We interact with the world through our 5 senses: hearing, visions, smell, taste, and touch. We should consider the 5 senses with our marketing efforts, specifically with efforts with Social Media.

Sense of Hearing – If you listen to your audience it will help you understand their language, culture, needs, desires, interests, etc. It will help you be relevant in offering value as part of your SoMe engagement. It will help you be a better brand and make better products.

Sense of Vision – There’s nothing worse than rehashing what someone else has already done. The Big Idea isn’t dead. Be Imaginative, be Innovative, be Passionate. Begin with a Vision.

Sense of Taste – Humor, sexiness, focus, intellect are all valuable assets in SoMe. However, there is a fine line between humor and potty humor, sexiness and porn, focus and myopism, intellect and being a smart ass. Stay classy people, keep your sense of taste in check.

Sense of Timing – Social Media is about timing and timeliness. Trends can change by the minute, don’t let an opportunity to be relevant pass you by. Don’t wait until tomorrow for a conversation you could have today.

Sense of Humor – Social Media needs to be social, or shared, or viral, or pass-aroundable. Nothing does that better than buzz-worthy content and no content is more buzz-worthy than humorous content. The most widely ingested media is humorous. Check out this video which clocks in with 214 million views. It is the third most popular video of all time on YouTube, behind Justin Bieber/Ludacris’ Baby and Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance (both of which are arguably funny):

Image courtesy Nayski

This means that when you’re planning your marketing strategy, doing quality control, training your customer service team, it will be your customers who decide how successful you are, they are the ones who will tell others how good you are. All of your PR initiatives, marketing campaigns, branded events, make up your Brand Intent: your efforts to communicate the brand you want to be. The other 99% of what your brand stands for is your Customers’ Perception of your Intent coupled with their experience with your product and your customer service.

Cigarette companies had it right. WAY back in the day, when cigarette companies still advertised, the would show their cigarette package mixed in with a scene of hip, cool, good looking young people having a great time playing pool or surfing (must have been tough smoking a wet one). They weren’t selling the product, they were selling the lifestyle.

Fast forward to a time when I have gray hair.

When you’re selling your service or product, consider that people are less interested in what you sell than what they can do with what you’re selling. Apple nails this with their new iPhone 4 ads. Let’s leave out their antenna issues for a second and watch the spot. It’s not about how shiny and sparkly the phone is, it’s the emotional impact of what being able to talk to a friend or love one face-to-face means.

Many agencies and brands have gotten so caught up in what they’re selling that they’ve forgotten why they’re selling it. Next time you’re looking to differentiate your marketing message, think about your customer using your product for the first time, the anticipation finally being paid off with “wow”. This is the sound of your client engaging with your product (unless your product sucks, then it’s a different sound, perhaps “ugh”, maybe “aargh”). Film your spot, design your site, and write your copy around that. Distribute it. Watch sales rise.

I used to HATE Comcast. I payed a fortune for TV, phone, and Internet. Most of my issues revolved around TV: no sounds, freeing picture, no service, etc. As an early adopter and technology geek I am fairly forgiving of technical problems as long as customer service is responsive and addresses my problem. In order to communicate with Comcast you had to use email, which took forever for a response, or the dreaded 1-800-Comcast. This last, more instant channel was and still is a nightmare. After getting shuffled through 5 departments, have of whose accents you couldn’t understand you ended up with some who said “I dunno. What’s your account number?”

This all changed when Frank Eliason at Comcast got the blessing of management to launch @comcastcares on Twitter. I can simply Tweet that I have a problem and within minutes (on a weekday, weekends take longer) I get a response.

The point is not to slag Comcast, I’ve done that enough on other sites. The point is that I’m no longer a Comcast Hater. As I said, I’m forgiving of technological glitches, now Comcast is addressing them in a timely manner. This has dramatically shifted my perception of Comcast’s brand.

Zappos is another brand using customer service to grow it’s brand. it’s ‘customer focused” culture has skyrocketed it’s repeat customers helping the brand not only grow conversions from existing customers, but to generate great word-of-mouth marketing as well as free PR.

If there is one thing that brands struggle with right now is brand ownership. They believe that they still control their brand. In reality, they never did. A brand is not built on websites, pr, and TV commercials, it is built on how customers perceive it.

Brand Intent v. Brand Perception

This is not to say that marketers are out of a job, far from it. Brands control their intent, that is to say through marketing, design, PR, advertising, product development, customer service, etc. a brand can develop a personality, culture and conversational tone. All of these things will influence customers for better or for worse. But the User Experience is made up of more than banner ads and pop displays. The quality of the product, it’s accessibility, support, sales are all part of customer service.

