A brand's palpable sense of its higher purpose must be communicated to its customers. Service or enhanced value offerings that simplify, enable, or that help customers navigate information are key. The opportunities afforded by richness and reach of digital platforms in conjunction with other forms of media can deliver that differentiation.

- Alan Moore, SMLXL, Differentiate or die

Alan Moore of SMLXL reports from the Disruptive Technologies session at the Forecast 2005 conference that the resolve presented to the group was:

Emerging technologies will completely break down the last vestiges of mass media and mass marketing.

Further:

The issue is now, it's not tomorrow, or next year. The issue is how then do you spend your marketing budget, how do you reach your customers, how do you differentiate in a crowded marketspace? How do you create pull to your brand?

For the answer, click here.

Thanks to Monica White for passing along Chris Cardell's email newsletter, in which he reveals some lessons learnt:

The first is that in business, as in life, giving is a great experience. The second was that most businesses wait until a client or customer gives them money before they start adding value to that customer's life. Now I say 'Why wait'. Start adding value now and believe me, the customers will come to you.

That is a sentiment I can definitely agree with - wholeheartedly. Giving is the new marketing. More:

The irony is that if there is a secret to your success it is to stop worrying about your success and start thinking about the success of your customers and potential customers. Pay attention to their problems, their needs. Go out of your way to make their lives easier, to put a bit of joy into their lives. Will the occasional one still treat you badly? Sure but who cares. The majority will be simply stunned by the way you are so different from the masses.

Chris, you should be blogging this stuff.

Doc Searls takes on branding...

I hate the term branding. Same with consumer, audience and market when it's modified by target.

He explains his statements further:

And yeah, I do believe that branding matters, only so far as being clear and consistent about your name (or your product's name) and what it means. After that, marketing needs to be about conversations and relationships (which is what markets are all about). I have lots of ideas about how to do that, but none of them involve leveraging anything from traditional marketing.

Indeed. And he certainly is not alone.

Someone send an email to Seth Godin asking for advice about how to spread the news of his business that he is being build from the ground up. Since I know what that's like I was good to hear this:

Most successes (in books, music, movies, politics, non-profits, etc.) don't come from where the established wisdom tells us they're going to come from. No one bet on Phish or Boing Boing or Google or Dan Brown.

Yes, it looks like the big guys (McKinsey, Steven King, General Foods) always manage to win, but what's really happening is that the big guys slowly fade away and the real growth comes from where no one expected it.

In a world where things are viral, you're more likely to succeed with passive networking (strangers recommending you) than the old school active kind. In other words, make great stuff, do your homework, build your audience and when you've got something worth talking about, people will talk about it.

Adrants reports on a recent review by Advertising Research Foundation's of dozens of cross media studies to have been mis-spent on advertising.

There's a headline in there somewhere. "Get Wasted. Waste Your Client's Ad Budget."

That $50 billion figure represent 18.8 percent of the total $266 billion U.S. ad spend as estimated by Universal McCann. The ARF says the two biggest causes of wasted media spend are ads carrying the "wrong" message and buys being made with "wrong" timing. ARF suggest after recovering from "morning after" syndrome, you walk right up to your creative director and account director and say, "Dammit, we need to test this creative before it runs!" Yes. Test. What a novel concept.

To test or to engage. That is the question.

Update: SMLXL's Alan Moore has more good stuff on this.

Some strong words from Seth Godin:

Somewhere along the way, marketers stopped acting like real people. We substituted a new set of ethics, one built around “buyer beware” and the letter of the law. Marketers, in order to succeed in a competitive marketplace, decided to see what they could get away with instead of what they could deliver.

As businesses have become commodities, many of them have decided that respect is the first thing they can no longer afford. If you’ve ever been herded onto a cattlecar airline, or put on interminable hold by a cell phone company, you know the feeling. One telcom executive confided in me last week, “after we sell you an account, we never ever want to hear from you again. If we hear from you, it’s bad news.” Hey, it’s just business.

And he sees the good side:

Of course, this means that a huge opportunity exists. It means that if you seek the very best slice of the market (the individuals and companies that can spend money—wisely—on new things) you’ll likely do best if you eschew trickery and misdirection and pandering and instead focus on customers that will embrace a realistic and honest approach to doing business.

Hey, I've got an idea. How about engaging and talking to your customers using a blog! :-)

brian d foy just wanted to review some new software

...so I wrote to the company's marketing address asking them for an evaluation license. It's one of the perks of writing about software. I get an email back asking for more information about me, and the marketing person wants to set up a meeting with the CEO so I can ask questions.

