While I was on maternity leave last year, inmedia went virtual, meaning we sloughed off the shackles of the commuter lifestyle and now all work remotely, communicating regularly by phone, email, Twitter, smoke signals… As such, earlier this week was a banner occasion when inmedianauts from around the country and across the globe gathered in Ottawa for briefings on a new client that we’ll be launching later this month. To most people, it isn’t novel to see one’s coworkers but for us it is. We’ve quickly established effective systems and processes that enable us to work as a cohesive unit, whether we’re in the same time zone or not.

Companies like ours have so many resources at their fingertips that enable telework to, well, work. With information in the cloud or on remote servers, we can all be connected to our data, and to each other, with ease. The telephone works well - we’re all talking to one another every day as well as to clients, prospects and media and analysts - as does email and Twitter and LinkedIn.

Should we actually need to physically be in one another’s presence, we can converge on a shared workspace like the CodeFactory, as we did earlier this week. As @FrancisMoran noted earlier this week, most of our clients never saw our office and there are multiple clients for whom we’ve done scads of work yet have never met face to face.

It was nice to see the rest of the inmedia team in person earlier this week, but it did remind me that while there’s something to be said for “face time,” we are pretty damn effective as a virtual unit.

Technorati Tags: telework, shared workspaces

Mickey Mouse, that is.

I just returned from another glorious vacation to Walt Disney World, our first trip with our toddler. We had an absolute blast. The weather was great, the food incredible, our accommodations spacious and affordable, and as usual, the customer service we received was outstanding. This is our fourth trip to Disney since 2004 and every time, we’ve marveled at the incredible customer service and impressive systems in place at the parks, restaurants, cruise ship, hotels, even the parking lots to ensure the best experience possible for the guests.

In fact, Disney has written a (the?) book on customer service called Be Our Guest that details all the elements of superior customer service that the company works so hard to achieve. Most of the time, it succeeds.

Traveling with a little one, you’ve got a lot of gear to lug around. Inevitably, things will get left behind or misplaced. So exceptional is the lost and found system in the parks and on the entire property that even though we lost several items over the course of our stay, most of them came back to us - from our son’s beloved stuffed animal to our rental car keys (thank god!)

It’s the systems that the company has in place that make it almost impossible to do the wrong thing.

For example, when they’re filling the massive parking lots for the parks, there are dozens of staff in the parking lot directing traffic so that the cars coming in single file are parking in order, side by side, with no room for error. There’s no parking willy nilly, instead it’s an orderly process and makes things easy for the staff and the guests. Clear signage makes it easy to remember where you parked and trams shuttle guests from their cars to the front gate on an endless loop.

Another great example is the proliferation of garbage cans on the property. Extensive studies were done to see how far a guest would be willing to walk to deposit trash in the proper receptacle, rather than just throw it on the ground. Subsequently, trash cans were placed at these specific intervals and this, paired with the many people cleaning the park, results in an almost impeccable environment. It would be more difficult for guests to litter than to just place their garbage in the trash can.

How does Disney do it?

The company works tirelessly to gather visitor data, with researchers at the entrance to the park surveying the guests, and now even some touchscreens in rides that ask questions, ostensibly to enhance the rider experience, but clearly to also gather market data.

The amount of staff it must take to operate a park on a daily basis is bewildering, but there’s always a friendly “cast member” whenever you need one. I have yet to encounter someone there who doesn’t seem to love their job, though a quick search on the internet sees that some ex-staff refer to it as Mouschwitz, which doesn’t exactly communicate happy images. Still, I can only speak to my experience as a guest, and that, on the whole, has been wonderful.

The magic one feels at a Disney park takes a lot of work, but no company does it better and you’d really have to try hard to have a bad experience on those grounds. It’s a well-oiled, well thought out machine and what it produces is nothing short of, well, magic.

Technorati Tags: Disney, customer service

It might be an oversimplification on my part, but from where I stand, much of the global debate around what to do about climate change has split along a fairly classic left-right axis. Those on the progressive end of the spectrum have embraced the environmental benefits of reducing anthropogenic climate change and often cast the debate in traditional liberal terms such as mitigating the impact on the poorest people on the planet, cutting our dependence on fossil fuels and the often-corrupt regimes governing countries where such fuels are to be found, and halting runaway consumerism. For many on the farthest end of the spectrum, fighting climate change is a natural outgrowth of their anti-capitalist convictions.