Word-of-mouth has always been and will always be the single strongest channel for marketing. Customers with a good experience tell one person, with a bad experience tell 10, etc. With social media this formula has increased dramatically as bloggers and tweeters rush to get their reviews out there.  If the dynamics of the good customer experience versus bad customer experience hold true, it is in the best interest of brands to make sure that even those with bad customer experiences are treated well through customer service. Doing so can very likely turn even a hater into a lover and turning a lover into an ambassador.

Image by Nebbes61

I see a great deal of fantastic UX design (CNN), sometimes side by side with very bad UX (Facebook). User Experience, even just the User Interface portion of it is not relegated to the Web though. The greatest form of User Experience ever is the sandwich. Think about it: it requires no special tools and can have completely customized content. A sandwich can be flat, rolled, cold, warm and can include a variety of brands from private to Oscar Meyer before engaging with your mouth. Is this taking UX to a too simplified place? Not at all, anymore than discussing the genius behind Modernista’s non-website. For those of you not familiar with it, Modernista’s non-website is merely a layer of navigation over Google results for their name.  Technically it’s genius, but more importantly it uses this abstract of a website as a way to qualify clients. If their non-site is too weird for a potential client then its obvious that that client isn’t potential.

Don’t think for a second that User Experience is relegated to web designers. I mentioned the sandwich to give you a point of reference for how broad a reach UX has. Let me give you a recent personal example. As recently as 10 minutes ago and as personal as my breakfast. I’m talking about butter. Stop & Shop butter.

Believe it or not there is a glaring User Experience mistake here. Do you see it? It may not effect everyone but it does effect anyone with both salted and unsalted butter in their refrigerator. Imagine that you’ve just reached into the fridge to pull out butter to put on your corn or bread. Now imagine that you quickly glanced at the box and decided “I need the red butter, that’s the yummy, salty one” because the salted butter box is red. Now imagine how it will taste when you grab the red stick instead and read no further. You’ve just slathered your breakfast toast with unsalted butter. Have you ever tasted unsalted butter? It is NOT yummy.

Of course each stick has the type on it, but half way through a stick the wrapper is crumpled and yucky, barely legible. Why a designer chose to make the unsalted butter box blue but the stick wrapping red, and vice versa is beyond me. However, it is a good example of User Interface design that most of us can relate to. User Interface, and User Experience is everywhere and we all have to deal with it. How many of us have poured orange juice into our cereal because we haven’t had our coffee or put our glasses on and the cartons look the same? How many of use have cars with cup holders that can’t hold out coffee mugs? How many of us have struggled to figure out how to activate the automatic faucet in a public bathroom?

The fact is that more of us are involved in User Experience than we realize. My wife is a kitchen designer. She is constantly solving User Experience and Interface issues. Customer service is another extension of User Experience. Other examples with which you may be involved?

Crosswalks
Answering the phones at your office
Public bathroom cleaning
Slicing salami at a deli
Deciding if the IN door on your store swings in or out
Picking the music that will play in your changing rooms
The signature at the bottom of your email
Choosing when to do road work
Putting your name on your mailbox
Spraying graffiti on a wall
Making sure there are pricing labels on your products
Choosing which mobile platform to develop for
Cleaning the lines for your draft beer kegs
Throwing away your old company collateral

Any others you can think of?

User Experience can be complicated but it can be as simple as paying attention to and being thoughtful about some of the the things I’ve listed above.

How often does anyone buy a car based on those commercial spots where they just show a bunch of driving footage and pitch you on the low price and warranty? I’d bet alot fewer than buy a vehicle based on the spots showing a hipster rodent in a little car or a truck pulling a yacht. If it’s not memorable, it’s not effective. If it’s not creative, either through humor, sex, visuals, cleverness, then it’s not memorable.

This has been proven in a couple of recently released studies by IPA, the University of Toronto and Ryerson University:

http://adage.com/globalnews/article?article_id=144942

Apple’s iPhone was certainly a new class of product; it used multitouch, it had sliding screens, no multi-tasking. But it was intuitive. My 1 1/2 year old’s favorite pastime is flipping through pictures or typing on both my iPhone and iPad. Despite the fact that multitouch was new, it was intuitive Even turning the device on for the first time was intuitive: you click on the big button, slide the button that says slide, and you’re in. Flipping the pages of your iPhone was like flipping the pages of a book.

The recent release of the iPhone 4 goes against the intuitive design sense that we’ve come to expect of Apple: if you hold it wrong, you’ll lose signal.

