools, blogging tools, and Google Analytics. Most of all, you learn new technology quickly.
• Organizational ability: You’re allergic to chaos. You dream in tables and charts. You know what GTD is, but you think it’s a set of suggestions rather than a way to run your life. You struggle with whether to sort your shoes by color, style, or height. You can juggle ten projects at once without letting something slip. You build process diagrams for navigating the local market. Perhaps most importantly, you know how to gently but firmly impose that organization on others, and to summarize complex information for quick consumption.
• An analytical mind: While you don’t have to be a statistician, you should want to analyze everything. The answer to doubt is analysis — whether that’s a spreadsheet, some web analytics data, or a survey. You know that the only way to improve something is to measure it, whether that’s a website, an Internet meme, or your own job performance.
• An eye for design: You don’t need to know how to design, but you need to recognize good or bad design — and give objective feedback to designers. You should be familiar with image editing, cropping, and adjustment tools, and with annotating presentations and PDF documents for feedback.
• A desire to change the world gently: We fervently believe that technology is rewiring humanity. The advent of accessible global digital communications is transforming our species, from how we do our jobs to how we fall in love, from how we learn to how we think. In a few short years, an Internet failure will feel like a stroke: We’ll have lost faculties we take for granted, and won’t know how to cope. While these might seem light lofty, high-minded thoughts, we have to ease ourselves into this transformation. Bitcurrent touches on many of the touchpoints between humans and technology, from public policy to web interfaces to cloud computing to mobility. It’s a fascinating place, to work and think, and you should want to spend time there.
• A thick skin: Humans make mistakes. Those mistakes are amplified when everyone’s working on a dozen things, traveling constantly, and using short-form, impersonal messages to stay in touch. To survive this, you need a thick skin and an allergy for drama. You need to say what you feel, then move on. Most of all, you need to assume that everyone else in the company has the company’s best interests at hand, until you have reason to think otherwise. This is a critical skill when working in any startup, but it’s particularly true here.
• A bias for action: Most of all, you must want to create change. Sitting still isn’t an option. You must be the kind of person who sends the first mail, organizes the event, puts the stake in the ground. Some people wait for external triggers to get them started; in this position, you are the trigger. There won’t be much coaching here, so you’ll need to ask for forgiveness instead of permission much of the time.

We’re tight on money, and in this economy, that means it’s a no-frills job. If you’re looking for a nine-to-five position with a predictable income, picture frames on your desk, office Christmas parties, and RRSP co-payments, this isn’t the job for you.

But there are lots of advantages to the position. You’ll get to travel to and coordinate industry events, rubbing shoulders with thought leaders and innovators. We have a decent office with great coffee and 3.5 Gigabits of bandwidth (yes, Gigabits. We like our net fast.) You’ll set the tone for technology discussions. You’ll have flexible work hours and can work from a variety of locations. If you’re looking to think and work on an ever-changing series of projects, some of which may evolve into businesses, this may be a good fit.

What the job entails

As program manager, you’ll have four responsibilities.

1. Event coordination. This involves working with various organizations to define program content, track down speakers and panelists, maintain a list of industry contacts, and perform research related to those events. It may involve attending 2 or 3 events a year, generally in North America.
2. Editing and blog management. We’re involved in several blogs for both ourselves and our clients. Each needs a publication calendar, content, editing, and maintenance. We’ll be launching other blogs, which may require Wikis, surveys, and other components. Each has analytics that must be digested and acted upon to increase traffic and make the sites easier to use. In particular, the publication of the forthcoming O’Reilly book Complete Web Monitoring will have a web presence that needs creation and maintenance.
3. Writing and research. Bitcurrent has published several studies (on cloud computing and content delivery networks) and continues to create content. Sometimes we sell the content; most of the time, we publish it online for the Internet community. You’re expected to contribute to that content not only by editing it, but by finding things you care about and writing them in conjunction with other members of the team.
4. Content management, storage, and retrieval. We generate a tremendous amount of data, from presentations to audio recordings of interviews, from business contacts to resources and links. This isn’t well organized today, but it needs to be. That means building a content management system that can accept various resources and make the available to Bitcurrent employees and/or outsiders. We’re not going to decide how this will work — that’s your job — but it might consist of a Wiki, a Google Site, a CRM tool, or some combination of them. You’ll be responsible for building, populating, and maintaining this system.

What we promise

This will be a varied, challenging, and fascinating job. We’ll give you authority commensurate with your responsibility. You’ll have a life, and time off. You’ll build things you’ll brag about for the rest of your life. And you’ll learn constantly.

How to apply

Get in touch with us online. Send along a resume, and point us at things you’ve done online or off that we’ll love. We’re looking forward to it.

This is the wrong question to ask. It presumes that I (not the expert on hair) have a preference that’s relevant.

