Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

This morning I was talking to Tris Hussey via Twitter, and we were musing about why some products succeed while competing products — even superior ones — fail. The specific context was Twitter versus Pownce versus Jaiku.

Note that he and I were having the discussion on Twitter, which, after some initial hesitations, has become one of my main avenues of online communication. (Read: insight, laughs, gossip, professional networking, etc.) Tris, being the early adopter he is, used all three services from the early days. But he says that Pownce and Jaiku have “fallen off [his] radar,” while he uses Twitter all the time.

This takes me back to discussions from earlier years about first-movers and second-movers. Google, it has often been pointed out, was one of seven search engines, and at the beginning it was hardly clear that it would morph into an industry mover of Microsoftian stature.

But in the case of Google, we can at least understand the basic rationale: the interface was (and is) simple and clear, the algorithms kept improving, and the company kept optimizing around search-based advertising. While I like Twitter — and note with pleasure that its stability has improved radically in the months since I started using it — it’s a little early to say it’s smart-like-Google in terms of design or corporate management.

But what Twitter does have is . . . a community. Fascinating, fun people like Tris Hussey and Erin Kotecki Vest and Kate Olson and Shawn Zehnder Lea and . . . well, thousands more — all of whom share their weighty or flighty or mundane thoughts throughout the day. It’s the water-cooler deluxe.

Is that enough to explain its success? I don’t know — but I’d love to hear what you think.

Front to back: Hugh MacLeod, Tara Hunt, Chris Heuer, Deb Schultz.
(Jeremiah Owyang is obscured behind Hunt.)

One of my favorite panels at this year’s SXSW festival was “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing,” which was chaired by my pal David Parmet, who does social-media-savvy p.r. work from the New York City area. (He also took the picture above.)

The panel featured three social-media pros whose work I read regularly — Tara Hunt, Hugh MacLeod, Jeremiah Owyang — as well as two who were new to me — Chris Heuer and Deb Schultz. Whether before or since the panel, I’ve gotten to talk with all of these people at least a little bit; they’re good folks who know what they’re talking about when they talk about social media, social networking, and online community. My notes for this panel are long and a little freeform, which is probably appropriate since the panel itself was free-flowing like a good group conversation.

The first question that Parmet threw out to the panel was this: How do you market into a community without coming across as totally skeevy? Someone made that point that, most of the time when we say “marketing,” we actually mean bad marketing — the kind we don’t like having aimed at us. You don’t mind the good kind of marketing.

It’s Not about the Technology

Deb Schultz made the great point — which I think can’t be stressed enough — that marketing, even in its newer, social-media-enabled forms, is not about tools or technology, but about the way you look at your customers. She said that this regard for customers has to be in your DNA, such that you face the hard work of getting out in the trenches and embracing the feedback your customers give you to drive your marketing, customer service, and product development.

Chris Heuer said that he hates the idea that companies (including, occasionally, his own clients) would say, “Build me a community tomorrow!” He thinks that we need an attitudinal shift, to shift people’s mindset from “Stop trying to sell me!” to “How can you help me buy?” Like Schultz, Heuer also commented on the technology angle: he said that social media isn’t new just because it’s a new tech platform, but because it changes the ways that companies relate to customers, suppliers, employees, and local physical communities.

Turn Your Best Customers into Your Advocates

Jeremiah Owyang chimed in about what he’s found out by interviewing companies, Read more

. . . but with SXSW-induced thoughts very much in front of me.

Pending the refinement of those thoughts into something more useful, here are a few notes:

• Joshua Porter offers an interesting take on the tenor of this year’s SXSW, and on what it means to embrace social media in business. His basic premise: it all goes back ten years, to The Cluetrain Manifesto.
• Kathy Sierra is a rock star for the SXSW Interactive crowd, and her keynote this year didn’t disappoint her fans. I didn’t think it was quite as good as her talk last year, but that’s comparing it to a very high standard. Rex Hammock has a quick but complete recap of the session; Banky pulled out some key tidbits here. When I talked to Kathy briefly after the session, she hinted that she might make a return to blogging, which will bring great joy to readers of her (so far erstwhile) blog Creating Passionate Users.
• Sunni Brown is the sister of my Hoover’s colleague (and all-around good guy) Rocky Brown. She captured several SXSW sessions in real time with her amazing illustrated notes. Here, for example, is her version of the opening keynote session featuring Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson (which I recapped here).
• My friend David Parmet chaired a panel called “Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing.” I thought it was excellent, but then again I’m such a fan of the folks who were on the dais — Tara Hunt, Hugh Macleod, et al. — that I’m probably biased on that score. I will definitely be writing more about the ideas in this panel later. Meanwhile, there’s a good overview here, and detailed notes here. I was particularly pleased to get to talk with Deborah Schultz and Chris Heuer after the panel — wasn’t familiar with their work before, glad I am now.

More anon.

(Photo by pittsinger.)

So, uh, any big games this weekend?

Probably there’s a recent transplant to the U.S. from Japan or Hungary for whom that’s a real question. For the rest of the country, sports fans or not, the answer is becoming increasingly obvious as Super Bowl hype builds to a fever pitch.