Now, according to Apple this is only happening to .5% of users and the media is blowing it up. (The takeaway from this should be that early adopters have big mouths, hate when things don’t work and are very adept at showing their displeasure through social media.) Steve Jobs says all mobile devices suffer from the same issue of signal degradation when a user cups the phone in it’s hand. Well, it didn’t have that much effect on my old Sony Ericsson that I discarded 5 years ago. Even if this is true as many antenna experts claim, the signal degradation was minimal or this would be old news. Apple’s second claim is that users, when holding the iPhone incorrectly, bridged the 2 antennae that make up the infrastructure of the phone. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is Apple’s assertion of users holding the phone wrong. This goes back to user experience and intuitive design: users will hold the phone the way they want, designers must make allowances for this behavior. Whether you’re a lefty or a righty we all hold a cell phone in a similar way. This doesn’t come from comScore or PEW, just a brief survey of people I know with cell phones, Apple or otherwise.

For some reason Apple decided to break up their 2-antenna frame at a key point where human hands would be gripping their product, thus causing the signals to be bridged and not work effectively.

It seems to me that common sense, with a healthy dose of real world observation would have given them a pretty obvious solution to the problem: change where the antennae break is located to a location that isn’t normally a point of contact for the human hand. Now, I don’t know much about mobile device development or antennae, but the problem, at least from reports from techblogs and Apple itself, seems pretty simple: avoid bridging the antennae. Does this help?

FAILS
Paper Session Ratings
Upon entering every session attendees are handed a slip of paper on which to rate the session. Seriously? Paper? There are alot better ways to deal with this from Tweeting to apps, but this is just the beginning of the Eco-enemy examples at SXSW.

Printed Invitations Required
This infuriates me. Almost every party I RSVPd requested that I print out and bring the invite. Not only is it inefficient but it’s a waste of paper. So far no one has requested the printed invite but I will throw a hissy-fit the first time Im asked. I wonder how many printed invites they never used.

Print Collateral
99% of the vendors on the trade show floor gave away printed material. “How else were they supposed to do it” you ask? Ask Chevy. They’re here showing off the Volt. It is covered with QR code stickers for more details. QR codes? I’ll explain those in a minute.

Apps Not Working
I had the opportunity to get a few new iPhone apps including the my.SXSW app. Almost all had issues. SXSW jumped right on my angry tweets, contacting me via email and Twitter to assist, turning the FAIL into a WIN. The folks at Tweetworks were equally as helpful.

WINS
QR Codes
These are small black and white maze-like UPC codes that can be scanned with a camera phone and app that will read them. Scanning one gives you a link to more info. While still in early stages and in need of some evolution, QR codes will replace trade collateral, business cards, possibly even URLs on marketing communications. Imagine a movie poster or magazine ad you can scan to learn more later. Even though this tech was used last year, I think this is the breakout product/service of the event. But, it’s only Sunday.

AT&T Network and Charging Stations
I hate to say it but AT&T got their shit together. The network has been without a hiccup for me. Their multiple charging stations a big bonus for those of us burning batteries tweeting.

Typical marketing campaigns can last from days to years. My shortest campaign was 5 days. A Super Bowl commercial may only run once.

Social Media is a different animal. Social Media should not be treated as a campaign but as a relationship. To make a relationship successful requires constant work (ask my wife). Social Media is an ongoing relationship between people, brands, etc. Engaging in short term campaigns typical of traditional and online marketing is like a sandwich board promoter, standing on the street shouting out tag lines and sales prices. An attention getter for sure but will you buy what they sell? Will you remember the brand?

Engaging in a long term Social Media strategy has obvious perks. For a decade I’ve been building micro-sites, splash pages, ad banners for companies.  They spend fortunes on these short bursts of marketing. Imagine if they didn’t have to build a new channel from scratch? A few years ago I was talking to a small PC gaming company whose products targeted women. Their games followed a continuous set of characters. I recommended setting each character and the group in general up each with their own Social Media presence. The idea was to keep communication going between characters and with fans. This would allow a small community to build up around the franchise, a robust and loyal channel for marketing. Rather than building new promotions for each new game, the company could spend months seeding game info through characters, even kicking off the game with a pre-story or augmenting it with side-stories. Between games the channel could be a little less active then ramping up as it got closer to product launch time.

Needless to say, they didn’t follow the strategy and still only dabble in Social Media, but at least they’re trying now. The idea of achieving success through short campaigns in Social Media is the opposite of what SoMe is all about. Take your time and commit to building your community and keep the conversation going because with Social Media, commitment and conversation is what it’s all about.

Image by antydiluvian