But after a frustrating and pointless conversation with the PR person:

Then I realize that she really knows nothing, and that she probably doesn't even work for the company. She says "we" in an odd, insincere way. She's an outsourced public relations person. I've dealt with this situation a lot. She probably runs her own boutique public relations shop, so at the same time that she's supposed to be selling the product to me, she's trying to retain her position of authority as the owner of a company.

And the rousing finale:

Eventually I just hang up on her. For a couple minutes I ponder if I should hate this company too, and that's not what a real public relations person wants anyone to think after a meeting.

Now, I realise that the episode was just PR done badly and one should not judge the entire industry by it. The incident does highlight that the industry uses standard practices that inevitably leads to a gaping void between the company's 'message' and its hired messangers and its audience and customers. So, as Steve Rubel sums it up:

Another day, another victim.

A fascinating article by John Battelle on 'sell side' advertising. Well worth a read. Seth Godin has a good summary:

Imagine online ads that carry money and rules with them. If you're a blogger or web publisher or even someone sending out email, and you fit the rules for a given ad, you can publish it. Every time you do, you get paid.

The ads deplete the money in their account and then vanish. If the ads are working, the advertiser refills them. If publishers find that readers like them, they publish them more often.

It's upside down because control is now flipped from advertiser to publisher/reader.

The concept sounds very appealing indeed and I will comment on it later.

There are many annoying things about computing but one of those things that is most likely to reduce me to screaming at the monitor and firing up Google to hunt down the home addresses of certain programmers is rude software.

Yahoo is a particular offender. Download and install their Yahoo Instant Messenger (or better yet, do not) and you get, unasked for, an icon in the taskbar and two more in Internet Explorer, all without so much as a 'by your leave'. Install the whole suite of Yahoo products and you get even more. This is 'interruption marketing' and contravenes the cardinal rule of 'do not piss off the customer'. If I wanted the frigging icons taking up my screen real estate, I would have damn well asked for them. So if you find that as intolerable as I do, download Trillian and use Yahoo Instant Messenger's services without actually having to sully your machine with Yahoo Instant Messenger. Hey Yahoo, my response to you trying to shove your products in front of me? Let's try "Screw you, I am going to use your more congenial competitor". I am willing to pay to be treated more to my liking.

Read More »

Uninstalled reveals that the September issue of Maxim magazine includes a short feature on When PR Goes Wrong.

The centrepiece of this feature is the complete text of a letter to editor Alex Strauss, sent by a certain New York PR agency on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution. Here’s the key section of the letter in question:

"Now that baseball season is in full swing, it is the perfect time to inform your readers about this exciting exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution. If there has ever been a museum exhibition to highlight in [TRASHY MEN'S PUBLICATION], Baseball As America is it. Please let me know if I can provide any additional information or visuals."

The Maxim article includes the name of the agency... I guess we'll just have to wait for the September issue.

Johnnie Moore has been 'engaging' on the topic of Lovemarks (he really does not like them) and in the process gets some really interesting conversations going with Mark at fouroboros.

I particularly like the case of the 'tyranny of the explicit'.

A friend was trying to sell a creative thinking course to a corporate and in response was told that unless the "deliverables" were made clear, the person wouldn't buy in. Because she was "accountable" to her colleagues. A client asked me to list the exercises I would use on a training in one column, with the intended learning points in the other. I refused. Bascially to do so is to deny the reality of any kind of creative learning - which is that WE DON'T KNOW where it will take us.

This is not a carte blanche to try to sell clients fuzzy concepts and 'creative' mambo-jumbo, only to remind ourselves that metrics do not measure the value of what is being delivered. And pre-defined objectives may be less useful than they are made to be.

Hey, we even have our own buzzword for this: emergent brand...

Oh, he wrote about that one too.

B L Ochman has a story about Warner Brothers Records making classic PR mistakes in getting bloggers to help them promote their music. Although the results were generally positive, they did hit a false note, here and there, especially in a campaign to promote the band, Secret Machines. New York Times writer David Gallagher noted that many bloggers found Warner's campaign to be clumsy at best, and sneaky at worst.

BL Ochman disagrees, the strategy was good, only the execution was lacking:

Warner's PR people made the same pitching mistakes PR people make in general: 1) not bothering to read the medium they are pitching; 2) not forming a relationship with writers they pitch; 3) sending the same pitch to everyone; 4) sending material the blogs don't cover (see point 1.).

