Widget: What do you mean by that?

As widgets -- those little chunks of code that allow "page-within-a-page" interaction on a website -- become more popular on the web, I foresee confusion.

The word "widget" has always been used as a placeholder for a type of product in business textbooks and off-the-cuff examples. But now that it's being used as the name of an actual marketing tool, will textbook makers and business school professors stop using the word? A professor saying "Acme Corporation makes widgets" can now have a whole new meaning. Is the professor trying to say Acme is simply manufacturing a generic product that isn't relevant to the conversation at hand, or is Acme an online development firm that specializes in producing interactive bits of code?

Jim Gaffigan and Hot Pockets: How to deal with negative brand attention online

Jim Gaffigan is one of my favorite comedians. If you haven't seen his bit on Hot Pockets, check it out. He completely rips apart Hot Pockets -- of course in a humorous, non-malicious way. Whenever I think about Gaffigan's routine, it makes me wonder how the people at Nestle, maker of Hot Pockets, feel about it as marketers. They're doing their best to get the public to buy their product, and here they have a comedian poking fun at their hard work and their livelihood.

So let's take Jim Gaffigan's Hot Pockets skit and apply it to social media.



Catharine P. Taylor at MediaPost recently wrote a blog entry about how Target faced negative publicity because of two errors it made in handling bloggers and Facebook. So between Hot Pockets and Target, you have two examples of brands that got less-than-stellar attention -- one due to a comedian and something Hot Pockets clearly could not control, and the second because of Target's poor handling of social media. In both cases it spread virally. Even though the Jim Gaffigan bit wasn't social media to begin with, the YouTube videos have certainly turned it viral and grown it from a simple comedy bit into a small Internet fad. (Hot Pockets has tried its own viral program at HotPocketsDojo.com, featuring games and e-cards.)



You might be saying, "So what? I don't work for a huge national brand like Target or Hot Pockets. Why do I need to worry about this sort of thing?"



With social media, it doesn't matter how big or how small your brand is -- you can still face this kind of publicity crisis if your company makes a mistake. Even if you don't make a mistake, an unsatisfied customer could do damage to your company's reputation and brand. So be prepared. A few thoughts:



1. Monitor the blogosphere, relevant discussion boards, YouTube, etc. Make sure you're trying to find your customers' reactions to your products and services, both positive and negative! Google Alerts are my favorite. Set up several for your brand, your products, etc. Think about all the different ways people could be talking about your brand -- this includes common misspellings too. Do a set of Google Alerts with key words in quotation marks, and another set without.



2. If you ever run into negative social media, my number one recommendation is don't overreact. Think carefully about how you will respond. Talk to your smartest, most level-headed people to see how they would handle the situation. Call a trusted friend in the industry who doesn't work for your company. Tell them the facts, and ask them how they'd respond.



3. Speed is important, but it's not everything. It's tempting to embrace speed when you see a negative item. After all, a swift response is essential, right? I agree to a certain extent -- you shouldn't let a situation sit for a long time without dealing with it. Move quickly, but cautiously too. A smart response is more important than a quick one. Make the wrong move, no matter how fast it is, and you're going to be pouring gasoline on the flames.



4. Sometimes a response isn't necessary. It's often tough to judge this one, and I'd say the more experience you have with negative publicity, the more likely you are to know when not to respond. Depending on the claim someone makes, how credible their story sounds, and how other Internet users are responding, in some situations you should not respond and let the offending material die a slow, quiet death.



Here's an excellent blog post by Glen Allsop that offers some additional pointers for how to react to negative blog posts.



Who knows...the Jim Gaffigan / Hot Pockets situation may have actually helped Hot Pockets in the long run, by getting the name and jingle on many people's lips. Of course the context of the additional awareness wasn't ideal for the Hot Pockets brand. But sometimes as marketers, we need to understand that we're not always in control. In these situations, make sure you're able to kick back, eat a Hot Pocket, and laugh at your own product.







Update 7/7/08: Here's a nice post by Susan Getgood that mentions some of the monitoring programs out there for keeping tabs on what people are saying about your brand.  She also talks about what she calls the "Four Ps of online engagement" that can help you determine how to participate.