(Sure, we’re creatures of habit, so we may well have a preference, and hey, we’re paying for it so we get to choose. But bear with me.)

What a stylist should be asking is questions like, “What do you do for a living?” and “how do your co-workers dress?” Perhaps they’d ask, “Do you have time to towel and blowdry it in the morning?” Or maybe they should wonder, “Do you play sports like wrestling in which hair length is a factor? Are you on a team that needs helmets?”

A good stylist would try to discern a pattern of needs (which the customer knows a great deal about) and then applying their domain expertise (cutting hair) to choose what’s best. In many companies, the people in charge of product direction are like stylists. Which causes lousy product decisions.

I believe that you shouldn’t ask a customer what they want. We’ve all heard stories of innovation — from the Sony Walkman to the Dodge Caravan — that were rejected by consumers. On the other hand, companies like Apple, who famously omit focus groups from their design process, do well.

That doesn’t mean there’s no need to survey. It’s just that you shouldn’t survey for what people want. That’s boring. You should survey for what people need, which they often can’t articulate. Companies that ask their customers what they want fail to innovate. It’s a problem famously described in The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen

In Apple’s case, this means looking at the emergence of broadband; the preference for buying songs one at a time; the frustration with tapes and CDs that don’t store enough music; the broader adoption that can be gained through easy user interfaces; and the feasibility of an Internet client/player storefront.

Maybe that’s why the folks in Cupertino have such tolerance for weird hairstyles.

How many people can we really follow?

How many people can we follow? Take a look at this excellent study by Huberman, Romero, and Wu. It shows that there’s an underlying hidden network of friends, and that the remaining follower/followee relationships are really just social courtesy.

If humans can normally handle around 150 social relationships then, as JP Rangaswami observes, tools like Twitter help push this limit up to perhaps 600 people.

Of course, it depends a lot on your intensity and focus on the people you’re following. People like Chris Brogan say they handle Twitter at scale, but that’s a full-time job. The rest of us eventually have to resort to automation to handle a large community.

Automation of community interactions

Lots of new vendors are launching tools to collect information from various social networks and online communities, then consolidate the results. They’re doing search, tag clouds, and visualization to help a marketer or community manager grok the zeitgeist of the folks in their community.

Getting your mind around what thousands of people are thinking is no small trick. But responding to those results is another thing entirely–one that’s also starting to emerge from technology companies (though most of these firms are still in stealth.)

Unfortunately, by using these kinds of tools we invariably make our responses sound like form letters, which turns off our audience, encouraging them to stop paying attention to us.

What drives unfollowing?

In the web economy, we spend a lot of time on acquisition of attention. But we spend far less on avoiding departure. For users who reach the social network saturation point, unfollows, unsubscribes, and the occasional mailing list spring cleaning are inevitable.

Twitter’s a good lab for this kind of thing. It’s trivially easy to follow or unfollow someone, and they don’t know you’re doing it immediately. Since the follow/unfollow mechanism is virtually frictionless, it’s a decent proxy for other social sites like RSS subscriptions and Facebook groups.

Based on my (admittedly unscientific) study, there are six main things that make people unfollow you.

1. A big-profile personality having others tweet for them. People are following you; do them the courtesy of actually being you when you have something to say. Even worse is people who use Twitter tools (updating locations automatically) to do their Tweeting for them.
2. Overly frequent messages, particularly when the person suddenly sends many of them. Twitter is about ambient awareness, and when someone suddenly sends ten messages at once it’s a clue that they’re using it more like email than like a conversation — logging in, responding, and leaving.
3. Replies that have more than 2 or 3 @names in them. This strikes followers as a mailing list, rather than a nugget of thought. With only 140 characters to engage and entertain, squandering half of that on names means the message isn’t very interesting.
4. Marketing content or advertising. This was by far the biggest turnoff. Companies that have used Twitter to solicit information or provide support do well. If you’re a company with a presence on Twitter, don’t tell — ask. Some people noted that they’d unfollowed others when those people signed up for a Twitter service that automatically told their friends about it, as this was like forwarding spam.
5. Tweets that are sad, personal, depressing, or involve bodily functions. Apparently if we wanted that much emo we’d watch goth angst on Myspace instead. On Twitter, nobody cares if you’re a dog.
6. Constantly promoting one’s accomplishments. Twitter’s not just an RSS feed for humans, it’s a mixture of conversation, idea generation, and ambient updates. Followers expect a mix of behind-the-curtain candor, humor, observations, and responses to others that introduce them to others.

So — we need unfollow tracking, and we need to correlate it to the interactions we had before the unfollow. With that kind of analytics we can understand which behaviors undermine our social efforts.

In the real world, my wife kicks me under the table when I’m being a bore (and yes, I have heavily bruised shins.) Online, we don’t have the luxury of quick feedback.