This kind of PR and marketing strategy does not 'embrace' blogs, whatever that means, it is merely adding blogs to the list of channels that blast the company's message at the consumer. The company is still not engaging, it just adopting (and adapting to) a new medium to be used for the same PR purpose, i.e. managing the message in the media. Old stuff in new disguise. Fair enough, if you want to have your 'message' handled by a proxy.

What we find amazing about the blogosphere is that a message can be spread without major PR effort and careful management of its distribution. So why not have a blog for Secret Machines and engage other bloggers and music fans that way?

Update: Dave Winer on the NYT headline Warner's Tryst With Bloggers Hits Sour Note.

Misleading headline. Warner Brothers Records decided to promote a new band through MP3 bloggers. Most turned them down. Then apparently Warner started an astroturf campaign, got caught, and denied it.

Adrants calls this the clearest example of the advertising industry gone insane:

Athens Olympic "clean venue" guidelines are said to warn against attendees wearing or consuming any brand that is not a sponsor of the event. In what certainly has to be either a joke or the manifestation of a marketing team gone mad, any attendee found with or trying to enter with a non-sponsor brand will be asked to leave or barred from entry. Has our business gone absolutely mad?

Not mad, just lost the plot. Totally and completely.

Update: Boing Boing has more on the 'media rules' going mad writing about Olympians barred from blogging. He asks for more info on this.

A colleague who knows a Canadian athlete writes to tell me that the athlete has been told there is no blogging once you're at the Olympics and staying in Olympic village. Apparently it's against the "media rules" there.

Now, Red Herring's doing it - proclaiming to the world the goodness of the blogs.

Weblogs could help make or break your startup’s marketing strategy. Instead of dealing with finicky newspaper and magazine reporters on volatile deadlines, Weblogs – self-published, and often opinionated, Web pages updated by individuals or groups of bloggers – give entrepreneurs a way to communicate directly with potential customers.

What’s more, blogs are an accelerated and global form of word of mouth, with the potential to attract new customers and generate yet more media interest.

They polled several bloggers and public relations specialists for their tips on how to make waves in the blogsphere.

1. Pay respect
2. Keep tabs
3. Make friends
4. Mind your own business
5. Join 'em…
6. …but not just for publicity
7. The best policy is honesty

Now all this sounds commonsensical to a blogger or to someone who understands the blogosphere. And this is very good advice, despite being given by a PR man. :-)

In a climate of corporate deceit, a company will get caught and lose credibility that will be extremely difficult – and in some cases impossible – to get back. It is all about building long-term trust.

We often describe blogs as credibility machines and used well they are a medium currently unrivalled in engaging and communicating with customers. For the blogging 'best practice' by companies we look at the science, art and law of blogging or how to blog, how to blog effectively and how to blog without getting sued. The advice in Red Herring would come under the art of blogging...

Uninstalled has the full story behind this innocent, homely little amateur site ilovebees.com that looks like it has been hacked, or hijacked, or just royally screwed up somehow.

If you dig deeper (or Google) it transpires that both the site and the hijacking are part of pre-release marketing for the next installment of the X-Box game Halo, from Bungie Studios.

They have even set up a blog, wherein "Dana" (fictional niece of the fictional owner of the ilovebees site) posts about her efforts to fix the damage to the site, dropping more clues to the convoluted treasure hunt as she goes along.

So is it a fake blog or not? They used a Blogger template, and BlogSpot (Blogger's free blog-hosting service). Uninstalled has looked at the volume of comments on the blog's first 10 posts, and noted that the site is creeping up through the Technorati rankings. There is buzz for the bees... so that's a blog right?

Let's see, it is engaging, check; it uses blog software with all the functionality, check; it has comments, check; it even registers in the rankings, check; but what's the point? Does it have credibility and personality? There is 'Dana', she is fictional and even if the person behind it develops individuality for the character, we know it's a gimmick. Marketing ploy. Clever and amusing but ultimately its sole purpose is to fool the audience into thinking it is something it is not. In my opinion, and I appreciate that others may not share it, is that a blog should offer value for value, that is, something that the readers get for their eyeball.

ilovebees.com and 'Dana's blog' offer entertainment in following the story, so one could say that there is value. And the number of comments seems to indicate that lots of people are having fun, presumably knowing by this stage what's behind it all. So is it a fake blog or not?

Stowe Boyd of Get Real asks how blogging shifts the meaning, perception, and utility of brand...

I maintain that a metaphorical shift of brand is taking place, analogous with the time shifting that real-time communication has engendered. Being able to touch people in real-time has changed everything in business conversation; similarly, moving the positioning of product or service from broadcast into many:many dialogue will force a reappraisal of brand. It will no longer be a promise, it will be an invitation.

Does it mean good-bye interruption, hello engagement?