People on the right, on the other hand, are over-represented among the climate-change skeptics and even when they do acknowledge that something untoward may be going on, they consistently sound dire warnings about the economic disruption that will surely befall us all if we do anything significant to address the situation. Free marketeers and advocates for the smallest-possible level of government involvement in our lives are practically default members of this side of the debate.

There are always exceptions to be found but I don’t think it’s any coincidence that it was a Liberal government in Canada that signed the Kyoto Protocol — albeit without ever doing anything substantial to meet our treaty obligations — while it is a Conservative government that has swiftly back-pedaled away from making any concrete commitments. Similarly, south of the border, the last Republican administration wanted to have nothing to do with the issue while the current Democratic president and Congress are far more engaged in the debate.

I don’t want to belabour the point but a quick Google search finds the following two rather representative comments among hundreds of blogs whose writers have opinions about global warming, its causes and what we should do about it that align rather predictably with their self-identification as liberal or conservative.

“Now world leaders, and even some liberals, are calling man-made climate change what it truly is, a hoax.” — Conservative Politics Today.

“Physical evidence of global warming is widespread and startlingly significant.” — U.S. Liberal Politics

As with many left-right splits on issues of compelling human interest, I find myself a bit bewildered by the near-complete binary nature of this one. While I have no difficulty understanding the motivation and point of view of the left-wing campaigners, I am astonished that those on the right can’t see that, within what I believe is an incredibly urgent requirement that we swiftly and decisively move to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change, there resides an almost unprecedented economic opportunity that ought to warm the cockles of the fattest-cat capitalist.

That’s why I so so enjoyed a blog post I read over the holidays by Ron Pernick, managing director of Clean Edge, Inc. and coauthor of The Clean Tech Revolution. In a column titled, “Don’t think of a solar panel,” Pernick said we need to reframe the debate so as to attract the support not just of “Birkenstock-wearing, back-to-the-earth, environmentalists” but also of the innovators, the entrepreneurs and, yes, the nakedly capitalist and return-hungry investors (my terms, not his) who will underwrite the massive changes that must take place.

“We should be framing the clean-tech revolution not in the context of something as amorphous as climate change and as divisive as cap-and-trade, but instead on job creation, economic competitiveness, energy independence, and national security,” Pernick wrote. ” Instead of leading with carbon offsets, cap-and-trade, and climate mitigation, we should be focusing on energy independence and security; clean-technology innovation; green-job creation; and global resource management and leadership.”

I’ve never made any secret of my socially progressive political views.Indeed, I have often joked that from where I sit on the political spectrum, Canada’s sort-of-socialist New Democratic Party looks dangerously right wing to me. And yet, at the same time, I am a business person, an entrepreneur and an investor of capital in technology and other companies. I see no contradiction in this whatsoever. Reframing the climate change debate as Pernick suggests leaves no contradiction for others who, like me, can’t identify with either the left or the right on this one.

Technorati Tags: Clean tech, climate change, innovation, entrepreneurship, Ron Pernick

Like many people, I rang in the new year with friends and loved ones at home, watching the famous ball drop in Times Square on television. With a little one at home, it wasn’t feasible to go out for the evening, and so when relegated to sticking around the house, it’s inevitable that we were drawn to watching one of the many new year’s eve specials on television.

We settled on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve, not because of the entertainers appearing, not because of any particular allegiance to the network it was shown on, nor because the television happened to be on that channel. Rather, we consciously sought it out, so ingrained into all our brains is the brand that is Dick Clark’s new year’s eve special. When I think new year’s eve and television, I think Dick Clark. The fact that Clark has been felled by ill health that has impacted his ability to host the program itself and so foisted Ryan Seacrest upon the viewing public is sad, to be sure, yet we still tuned in. In our case, not to see what J Lo would wear, not to gawk at the ailing state of the iconic Clark, but just because the program itself is such an institution, has such a strong brand.

Before we settled on Dick Clark, however, we wandered the proverbial dial, seeing what else was on. A lackluster performance by Britney Spears in a fountain in Las Vegas was the only game in town, television-wise, from 11pm when Fox started its terrible programming. Some would argue that terrible programming is keeping in line with Fox’s established brand, but I digress. It was sad to see Spears performing amidst a line-up of nobodies. Though it was a boost to the ego to think that they were letting just anyone perform on live television like that; maybe I’ll whip up a song and dance number for next year’s special. Stay tuned!

