Year: 2009

Hard candy shell not as hard as you might think

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

So Skittles threw in the towel. They didn’t have the stomach for profanities and racial slurs showing up on their “homepage,” which they had given over to a Twitter search page showing real-time results for “Skittles.” When I wrote about this yesterday, I was thinking of it as a bold move, and even with all the potential pitfalls it would probably still pay off for Skittles in terms of attention.

I wasn’t surprised to see how the public played with the shiny new toy Skittles handed to them. What does surprise me, though, is that Skittles seems to have been surprised. Didn’t they know this was going to happen? They must have had hours and hours of internal debate about the wisdom of this move. I’m reminded of the movie War Games, where the computer goes haywire at the end and the screen scrolls the list of all the possible conflicts it is programmed to consider, like “USSR first strike” and “Albanian decoy” and “Canadian thrust.” In the Skittles war room, didn’t they have a big board with “racist hijack” and “profanity blitzkrieg”?

I’m wondering, based on a not-inconsiderable experience with the way decisions can be made in large companies, if someone a level or three above the person who decided to begin this experiment stepped in and decided to end it when they saw how it was going.

Corporate marketers expanding their presence in social media are used to answering the question, “What will you do if someone says something negative about your products or your company?” and the answer usually is something along the lines of, “At least the negative comments will be on our site where we will know about them and can respond in an open, transparent way.”

Yes, but what about when there’s nothing to respond to, when the negativity is purely for the sake of negativity? That’s when we really find out how thick or thin are corporate skins are.

Yesterday I also said, “Naturally, some people can’t resist the urge to spam the channel with anti-Skittles childishness, but they’ll get tired of that eventually.” I just spent five minutes paging through search results and couldn’t find a single obscene or racist tweet. While “skittles” was the number one trending topic on Twitter yesterday, it’s not even showing up on the top ten today.

Maybe Skittles melted too soon. With the short attention span of online pranksters, maybe they only had to wait another day to get out of the crosshairs. No less a social media personage than Charlene Li has already declared that the Skittles experiment “redefined branding.” Maybe they were mere hours away from becoming the social media success story of 2009, rather than a case study of how social media can bite back.

Like the number of licks required to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

Taste the social media rainbow

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

One of the conversations we’ve had most often at SAS around our participation in social media channels involves the control of our brand, or more accurately the realization that every company has come to in the last few years: We no longer control our brand. Our message is determined as much or more by what people are saying about us than what we’re saying about ourselves. That’s pretty much an accepted Social Media 101 principle these days.

Skittles, the candy company, has taken it to the furthest extreme. As of now, if you go to www.skittles.com, their homepage is a Twitter search feed for "skittles." A pop-up box gives you further options, including Friends, which takes you to Skittles’ Facebook fan page. The Media link gives you the choice for Video, which takes you to YouTube, and Pics, which takes you to Flickr.

By doing this, Skittles has turned their brand over to the public more than any company I can think of. Is it a good idea? There’s lots of debate about that on Twitter, with opinions ranging, as they inevitably do, from "brilliant" to "idiotic." But by the nature of the change they’ve made, the conversation is essentially taking place on Skittles’ homepage. And, most important of all, it’s taking place. When was the last time you thought about Skittles? What else could have gotten me to blog about Skittles?

Of course, the discussion will die down, and generating a lively debate in social media channels isn’t going to sell more candy. But this decision makes a lot of sense for a consumer product like Skittles. I never looked at their website before today, but I imagine they had a hard time keeping it interesting. How much is there to say about fruit candy other than contests and maybe a new flavor every now and then? Skittles has made the medium the message, and by adopting social media channels as their primary means of communication, they have a lot more chance of getting people talking about them. Naturally, some people can’t resist the urge to spam the channel with anti-Skittles childishness, but they’ll get tired of that eventually. In other words, I don’t think they had a lot to lose, and a tremendous amount to gain.

What’s the lesson for an enterprise technology company like SAS? Well, it’s not "replace the homepage with a Twitter search." SAS solutions come in a lot of flavors and sas.com does a great job of conveying information to customers and potential customers that couldn’t be accomplished through social media alone.

But what about the people who would never think to come to our homepage? There are lots of people in business, in academia, in government who use SAS software every day but don’t think to come find out what’s new. Plus, SAS software plays a behind-the-scenes role in nearly everybody’s life. Those are the messages we can convey in social media, to audiences who don’t know yet how much they want to know about us.