Wired has an article about accessibility of website based on the infamous Odeon cinema website incident. Usability guru Jeffrey Zeldman, who co-founded the WaSP (Web Standards Project) coalition to promote good accessibility practices, said it makes "perfect sense" that wayward websites are brought into line by the people who use them.

It could be a win-win. Mr. Somerville did Odeon a favor by solving problems that prevent customers (from) using the site. The company could easily have spent six figures learning the same thing from a consultancy.

Even if the next volunteer who cleans up after a big site's mistakes is also shot down by the legal eagles, the buzz that gets generated by these events will make others think about their own sites' accessibility.

The UK anti-discrimination Disability Rights Commission says it is "only a matter of time" before companies are sued for having inaccessible websites, usability is gaining a higher profile.

Judy Brewer, director of the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, said the consortium's standards ensure a good experience for both disabled and other users - if designers play by the rules.

Not all businesses have yet understood the advantage in ensuring their websites are accessible to people with disabilities, who constitute a significant percentage of the marketplace.

We are lucky to have a style-obsessed designer, who is also a web-page accessibility freak, working with us. Thanks to him (and David) our blogs conform to the consortium standards of web accessibility. Honest.

Note: tBBC blog site is not strictly following all the standards for two reasons a) it was designed before we got onto the accessibility bandwagon and b) we are now in the process of redesigning it. So watch this space, some amazing changes, well, changes anyhow, you sceptical readers, will take place here Real Soon Now!

Steve Rubel has reproduced the full text of a lengthy article that appeared yesterday in The Holmes Report, an influential PR industry newsletter. It was written by Paul Holmes himself and entitled It’s Time to Take Blogs Seriously—and Maybe to Develop One of Your Own. Nice.

To start with there is quite a bit of Blogs 101 with much background info, but as it is a lengthy piece the pace picks up and there are some very useful sound-bites. There is one I like, which is actually quoting Steve:

The people who read blogs are the opinion leaders and the early adopters. They are people who pass on what they learn to other people. And these sites are being read every day by the journalists who cover your industry. It’s amazing how many stories start on the Internet and then make into the mainstream media.

And there is one quote by McAuley that is close to my heart:

While I think marketing executives are aware of blogs, I think very few really grasp what role they should play in the corporate communication effort...

The biggest potential threat is that there’s no mandate for politeness in blogs. If a blogger doesn't like something, there’s no editor encouraging the writer to tone it down or offer a more balanced view. In many ways, bloggers write to be sensational, to get a reaction, and to start a dialogue—which of course presents an opportunity.

Exactly. That is what so many corporate creatures do not get. In order to have a dialogue you have to abandon control to some extent and accept that the fake veneer is stripped and real people emerge. And sometimes, it is not a pretty sight... but still better than what we see today. A quote by Todd Defren, a principal at Shift Communications and a blogger himself, sums it up real nice:

To those people who still think that blogs are 'loose cannons', I’d say that they should embrace the revolution— or become cannon fodder.

Another quote with the same point, by Mike Spataro of Weber Shandwick Web Relations:

Blogs are more of an opportunity than a threat. Blogs are among the best ways today for companies to speak directly to consumers—an increasingly important strategy in this age of participatory citizen journalism. With media fragmentation at an all-time high and its continuing loss of credibility to the average American consumer, blogs can be tremendous buzz generators for a company. And nowadays, brands can't afford to turn down any opportunity to create a greater sense of connection with their target audiences.

And finally, what Kathleen Godwin, an online marketing columnist describes is closer to what we help our clients to do - build and run their own blogs:

In addition to dealing with independent bloggers, some companies have already created their own corporate blogs. A few savvy businesses have caught on to the fact blogs essentially present an opportunity to build communities where like-minded people gather to establish interactive dialogues on issues of their choice. And in the business world, large communities gather. Business-blogs offer organizations a platform where information, data, and opinion can be shared and traded among employees, customers, partners, and prospects in a way previously impossible: a two-way, open exchange.

There is more where these came from.

A point to remember, this article is written by PR people for other PR people, with a PR jobs to do. tBBC does not really play in that yard. Our aim is to train employees and/or management how to blog themselves. How a particular company applies blogging depends on the business model, the target audience, management culture, external pressures, etc.

The blogs we then set up and train for can vary from group blogs to internal blogs (project or knowledge blogs) to crisis management blogs to 'conversation' or brand blogs. As far as we are concerned, a blog is a tool and we enjoy finding out how it could work in many and varied ways for different companies.