The other channel we had the misfortune of stopping on was CNN, the most trusted name in news. While Gawker has a thoroughly cheeky recount of the night’s events, to me this programming was the most egregious mistake by a big-name media company on a night full of trainwrecks. CNN has branded itself “the most trusted name in news” yet the buffoonery of a raunchy comic and a respected anchor was far beyond good taste. I wouldn’t trust Kathy Griffin to cross the road, let alone entertain people to ring in the new year. While Gawker points out that CNN, which is struggling in the ratings, needs Kathy more than Kathy needs CNN, it’s unfortunate that the network felt it had to corrupt its branding so flagrantly in order to attempt to lure viewers. As we’ve written about previously, poorly conceptualized stunts like this don’t work, rather, they tend to turn people off.

We’ve been marketers long enough that we’ve helped guide companies through rebranding and new identities and what we’ve learned is that your true brand is not what you thrust upon the marketplace but rather how your customers and the public at large identify your company and its offerings. That’s where Dick Clark got it so right for so many years and CNN got it so wrong. When you deliver something expected, customers are pleased. Likewise, when you provide something totally antithetical to what they’ve come to know from your company, they’re confused and put off. Valuable lessons to learn for all of us.

Happy new year to all! Best of luck for 2010; may the year be healthy, happy and prosperous for everyone.

Technorati Tags: new year’s eve, Dick Clark, CNN, Fox, branding

My husband and I went to see Avatar over the weekend. Wow. The visually stunning spectacle has been director James Cameron’s pet project for more than 10 years, his last major theatrical release being a little movie called Titanic. The movie is in 3D but it’s so unobtrusive and simply enhances the story without going for corny effects, a novel approach to an older technology, enhancing rather than interrupting the storytelling process.

It was an inspired move by Cameron to hire virtual unknowns in the lead roles, but a mistake, despite her considerable talent, that he cast Sigourney Weaver in the film because, more than once, it felt like I was watching Aliens or even Gorillas in the Mist. For the same reason he put faces to those with whom we have had little or no previous associations in the lead roles, he should have cast an unknown in Weaver’s role; this was the only distraction that took me out of the marvelous world of Pandora and back into North America, circa late 2009.

I don’t want to spoil the storyline of the movie for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it but plans to, but suffice to say that while the movie is well worth seeing and elements of the film’s story are absolutely creative and novel, the vast majority of the plot is well trodden territory. Thematic elements are very reminiscent of [SPOILER ALERT!] this, and this.

There’s nothing new under the sun, they say, and the same is true when it comes to marketing. While it’s true that in the realm of technology, there are truly revolutionary products being released, there are also a slate of products that are only slight modifications on existing offerings or have very little if anything unique about them, rather they are “me too!” propositions. That’s okay - consumers need options at different price points with different feature sets, and other distinguishing attributes, however small.

The challenge becomes how to market your offering when the basic story (of your product, your company, your industry …) has been told many, many times before. Take a page from James Cameron’s book and find novel ways to tell a familiar tale, use new technology to do so and make it compelling to your audience. In our terms, this means to use novel marketing approaches like social media to communicate your key messages to your prospects and customers, providing them with the information they need in a format that’s interesting to them and that will get them talking to other prospects about why your offering is the one to see and why your marketing campaign is better than that of your competitors.

Technorati Tags: Avatar, James Cameron, marketing

There’s a good reason our blog was so quiet last week. We’ve been incredibly busy launching the world’s first bionic finger, Touch Bionics’ ProDigits, to the worldwide media. We’ve had tremendous uptake on the story from all sorts of media all over the world.

I’ve thoroughly bastardized Dylan Thomas in this post’s title, but it’s for a good cause. This morning, the fruits of my labor appeared on “Good Morning America,” one of the highest-rated morning shows in the U.S. and one that airs worldwide. Here’s the segment: http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerindex?id=9329178.

Getting this segment to come together was no easy feat. We launched last Tuesday, and I began pitching GMA in earnest the following day. I spoke often to with the medical producer there and by Thursday morning, it was set - they were going with the story. I’d lined up a patient in NYC and a prosthetist to come into the city for an in-studio segment Monday morning. Elated, I let the whole Touch Bionics team know we were set; ProDigits were going to be featured on “Good Morning America.” I was told to expect a call from a producer to go over the finer details later Thursday afternoon.