Seeking a proactive professional to proactively proactivize

Dave

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

My SAS colleague Margo Stutesman forwarded me a blog post from Sasha Dichter, director of business development at Acumen Fund. “I’m assuming she sent it because she likes the way he quantifies what he’s looking for in a social media marketer, as opposed to trying to get me to move on.” I’ve spent a lot of time either writing or reading job descriptions and help wanted ads. Writing a good one is not easy. I like the way Sasha lays out what he’s looking for:

I’m looking for a great marketer — a storyteller, a tribe-builder, someone who knows how to connect with people in a real and genuine way and help them to be part of something big…and who at the same time is ready to roll up their sleeves with data and numbers and analytics and web 2.0 tools.

Great stuff, and it immediately gives you a sense of what the job will be like and what it would be like to work with Sasha.

Social media gives us so many opportunities to rewrite the rules of corporate communications – not the fundamentals, but the stodgy old stuff that isn’t working anymore, like some of the language we use. I’ve read dozens, possibly hundreds, of job descriptions that told me the company was looking for a proactive, customer-focused self-starter, but not what the person would actually, you know, do. “My favorite line in a job description was obviously a placeholder that never got edited before publication: "Works closely with Harriett."”

Knowing you’re being stodgy isn’t always enough. I’m working on our Social Media Guidelines & Recommendations to give to SAS employees who want to know how “and indeed if” they can participate in social media. “The short answer is yes, with more to come.” I’m a pretty informal person and often find myself struggling to maintain a professional demeanor in meetings when what I really want to do is sneak jokes into the minutes to see if anyone reads them. Even so, it’s hard to break the habit. I just looked at a sentence I wrote in the draft guidelines for podcasting:

Our intention as we develop podcasting practices at SAS is to identify podcast-worthy topics that support overall SAS messaging and create a unified podcasting strategy that supports multiple marketing efforts and maximizes the content and production resources.

Not the most inspiring of manifestos. But it’s so easy to slip back into stuffy mode. That’s one reason I appreciate Intel’s social media guidelines, and why they’ve gotten a lot of attention. They sound like they were written by real people, for real people. “And in my own defense, the sentence I picked out above is one of my stuffiest.”

The larger, more important message of all this is one I hope our bloggers at SAS will continue to recognize and feel comfortable with: not every post has to be a white paper. That email you just dashed off to ten colleagues about an important development in your field could be a blog post with a few minor tweaks, and maybe just a spell check.

Social media may be encouraging some to become too personal and informal “I’m still a fan of good grammar and spelling”, but if it convinces the corporate world it’s okay to talk like people instead of committees, that will be a wondrous thing.

First word! Probably!

Dave

Like so many things about parenting, we’re not really sure of the protocol for deciding on a child’s first word. Is it the first time he says something recognizable regardless of context, or the first time he clearly identifies something by using the correct word for that thing? When does it happen? If we declare it too early will we get knowing, accomodating, but not-quite-accepting nods from fellow parents?
The Boy has often said “mama” and “dada” and “hey” and a few other things that seem to be actual words, often at times when it could reasonably be said that was what he meant to say. And for a month or two he’s been making vague noises when he sees one of the cats “or should I say Hastings, because Siegfried and Roy still run from him like he’s a tiny veterinarian”. Sometimes it sounds like, “Hey, kitty.” Sometimes it sounds like, “Ehhh, keeeahhhhahh.”
But this morning in response to Mommy’s question, “Do you see the kitty?”, Conrad responded, very clearly and without ambiguity, “Kitty!” All the sounds were there, including the oft-overlooked T sound.
So, we’re calling it. On February 16, 2009 at 8:42 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, at the age of one year, five days, one hour and 42 minutes, Conrad said his first word, and it was “kitty.”
UPDATE: We just got back from his one-year checkup with his not-easily-impressed pediatrician who said that this, in fact, does not count since Jean said “kitty” first. So his official first word is yet to pass his lips.
She also asked us a lot of questions seemingly designed to deflate the proud parent, like, “How does he show you what he wants?” and “When you roll a ball does he roll it back to you, and does he put any English on it?” and “Has he written anything I might have read?”