And all the developments in the PR and marketing industry are very relevant to us. They pave the way for a different type of interaction between companies and customers. And with blogs we can add something to their toolbox too.

PR machine has an interesting observation in an article for Global PR blog week:

Blogs are posing threats to Fortune 1000 brands and in order to meet the new brand threat that blogs pose, corporations are attempting to influence bloggers in their media relations outreach, as well as shifting media budgets to strenghthen their own online corporate brand voices.

The main points are as follows:

• Micro Media is Changing the PR Practice (i.e. weblogs and RSS news feeds and the Vanishing Mass Market)
• Fortune 500 Abandoning "the Universal Message" (McDonald's marketing shift based on no single ad can tell the whole story)
• Use of many stories rather than one message to reach everyone (McDonald's new strategy of brand journalism)

I am not as excited about the threat blogs may or may not pose to brands as by the real potential of blogging to give branding a new meaning. Blogs can be the perfect tool for an 'emergent brand', where brand is a behaviour and an expression of an authentic identity to a degree much greater than current branding and marketing allows. Paradoxically, authenticity is very hard to get right and the entire practice of branding, marketing and PR has been the opposite - constructing an edifice, projecting an image on top of whatever was bubbling and sometimes festering beneath the high-gloss surface. Engagement was a no-no, hiding from a customer routine and style over substance has ruled the day.

Fortunately, the edifice is showing cracks and there are things that sprout forth in them. Blogs are just an example of the process. May they long continue ruining the varnish.

Marketing metrics suck. Take 183:

Internet marketers facing higher advertising fees on search networks are becoming increasingly concerned about a form of online fraud that was thought to have been contained years ago.

An indepth article by Stefanie Olse of CNET News.com about the practice known as "click fraud" that began in the early days of the Internet's mainstream popularity with programs that automatically surfed Web sites to increase traffic figures. Some marketing executives estimate that up to 20 percent of fees in certain advertising categories continue to be based on nonexistent consumers in today's search industry.

According to the article, although the extent of click fraud is impossible to measure with any certainty, its persistence has exposed a fundamental weakness in the promising business of Internet search marketing. Google's pending initial public offering has been widely anticipated as a barometer of online advertising and the post-apocalyptic dot-com climate in general. John Squire, vice president of business development of Coremetrics, a Web analytics firm says:

It's hard to tell how big the problem is, but people are looking at it closer and closer as the cost of search advertising goes up. Click fraud is a fin sticking out of the water: You're not sure if it's a great white shark or a dolphin.

The article points out that unlike advertising in traditional media such as billboards and print publications, "cost per click" Internet ads displayed with specific keyword searches have been promoted as a definitive way for companies to gauge their exposure to potential customers.

As a result, U.S. sales from advertiser-paid search results are expected to grow 25 percent this year to $3.2 billion, up from $2.5 billion in 2003, according to research firm eMarketer. From 2002 to 2003, the market rose by 175 percent.

As more advertisers have competed for desirable keywords in their industries, the cost for clicks has risen too. On average, advertisers are paying 45 cents per click this year, according to financial analysts, up from 40 cents in 2003 and 30 cents in the second quarter of 2002. In certain sectors, such as travel, legal advice and gaming, the cost can reach several dollars per click. Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, a search-engine marketing firm based in Los Angeles that specializes in fraud protection argues:

There's a fatal flaw in the cost-per-click model because a ton of marketing dollars can be depleted in a fraction of a second. Technology is continuing to be developed that can exploit this pricing model at incredibly high volumes.

There is much more, with cases, arguments and diagrams. Well worth a read.

Adriana cross-published her post on the five stupidest PR tactics to the Big Blog Company's internal blog. One of the external people we've given a log-in and password for the internal blog, a clued-up guy who works at a large multinational entertainment company, commented:

Wow, you just described [Large Multinational Entertainment Company's] entire PR strategy.

Seriously, I can’t think of much we do OUTSIDE of those five… some of those media kits are damn nice, though.

If you hear the sound of heads bashing against brick walls, it's coming from tBBC HQ...

Did a post on SMLXL blog about the 'conspiracy theory' of official color reassignments... :-)

Marketing now is all about being relevant and creating a positive experience. I'm going to go relieve myself in a Budweiser can? That could be a problem.

I know this sounds strange, like an eavesdropped conversation out of context, but what caught my attention wasn't the activity connected with a Budweiser can but the first part of the statement...

So marketing now is all about relevant and positive, says Adam Salcuse, CEO of Boston-based alternative ad agency. Who'd have thunk it? Let me get this straight, the barrage of advertising messages is supposed to tell me something that I want to know and also make me feel good about it. Well, sod brand association and bring on the Budweiser can!

