Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Active social media monitoring can keep you in the know about what consumers think of your brand. When done effectively, it allows you to spot fires in the making and work on putting them out before they reach three-alarm status. It also provides great opportunities to connect directly with customers, potential customers and brand enthusiasts in real-time which can breed a great deal of brand loyalty.

But yours isn't the only brand you should monitor.

The widespread use of social media coupled with a good listening strategy makes it very easy to keep an eye on your competitors, and you should be watching them like a hawk. Now, before you write off this tactic as "stalking," allow me to illustrate its effectiveness: Let's say you work for a TV station in a medium-sized market where the top three affiliates are very close in the ratings. If you follow the competitor's interactions with viewers and actively monitor their brand you might be able to glean all kinds of helpful information.

Consider this: That exclusive interview that Station X just landed is no longer exclusive when the interviewee announces to his or her twitter followers that they just did a 20 minute interview with said station and can't wait until it airs next week. If you're lucky, someone will likely inquire further about the topic and the interviewee will spill the beans all over the Twitterverse. They may also spread the word in their blog or via Facebook. After all, an interview with a news reporter is just too juicy and self-aggrandizing for most people to keep it out of their social media status updates.

But this isn't just a tactic for TV stations. Any company or organization can find out what's being said about their competition and use it to their advantage if they simply start listening. If Comcast sees a ton of gripes about Time Warner Cable in a market where they compete directly, they can literally go in for the kill if they can sell their services as superior or offer a better deal and maybe make a conversion in the process.

This is not small potatoes when every customer counts.

I posted a blog last summer about a bad experience I had at a hotel that did not want to honor the deal Orbitz gave me for booking my travel through their site. I heard from a competitor a few hours after my blog post was published encouraging me to use their site in the future. They were clearly monitoring mentions of Orbitz in the social media space. The good thing is Orbitz monitors its own brand and they contacted me first, apologized and gave me $50 off my next booking. But, if Orbitz had not responded, I certainly would have gone to that competitor. And if nothing else, they put themselves on my radar, and that's a good thing for that competitor. There are many ways to use social media for business and they go well beyond what you've grown accustomed to hearing. We'll explore many more in the near future.

So bookmark this blog if you haven't already. We've got a lot to talk about.

UNC Asheville and Capstrat launched a redesigned www.unca.edu last week after nearly ten months of planning, design and development. This is a major accomplishment for both the University and Capstrat. Here are a few items of note:

• • The new unca.edu embraces open-source technology. By using the Drupal platform and community-contributed modules the university can easily maintain and enhance the site.
• • The process to design the site was truly democratized. We used their baseline research as a foundation for focus groups and surveys that helped shape the design. The final design was selected via a community-wide survey with unprecedented response rate and decisiveness. Of the 1,200 respondents, nearly 75% selected the now-implemented design option.
• • The Drupal content management system allowed the UNC Asheville team to migrate most of the site's content. It's helping them do more in-house without sacrificing quality. It is now a foundation they can use to migrate the remainder of their Web sites.
• • The site uses user-generated content wherever possible. Community members are encouraged to submit Flickr photos that will appear on the site. They are also using services like YouTube and Vimeo for video content.
• • Finally, and probably most importantly, it embodies personality of the university. We set out to create a design that showed the unique nature of UNC Asheville supported by content that demonstrated that uniqueness through evidence. Large feature stories on the homepage and a profile section, called Faces of UNC Asheville, does this quite well.

Not only are we proud of the site, we're excited for the UNC Asheville family. They say that UNC Asheville is one of North Carolina's best-kept secrets. Now they have a Web site commensurate with their great university. It won't be a secret for long.

Twitter. It's hard to think about pop culture today without it. Everyone from celebrities to grandparents to corporations seems to be logged on, tweeting to their followers. But is that really the case? What about those who've been slow to give in to the hype -- like me?

Most of my Capstrat colleagues have a Twitter account, but I had the feeling most Americans aren't on Twitter. Curious about the truth, I did a quick Google search. Here's what I found.