Posting business-related videos on YouTube

Dianna Huff asked the question whether or not businesses should be using YouTube for video. If you read through the comments, you'll see the opinion is mixed.

For situations where you can point people directly to your video (e.g. when you already have people on your website and you want to show them a clip), embedding the YouTube code on your page (or Google Video would work just as well here) seems to be the way to go...as mentioned by a few people in the comments of Dianna's post. That way you're not taking people to the YouTube site where there might be links to objectionable content appearing alongside yours. The other no-brainer way to post video on your own site is of course to put it on your own server, but because of the technical setup that's required, this might not be the best option for many people.

Of course, two of the major benefits of posting a video on YouTube are the viral component and the universality of its platform. These are benefits you won't get by keeping a video confined to your own website.

I would post a business-related video on YouTube if I thought it would help the clip gain a wider distribution and popularity among my target audience, even with the chance it might have links to not-so-wonderful content alongside it. It's not like business users have never used YouTube before and don't know what kind of content is posted there...and that they'll be shocked if they see a link to a stupid or objectionable video. I'd be willing to bet more than 90% of business users have been on YouTube before. They know that YouTube is like a soup with lots of ingredients floating in there -- some good and others not so good (lima beans!). They will choose to pick out the good bits and ignore the undesirable bits floating in there, without changing their perception of your brand.

Here's an example of good execution of business video on YouTube. Cap Gemini seems to understand the medium. The company is posting video regularly (when I checked, they had several videos that were posted within the last week, some last month, others two months old, etc.) so they're consistent. They also have a few formats of video -- interviews, case studies, etc.

The use of business video on social sites like YouTube is still in its infancy. I think you're going to see a lot of companies trying different things -- some succeeding, others failing miserably. The potential is there, especially within markets where visuals are important (e.g. construction equipment). But in the long run, once a set of best practices has been established for business video on social sites -- whether it's a business channel within YouTube or it's another website that gains traction and fills this market need -- you'll see a much clearer path for business video. Until then, it's the wild, wild West!

Disorganized marketing data is as good as no data at all

As marketers, we play in big pools of data every day. We're renting lists, sorting and filtering databases of leads, and going through mounds of statistics to look for trends. That's great -- when the data is accurate, filtered and tagged properly, and the way it should be.

But do we take for granted that our data is good? This can be very dangerous. If you're renting a list and the list vendor hasn't done a good job of verifying the data and organizing it properly, you could end up reaching a lot of people you didn't want to reach.

Here's a great example. The other day I read a press release by Jigsaw, a site that's a cross between a list broker and a social network. (In case you're not familiar with Jigsaw, you can essentially buy, sell, and trade business contact information. It's billed as a great resource for sales professionals who need a constant stream of accurate leads.) Jigsaw's press release announced that it will begin providing all its company data -- company names, addresses, industry, number of employees, etc. -- for free. The hook, of course, is that you still need to pay for contact info for particular people within those companies. You can also license this data for use in your own applications, on your own website, etc.

This caught my eye because the media property I work for, IndustryWeek, is always looking for new ways to provide useful and relevant information to our manufacturing executive audience. I thought a licensing deal with Jigsaw might be worth looking into, if we could help connect manufacturing decision-makers with information about companies they need to know.

So I started digging deeper. I went to Jigsaw's Open Data Initiative pages, to a list of pre-defined filters they've already developed for the data. I was pleased to see a category and several sub-categories for manufacturing, which is exactly what I was looking for. So I decided to check it out. I clicked on the "Aerospace & Defense" sub-category, and the first few company names looked appealing. These all look like companies that are in the aerospace or defense business.

But then I scrolled down the page. I started noticing something disturbing. There were a lot of listings for martial arts studios. Wait a second: martial arts studios aren't manufacturers! It took a few seconds before I figured out what was happening. Their filter must be finding the word "defense" in the listings for karate studios, which of course is getting matched up with "aerospace and defense."

I thought maybe I just picked a fluke category, and most of the data here is good. So I tried the next sub-industry filter in the list, "Automobiles, Boats and Motor Vehicles." Again, the first few seemed good. But then I started seeing listings for "Funday Eco-Tours" and "Go Fish Charters." Again, these companies might be associated with boats, but they have nothing to do with manufacturing.