This is where our story takes an unexpected turn. The call came, but it was to say that they didn’t feel the story was different enough from the i-LIMB Hand, which they had covered in 2007, and so they were going to cancel our segment. The patient we were originally going to feature has a partial-hand prosthesis with all four fingers and a thumb so it does not, in fairness, look that much different from the i-LIMB Hand. Nonetheless, this is how I felt.

Having come so close, I was not going to take no for an answer. So I began to pitch all of the other angles to the story - we had other patients, in other locations, with other circumstances. ProDigits is a huge technological advancement from the i-LIMB Hand, it’s the first device of its kind and, before it came along, partial-hand amputees had no other option to regain any meaningful level of functionality. We could tape in advance, we can provide experts, here’s research to back up our claims of the numbers of potential patients… Basically, I would not take no for an answer. I knew that this was a compelling story and that it would be of interest to GMA’s audience. It was just a matter of presenting the whole story of ProDigits and what was available from a resource perspective and convincing them that we could provide the producers with the components they needed in order to put together a good story.

It worked.

They went for the compelling story of Michael Bailey, a 24-year old student in Atlanta, Georgia, who lost three fingers in an industrial accident nearly two years ago. Michael’s prosthesis clearly shows his remaining finger and thumb and so, presumably, tells the story of the partial-hand prosthesis better. GMA senior health and medical correspondent Richard Besser flew all the way to Atlanta on Sunday to do a great interview with an amazing Michael Bailey and the piece aired this morning. (The hit was all the sweeter because this morning was the the debut of new “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos, ensuring our story even better ratings! In a little banter with his co-host that’s not seen on the posted segment, Stephanopoulos, who got to shake hands with a model ProDigits, said the story had given him goosebumps.)

Phew!

This was a lesson in perseverance, and in knowing the whole story, one that extended well beyond the news release. When I was hit with that first setback, I was able to present that whole story and win the day. We couldn’t be happier with the result, and, more importantly, neither could our client.

Technorati Tags: Touch Bionics, ProDigits, Michael Bailey, Good Morning America, George Stephanopoulos, media relations, product launch, public relations, perseverance

A quick browse through my Google reader shows that it’s that time again. No, not the holidays. It’s time to gaze into the marketing crystal ball and make bold predictions about where marketing dollars will be spent in the upcoming year, what communications trends will appear and how we as marketers can best lever this knowledge.

I don’t pretend to be extraordinarily prescient when it comes to these things, so I’m going to put down my own crystal ball and instead point to a few posts on other blogs that might illuminate the near future for marketers.

A LinkedIn question about New Years resolutions for CEOs has garnered 5 responses so far. What are your clients’ resolutions for 2010 and where do your services fit into those plans?

According to this post, it’s going to be all about social media and email next year.

Will portable identities take off like this post predicts? Will B2B companies further expand usage of social media and take advantage of this brand portability?

And finally, this post predicts all of the above will take place in 2010.

Do you have any predictions for the year ahead?

Technorati Tags: social media, email, marketing, 2010, predictions

Several items in my Google Reader caught my eye this morning. Being the amateur philologist and word nerd that I am, titles about “word of the day” and “word of the year” are assured to be clicked.

EMarketer’s word of the day is cyberdisinhibition. Notwithstanding that it may not, in fact, be a word, it’s an interesting concept - people are more inclined to lose their inhibitions online and this could impact your business considerably as customers are more inclined to complain about bad customer service or spread word about dissatisfaction online than they are in the “real world.” All the more reason to excel at customer service. Sites like the Consumerist are devoted to spreading the word about sub-par customer service; this is not a site where you want your company to appear.

In a year when sparkling vampires ruled the box office (and high school locker posters), an exciting new U.S. President held his first year in office, Michael Jackson and other cultural icons passed away, H1N1 threatened health worldwide and the economic bailouts in America overtook international headlines, the Global Language Monitor has just announced the Word of the Year. The winner is? Twitter. The microblogging platform saw incredible year-over-year increases, the linked ComputerWorld article references research that denotes a 1,170% from 2008 to 2009. It’s undeniable that the platform has made the leap from being strictly for tech geeks and now is the communication platform of choice for the mainstream public.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, cyberdisinhibition

A strange and perhaps first-of-its-kind legal situation caught my eye yesterday. A senior executive from DefJam Records was arrested for not Tweeting. Yes, you read that correctly - he refused to Tweet when the police demanded it of him and he was arrested on a litany of charges.

But, let’s back up a little.