A poll by Harris Interactive reported that half of Americans (51 percent) do not use Twitter or have a MySpace or Facebook account. Only five percent of Americans polled said they use Twitter.

A survey conducted by Sysomos found that five percent of Twitter users account for 75 percent of all activity. Interestingly, about 85 percent of all users post less than one update per day and 21 percent of users have never posted a tweet.

So maybe Twitterers aren't as active as it seems.

In all honesty, I've shied away from the Twitter bandwagon. I tackled Facebook, but something about Twitter has kept me away. Perhaps it's the concern over tweeting interesting tidbits that people want to read. Or maybe it's the addition of another medium to keep tabs on. Either way, I've been an onlooker to others joining the game, despite their encouragement that I join.

However, that's all changing. In an effort to step out of my comfort zone in 2010, I'm going to give Twitter a test drive. I want to find out what everyone loves about it, first-hand.

I'm off to start tweeting. I'll see you there – @elane0513.

I want someone to build an app for me that can find lost keys, hats, remotes and dog collars. For my Droid.

I've got an Arduino. I've got all sorts of projects waiting patiently in the wings of my free time. I'm hoping to break into app development at some point this year (Droid app dev - let's be clear, I'm not learning objective c). I'm all about wiring up my house with RFID emitters and a wall panel, but I want something more...device-y. I want an app to track and fire these RFID signals, and geolocate them in their nooks and crannies, between the sofa cushions, in the pocket of the pants that I wore last Tuesday. Hell, take it to the next level and get some funding: pitch it to Netflix to wire up their rentals so I can find those DVD's in the laundry hamper!

This has been done already, I know. Clunky, old and cheap-plastic-y, just like the Web site. If you'll build this Droid app for me, I'll build a sexy site for you to match*. Aaaaaand I promise my devotion to and shameless promotion of you and your fabulous app.

To address the most obvious naysayer argument straight away: I will NEVER lose my phone.

Gauntlet thrown down. Hit me up:

#big_britches

http://www.facebook.com/bigbritches

 

*Disclaimer: Not for free. Certainly affordable, certainly sexy, but unless you wanna throw in some royalties (let's talk), I have bills.

One of the interesting subplots during the last couple of years of Super Bowl advertising is how well the "consumer-generated" commercials have fared against the big-budget spots created at traditional ad agencies. Last year, the "Crystal Ball" commercial for Doritos -- created and submitted online by two unemployed brothers from Indiana -- won the coveted top spot in USA Today's Super Bowl Ad Meter, which measures in real-time how much viewers like the game's ads as they air. And this year, another "homemade" Dorito's ad (featuring a dog's shock collar being put on its owner) ranked second on the Ad Meter (and garnered its Cary, North Carolina-based creators a $600,000 prize from Frito-Lay for the feat).
 
Statistical and contest measurements aside, my subjective take is that these low-budget spots stand up remarkably well next to agency-created work. But having worked at some of those large shops, I think I know why that's the case. When it comes to creativity, it's a good rule of thumb that the more people that get involved in a creative project, the worse the outcome will be. And when a client is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have an agency create their commercial -- and another $2.5 to $3 million running it on CBS -- you can imagine how many layers of approval come into play, especially in these economic times. In the process, many of these spots end up suffering a death by a thousand cuts. The consumer-generated ads, on the other hand, get created in a relatively unfettered creative environment, and get a simple "go/no-go" call from the client on their finished product.
 
It's the classic problem of Creativity by Committee. This isn't to deny the value of collaboration, of course. But it does shed a little light on the all-too-common inverse relationship between the "stakes" of a creative project and the eventual quality of the outcome. (See: Most Hollywood movies and municipal art commissions.)
 
What's the answer? Nurturing as much trust as possible between any creative "patron" and the actual creative team. That trust is built up-front, by a proven track record on the part of the creative folks, and healthy ability to "let go" (within limits) on the part of the client. When all is said and done, creativity requires many leaps of faith. Companies who excel at spotting creative talent, then giving them room to do what they do best, will usually be happiest with the end results.