I'm saying this not to fault Jigsaw. I've played around with their site in the past, and I found it to be pretty good. The business model makes sense, although I can't say anything for the accuracy of the information because I've never checked it out personally. My larger point is that when you're given a data source, you should always ask questions like:

• How was this data collected?
• How were the filters/groupings/categories applied? For example, for a magazine circulation form, I'd ask if individual respondents put themselves into an industry grouping, if the publisher added the grouping based on the name of the company, or if it was done some other way.
• How fresh is the data?
• Was there any human intervention in the data collection process? In other words, did an expert review responses for plausibility? If it's numerical data, was it scrubbed to remove outliers?
  

As the world becomes more dependent on databases, we hear an increasing number of horror stories about data gone wrong (the TSA's "Do Not Fly" list comes to mind, where some people have been mistakenly placed on the list and go through a huge ordeal every time they need to board a plane). Don't let your marketing program become a victim of bad or improperly used data.

Customization of online advertising creatives: follow up

A couple months ago, I wrote this blog post about Wilkes University and how it's "targeting" ads in several media to individual students the institution wants to recruit. I briefly mentioned the "Find a mortgage in insert your community name here" types of ads that you see around the Web. A few more thoughts on that topic:

• Cory Treffiletti of Catalyst:SF just wrote a brief post about ad creative auto-development, where you can get a company to personalize your ads and how they're delivered. He links to three companies that provide this service, although in slightly different ways.
  
  
• A number of advertisers and agencies outsource their design work (or perhaps "final assembly of an already designed ad" is a better way to put it) to arrive at a customized look for their ads. First they'll design an ad template or look and feel in house. Then they'll outsource the final step -- the "assembly" -- to companies in China, India, and other low-cost nations. The inexpensive workers will start with the template and will actually develop hundreds, thousands, or more GIF or Flash-based creatives that are personalized for the specific targets of your campaign. It's a much lower tech way of accomplishing the same thing, rather than dynamically inserting the information into the ad. But it's probably just as cost effective in many cases.
  

Google's erratic behavior and relevancy declines -- is Google getting greedy?

Here's a great blog post from Tom Pick about Google and its recent erratic behavior. It's something all online marketers should keep an eye on, because many of Google's actions trickle down and affect so many of the things we eMarketers do every day.

Google's entire business model is built on relevancy. That's what got the company where it is today. Back in the late 1990s when the search engine wars were in full combat gear, it was Google's great search relevancy that made it stand out from the pack.

Tom's article contains links to several other articles, a couple offering "conspiracy theories" about Google's erratic relevancy of late. Is Google getting greedy? Personally I don't buy any of those theories. This almost surely isn't an intentional move by Google -- probably just a series of bad decisions and slip-ups that have snowballed. I think Google will correct them and move on.

Google knows search relevancy is its golden goose. Why would it risk killing the golden goose for short-term gain? That doesn't make sense.

Here's an interesting question though: Could Google be dethroned as the "king of search", if its search relevancy slips and someone comes along with a more relevant product?

I think the answer is yes. But it would take a dramatic turn of events. Google would need to make a series of major and sustained mistakes, of which killing the relevancy goose would only be one of several huge strategic errors.

You'd also need a new king. Could Yahoo or MSN (or with all the Microsoft/Yahoo talk in the past few months, the two joined...) take over Google's top spot? Or would it take a new, different, better kind of startup -- a la Google in 1998, with such a huge relevancy advantage -- to take the crown? It's a much more mature search market today than it was a decade ago when Google entered the game. So I think a new player would need Rupert Murdoch kind of money to even make a dent.

Webcast day and time survey results

Back in April, I wrote a post and linked to Ken Molay's survey about the best day and time for a webcast. He's published the results here. I think it's interesting how the West Coast wants morning events and the East Coast favored afternoon events. Ken suggests perhaps it's conditioning -- that's when they're used to seeing webcasts?

Applying the same logic, I wonder if West Coast TV viewers were asked about their viewing preferences for live events like sports playoff games, if they'd choose 6pm start times because that's what they're accustomed to? I'd love to see data on that. I'm sure the NFL has some sort of data that they use to justify such a late starting time for Monday Night Football games for East Coast viewers.