Don Crowther at the Global PR blog week takes apart some of the most common and dearly loved PR tactics that probably are the bulk of everyday activities of many a PR firms and departments. As he points out:

...some of these are going to strike a nerve. There are many publicists and PR professionals who have created job security for themselves by constantly executing these very tactics.

The question to ask is whether the same amount of resources, if spent on some other tactic, (perhaps even outside of the PR arena) would have increased sales to an even higher level, both short and long term.

1. Big Events
2. Sponsorships
3. Sending out undifferentiated media releases
4. Sending media releases to the world
5. Creating expensive media kits then distributing them to the world

Stepping on some toes, are we? The right ones, if you ask me... Bloody marvellous. And even better news is the comments after the article are all in agreement.

Roland Tanglao at Global PR blog week has a fabulous rant that fits in so well with tBBC spirit and was inspired by Doc Searls and Ross Mayfield.

I don't believe in public relations. I am not a PR pro and never want to be. I just want people and corporations to communicate in the best possible fashion.

I don't believe in messages.
I don't believe in spin.
I believe in communication.
I believe in conversations.
I believe in relationships.
PR is dead, so let's get rid of it.

Instead let's get people who are passionate about your corporation to write about your company. People who believe and who can tread the delicate line between public and private, and the myriad of laws and regulations and write in an informal, natural and conversational voice. People who can tell your company's stories.

Most often, this will be full time employees. This will be BOTH your C level executives AND other employees.

These are the people who should blog, indeed. The most convincing reason for me is:

Best way to build weak ties into relationships that will eventually lead to money directly or indirectly for your company.

Simply put, true and doable.

Note: I am belatedly processing all the juicy goodness from the Global PR blog week. More posts from the event to follow, watch this space. :-)

... and sometimes not even that skilfull. But I digress. Krzysztof Kowalczyk of Weblog without honor or humanity supports this statement with an example of Jackito, a new PDA by some French startup company.

What drew my attention was this marketing overview. It says: "The only one with a such larger screen". While "large" might be interpreted in many ways, it's screen resolution is only 240x320 - the same as Pocket PC, two times smaller than many Palm PDAs (Tapwave Zodiac, many CLIE models and some Tungsten's have 320x480), not to mention Toshiba's Pocket PC with 800x600.

So, lies, all lies, nothing but the lies.

This guy knows his PDA stuff, obviously. He has something nice to say about them - he thinks their website is nice.

Headshift sums up the case well: Some marketing departments prefer inaccessibility to uncontrolled experience. It is depressing how in an age of internet and communication technology that empowers individuals to publish their views, there is still an attempt by some to control any user experience online.

A public-spirited accessibility hacker came along and built an accessible, easy-to-use and legal front end to the Odeon site (their site is so poor it contravenes the Disability Discrimimation Act), you would think they would show some gratitude. But no, Odeon's Marketing Director Luke Vetere would prefer a significant percentage of his potential customer base seeing nothing at all rather than an accessible version of his Web site that they do not control.

This is what I found on the web page called Accessible Od*on:

I have received some strongly worded emails from Od*on, and under the threat of legal action have had to remove my accessible version of their highly inaccessible website (it fails to work in a wide range of browsers (and on entire platforms), and contravenes the Disability Discrimimation Act).

I was not taking any commercial advantage from the site - it existed only to provide a service to others and to provide a greater access than that currently provided by the official site (as anyone who has seen my other accessible sites, or read the glowing reviews of my sites by the Guardian, the Independent, or NTK can attest).

You can also read the email exchange between Odeon and Dracos there. They keep referring to the 'confusion' caused by the Accessibility Odeon site to customers wishing to visit and register with Odeon cinemas online. I wonder how many have really complained and what was the nature of the 'confusion'...

On one level this seems unbelievable and unreal to me. I spend so much of my working day reading blogs written by 'turned' marketing and PR professionals that such attitude strikes me as incomprehensible in this day and age.

However, it is a stark reminder to me that the bulk of businesses are in the grips of control freaks populating their PR and marketing departments. To be fair, this may not be entirely marketing wonks' doing - their uneasy relationship with management constantly pushing them for tangible ROI and metrics turned most creatives into obsessives losing sight of the fact that their job is not justifying their existence to the CEO but enabling conversations between the company and its customers.

And so I call for burning marketing departments to the ground, passing the plough over the soil to put an end in legal form to their existence and scattering their ashes in all four directions, until such time they come back worshiping the true god - the customer.

OK, I will settle for the sacking of Luke Vetere, Odeon's marketing director...