The Super Bowl commands so much attention for many reasons, and several of the most imporant ones have little to do with football per se. This is so because the culmination of the NFL championship hunt has become a cultural event and a business event as much as it is a sporting event.

As a cultural event, Super Bowl Sunday has become an informal national holiday, on par with Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. It’s a holiday when people get their friends together, fire up the grill, and drink too much beer as they celebrate . . . well, what exactly? I think most of us are celebrating friendship and a sort of imprecise Americanness — but one that’s open to anyone, male or female, American or otherwise, who’s willing to put up with a four-and-a-half-hour football game.

Meanwhile, canny marketers have turned the event into a major selling opportunity. Old-school advertising has had more and more trouble in recent years cutting through the clutter of marketing messages that bombards consumers daily; the Super Bowl provides one of the very few opportunities to reach hundreds of millions of consumers across all demographics. And since Super Bowl commercials have become a competitive genre in their own right, many of those consumers will purposefully pay special attention to the advertisements — something that they never do otherwise.

The Super Bowl’s success as a marketing venue is the apotheosis of the NFL’s triumphant quest to become the dominant league in an American sports landscape populated by giants. Baseball is still called the “national pastime,” but the gridiron long ago displaced the diamond in the hierarchy of American sport. And while the NBA has risen (in the 1980s and 1990s) and declined (in this decade), the NFL has sailed serenely on, gaining popularity by the year. So it’s no wonder that the grand finale of the pro football season attracts so much attention.

It helps when there’s a good game scheduled on the field, too — and Super Bowl XLII could be a doozy. League officials must have been salivating for many weeks now, since playoff matchups made it likely that either an undefeated New England Patriots team or their archnemesis, the defending-champion Indianapolis Colts, would face either the Dallas Cowboys or the Green Bay Packers — two of the most popular and storied franchises in American sports.

Given the likelihood of these matchups, the New York Giants could be viewed as an upstart team, except that they represent the largest city in the country and have their own long and proud history of championship football. They got to the Super Bowl by beating the Cowboys in Dallas, and then topping the Packers in a bitterly cold game in Lambeau Stadium. The Giants have also peaked at the right time: since the beginning of December, they’ve won six out of eight games.

One of those two losses came in the last week of the regular season, when the Giants lost at home to the Patriots in a 38-35 nail-biter. In facing the Giants again, the Patriots will be attempting to do the unthinkable by putting up a combined 19-0 record, a mark that no team has ever accomplished. Besides establishing a record that might stand for decades — as the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ perfect 17-0 season has until now — a Patriots win on Sunday would crown a great football dynasty, since New England also won championships in 2002, 2004, and 2005. (In their “off” years, the Pats went 9-7, 11-6, and 14-4.) It would also, after the champagne stopped flowing, raise the question of what the most successful NFL team of this decade could do to top itself.

The same spoiled-for-choice question already faces the NFL: how do you improve on the most successful annual sporting event in the world?

~

Stay tuned to this blog and to Bizmology this week and next as we bring you more coverage of the Super Bowl and its business ramifications.

(For full effect, say that title aloud in your best Charlton Heston / Soylent Green voice of pathos and outrage.)

Myself, I don’t watch horror movies — I’ve always been too squeamish. But even I am intrigued by the marketing surrounding the upcoming monster-attacks-New-York movie Cloverfield, which is the brainchild of Lost and Alias creator J. J. Abrams.

The multifaceted marketing campaign for the movie has included standard fare like thrilling trailers, but it has also broken new ground by using social media methods to create an entire mythology around the movie’s characters.

Now Chris Thilk of Movie Marketing Madness has posted an insightful and highly detailed (= long) piece tracing how the marketing campaign has unfolded. If you’re interested in cutting-edge online marketing, it’s well worth your time.

The Tale of Two Cloverfield Campaigns

. . . The two-pronged campaign certainly was a great decision by Abrams and the studio. I don’t think, even if things had kicked off as they did with that initial trailer, that potential fans online would have been as engaged and enthused if there had just been a poster, trailer and Website just like every other movie out there, no matter how cool the movie looked. It would have been subject to the same level of “insider” reports and spy leaks as every other movie.

But by, essentially, giving the online audience a regular supply of new rawhides to chew on Abrams and Paramount were able to earn their loyalty and turn them from casual or even devoted fans into surrogate marketing agents. The bloggers who write about movies in general or this movie in particular were the ones selling the movie, broadcasting the new material that was given to them all over the Internet.

Some friends of mine who are movie buffs say they’ve heard bad things about the film itself — i.e. that the payoff when you’re sitting in the theater isn’t going to be as good as the marketing campaign has been. But I’ll bet that Cloverfield rakes in the money when it debuts tomorrow.

While I’m at it, let me mention this great video of a talk by Abrams at the TED conference. In it, he talks about how he’s been motivated as a storyteller by the “mystery box” — the conundrums that keep you engaged with a story as it unfolds. It’s worth your time if you do any sort of creative work that must intrigue an audience.

Abrams certainly seems to have succeeded in making Cloverfield a series of “mystery boxes.”

(Hat tip to Geoff Livingston for putting me onto Thilk’s post.)