Apparently all the kids are going crazy for Justin Bieber. I’m pretty far out of his target market, so the fact I’ve not heard of him shouldn’t surprise anyone. He’s a 15 year old pop singer who makes the girls’ hearts go pitter patter. Signed to DefJam, he was set to make an appearance Saturday at a shopping mall in Long Island. Being a savvy marketer, James Roppo, senior VP of sales for DefJam, Tweeted about the upcoming appearance, trying to drum up interest and ensure there would be a long line of adoring fans at the signing.

The tactic worked. A little too well. Three thousand young girls showed up, long before the star himself arrived, and the crowd quickly got out of control.

This is the point in the story where I debate whether I should disclose that maybe, just maybe, when I was a tween myself, there was a certain band that I was crazy about — I’m not saying who but it rhymes with Mew Hids on the Knock. And I just might have lined up outside a shopping mall in the dead of winter while I had chicken pox in order to get the autographs … of the band members’ mothers. And maybe, just maybe, I was so far back in the line that when a security guard shut the door to the mall saying that there was no way we would all get in, a mini riot of weeping young girls ensued. Maybe. Nope, too embarrassing - never happened.

Let’s just say that I can imagine how the scene quickly devolved. Hell hath no fury like 3,000 lovelorn 11 year olds scorned. The police implored Roppo to Tweet to the fans to tell them that the signing was off, but he refused. It took Justin himself Tweeting that his appearance had been canceled for the melee to break, but not before five people, including a police officer, were injured.

It’s obvious that this man did completely the wrong thing and endangered many people needlessly in the hope of drumming up publicity for his label and his client. He’s probably going to have a lot of time in a quiet place to think about his actions if he’s convicted. His charges include endangering the welfare of a child, obstruction of governmental administration, reckless endangerment and criminal nuisance.

What lessons can be learned and applied to other marketing situations?

First and foremost, always do what the police tell you to. Use common sense. Don’t endanger people with crazy stunts for the sake of publicity. I assure you it will backfire.

Second, if your market expects you to communicate using a particular channel, you cannot go offline when the going gets tough. Even in crisis situations, even if you’ve done the wrong thing, you need to communicate with your market. In this case, Roppo drew these fans using Twitter and, once they were in danger, he needed to use the same channel to disburse the crowd.

Third, know the size and scope of your situation and act accordingly. The blame has been shifted by DefJam to the shopping mall for not being prepared to handle the crowds. If this kid is the phenom he obviously seems to be, then the onus should be on the label to ensure that he’s being put somewhere than can support his legions of adoring fans. If you’re participating in market-facing activities like a trade show or conference, ensure that the level of your participation makes sense - have enough materials on hand to distribute, have enough staff on hand to manage booth traffic, and so on.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Justin Bieber, DefJam, marketing

At the peak of the dot-com and telecom bubble at the beginning of this decade, my wife, who is also a technology marketing strategist, and I often amused ourselves by imagining the response we might get if we created an entirely fictitious company and put up a website that employed all the utterly meaningless buzz words that were being bandied about at that time. I forget what we going to call the company — the name certainly had the word “solutions” in it — but I remember that we invented an incredibly persuasive mission statement that actually said nothing at all.

We didn’t think we’d get any customers, but we were pretty sure we could get some VC funding.

That little inside joke of ours came to mind this morning as a I watched a lovely little video by Made to Stick co-author Dan Heath on “Writing a mission statement that doesn’t suck.” Using a pizza parlour as example, Heath shows how an initially-quite-effective mission statement is turned into mushy pablum by the use of words that sound aspirational but that really don’t mean anything at all. Actually, it’s not that these words don’t mean anything at all; it’s that they could mean anything to anyone.

I do a lot of work helping technology companies figure out their differentiated positioning in the marketplace. This work is usually done in the same sort of group-think environment that turned “serve the tastiest damn pizza in Wade County” in Heath’s example into the mushy and meaningless “present with integrity the highest quality entertainment solutions to families.” Every time the word “solution” is suggested — and it is suggested almost every time — I implore the workshop participants to imagine the word doesn’t exist. “Now,” I ask them,” What is it that you actually do?” The answers immediately get much sharper and focused and far more meaningful.

The little joke my wife and I still wish we had managed to play on a gullible marketplace was predicated on this tendency to avoid specificity in favour of being all things to all people. In marketing, though, the joke will be on you because in trying to be all things to all people, you will succeed only in being nothing to anyone.

Technorati Tags: mission statement, Made to Stick, Dan Heath, technology, marketing, positioning