Sprint's Treo 600 is due for some bashing by customers.

Howard Rheingold writes about his encounter with customer care when his Treo 600 microphone stopped working...

So I took it to the Spring store. They asked if I had the $4/month insurance. I said "no." I am only now realizing what a good deal it is. Why didn't you INSIST that I get it, Justin? Anyway, the indifferent young man I talked to at the Sprint store in the Bonair shopping center in San Rafael, California then said that they didn't do repairs or diagnostics and didn't know who did. He actually SURFED THE WEB to give me the phone number of Palm. So I called Palm, who told me they could deal with everyone's Treo 600 except Sprint's. They directed me to a third party repair service whose voicemail sends you to the web.

Then I read the comments on his article and came across this torrent of bitterness by a "Former ATTWS Employee":

I am not surprised to read the comments on poor customer service, I think everyone should know that customer service is nothing more and nothing less than a barrier between a company and it's customers. It has nothing to do with providing 'customer service' and everything to do with lying to a customer and deceiving them enough to the point they will either regain trust or, having lost it, just go away.

It used to be that when you called customer service, you were reaching someone who knew what they were talking about and willing to make the right decisions for the customer and the company. Not anymore. The sooner consumers/citizens realize that and stop holding some false hope that companys actually *care* about you, the better for all, and the sooner customers and employees will stop being infantalized. Treat them like a child, give them a lollypop and send them on their way. Nowadays customer service reps are just former fast food employees who found something slightly better.

So instead of imagining someone in business casual, clean shaven, listening and empathizing, imagine more accuratly, someone in baggy workout clothing slobbering into the headset while wondering when you will get off the phone and let them get back to being harassed at work by their ineffectual, butt-kissing management. Sad but true.

Hm, now this is yet another example of 'conversations' about companies that are happening online. I wonder when those companies will get a clue.

As mentioned before here, Jason Calacanis has a rather different model for business blogging than we do at The Big Blog Company. Probably the main reason we see things differently to Jason is that we have radically different views on the efficacy of advertising. Jason's view, on the face of it, is the same as ours when he says:

I’m down with the whole disruptive advertising is dead thing. I hate commercials, and I fast forward through them on my Tivo too.

Which is exactly our view too. But the next remark in Jason's article is:

However, our strategy of having one great big advertisement per blog is really working for advertisers.

In other words: "I hate advertising! Advertising sucks! Now here is a message from our advertiser". Riiiight.

However the purpose of this article is not to bash Jason Calacanis, to whom I really do wish every success, but rather to say why we will never, ever, ever recommend to a client of ours that they stick advertisements in their RSS feeds. To paraphrase Jason, interruptive advertising is dead. It is worse than dead, actually, it is of negative value as it damages the appeal of your brand. Not only do I not want to listen to a 'message from our advertiser' when you decide I should listen to one, I will actively take measures to ensure I do not. It is called the 'back' button. Ciao babe, the customer has escaped. Elvis has left the building.

Sorry but advertisements do not provide 'amazing value' to the person reading them or useful information to me unless I actually want to see them. Given that the very raison d' être of RSS syndication is to streamline and aggregate lots of content to prevent information overload, adding something that is noise, not signal, to an RSS feed is tantamount to telling the person who has the feed "Sorry, but we are not going to allow you any say in how you access our information". If I can just about (sometimes) tolerate a banner advert by just ignoring it, I cannot ignore an advert forced into a medium designed to deliver only what I want. No way.

I could write out my reply to such a notion of interfereing with what I want to do but a well know gesture would convey my feeling on that very succinctly. Rule One of PR and marketing: do not piss off the customer... and by shoving something under my nose without so much as a 'by your leave', you are indeed pissing me off and it is not like there is any shortage of alternative places for me to take my eyeballs where folks are not annoying me.

It is extremely easy to add an RSS feed to an aggregator. It is just as easy to remove one as well.

Adrants responds to a blog post by Tom Hespos of Underscore Marketing that discussed product placement and integration:

...what really amounts to fear and laziness on the marketer's part to engage with the consumer in a meaningful conversation and suggest the creation of simple brand-hosted message boards and discussion lists the draw consumers into a conversation about a company's product. Certainly, bad things will be said about any given product but wouldn't a smart marketer want to know everything about their product including what might be wrong with it?

I'd go a step further and suggest the creation of an entirely new discipline headed by a director of customer/consumer conversation/dialog. The sole responsibility if this person/department would be to converse and listen to the consumers with no interest in selling product. Sure, product management, marketing, sales and customer service touch this area but not enough to make it effective. Each of those disciplines has a goal that is counter to having an open, honest and friendly discussion with a customer of prospective consumer.

This is not achieved though doing surveys or hosting focus groups or through agency account planning efforts. It is achieved by talking to customers/consumers as one would if they were discussing a product at a cookout or dinner party. This is not stuff that can be rolled up neatly into a spreadsheet of a PowerPoint presentation. This is roll-the-sleeves-up, get-dirty-with-the-customer conversation.

I am getting to like AdRants more and more. Listen to this rant:

Give a shit. Basically, that's what this boils down to. Consumers are not a vast collection of numbers on a spreadsheet or a nice collection of 5 categories with silly marketing names like "early, suburban adopter." They are people with real concerns that will, ultimately, lead to a better product. Listen and give a shit. That's good marketing medicine.

The words rooftops and shouting springs to mind...

Dave Winer's message to advertising people and to those who still consider advertising relevant and/or necessary:

I'd like to remind people who say that RSS needs advertising that the whole equation is flipped upside down, and advertising is the least interesting way to flow information via RSS. Consider that I might subscribe to feeds that contain commercial information that one might otherwise see as advertising. For example, I'm in the market for a bunch of products that don't exist yet. I'd love to be able to subscribe to a feed that alerts me when they exist. Then of course I'll pay money, and someone will profit. I'll write about it again, in the meantime, if you want to brush up, read The Cluetrain Manifesto and repeat after Doc Searls:

There is no demand for messages. There is no demand for messages. There is no demand for messages.

Remember folks, you're not living in the same economy, this one is decentralized, not a monoculture, and doesn't follow the same rules. Them that invest in buggy whips are going to to have buggy companies.

Amen to that.

Another article about blogs and their marketing/advertising/PR potential. Some useful numbers...

Blogging - a contraction of "Web" and "log" - continues to grow as more people use the Internet to post opinions and life experiences on personalized Web sites. Advertisers, publishers and software makers are now mining them for their commercial potential. Web site technorati.com tracks about 2.95 million blogs, with more than 10,000 added each day. Others estimate the number of blogs could reach 10 million by year end.

Kevin Howard, director of media for Avenue A NYC, a unit of AQuantitive, said marketers are "salivating" over bloggers because they're seen as trend setters. He sees strong niche potential for blogger ads.

If they can get these people to start talking about their products, it can hopefully spread out into the masses. Down the road, Google and Microsoft will get smart about it and figure how to make it a valuable proposition.

Madison Avenue is paying close attention to Nike's blogger-ad push, timed to coincide with the start of the Olympics.

They're involving the community and getting them excited about allowing them to be part of this experience. We do see blogging as an opportunity for some of our clients to branch out down the road.

This is simply using a new format to do old advertising and marketing tricks with. Move on, nothing to see here.

It is very important for us to differentiate ourselves from such business models. Neither viral marketing blog-style nor advertising revenue from ads placed on blogs is what we bring to our clients. We are using blogs as a medium with a unique style, not just format, to create a very different relationship between a company and its customers and its employees.

The New York Times reports that starting next week, a handful of marketers in the United States will begin sending customized ads to Internet users who land on About.com, Lycos and nytimes.com, among other Web sites. So, instead of seeing a random advertisement for the Audio Book Club or the e-travel agencies Orbitz and Priceline, you might see ads addressing you by name, mentioning some of your past purchases at the site and urging you to return.

Analysts and industry executives say this new approach offers online sellers a new and inexpensive way to retain customers they have spent heavily to acquire. In recent years, marketers have mainly used e-mail messages to persuade users to return, but spam filters now block many legitimate commercial e-mail messages and spam-weary consumers are less inclined to open commercial messages that make it to their in-boxes.

Analysts and industry executives would do well to try to understand that customers want to be left alone. Interruption marketing does not work, we are learning to screen 'messages' out. It is increadible how the industry does not get the customers' 'message' to stop interrupting - all the pop-up blockers, spam filters and reluctance to part with email lest it's hijacked by zealous direct marketers.

Sarah Fay, president of Carat Interactive, a Boston-based advertising firm, predicted that advertisers would work hard to make customers comfortable with such ads.

Loyalty marketing is becoming one of the top ways to increase sales. You see it with catalogers, and how sophisticated they are about mining their e-mail databases. This gives you a new way to touch people who really have a relationship with your company.

No, it doesn't. It gives you a new way to annoy people. If you want to touch people and have a 'relationship' with your customers, perhaps a different industry would be more suitable. Offer value for value, give them something they are interested in, entertain them, inform them, engage them. Just do not interrupt them.