Not so fast. It was a set up from the beginning—a set up perfect for generating buzz and involving fans. Fabio [...]]]> When Old Spice announced that Fabio would be replacing Mustafa, the outcry was instantaneous. Was Old Spice going to end up like The Gap and quickly backtrack when customers on social media screamed loudly enough?

Not so fast. It was a set up from the beginning—a set up perfect for generating buzz and involving fans. Fabio has issued this challenge on “the internets” for a duel with the “old new Old Spice guy” against him, the “new, new Old Spice guy.”

Fabio or Mustafa? Who will win?  Clearly Old Spice will!

Consumr is working with publisher Rodale to import Yelp-style product reviews for some 50,000 products you can find on grocery store, [...]]]> Advertising Age reports the launch today of Consumr, a new social media ratings site. It’s meant to be Yelp-meets-Foursquare to rate consumer packaged goods like Cheerios and Tide. This is a service without a need.

Consumr is working with publisher Rodale to import Yelp-style product reviews for some 50,000 products you can find on grocery store, drug store, and mass merchandiser shelves. Also, like Foursquare, consumers can “check in” with brands they like and earn badges, called “flair.” With enough “flair,” participants can earn the distinction, for example, of being named a “flavor fiend,” exclusive for connoisseurs of Chobani yogurt. Wow! We’ve written about pointless social media activity before (i.e. people taking the time out of their busy lives to “like” Ziploc bag on Facebook), but building a business around pointless social media activity seems a bit much.

Sites like Yelp work because the businesses, services, and products they review are relative high stakes. Here are the five key high stakes consumer motivations that make review sites like Yelp work:

1)      Expense:  You might look at car reviews because buying a car is a high stakes financial investment.

2)      Longevity: Using the car example again, you are buying a product with a long life—the high stakes are you’ll own it and use the product for years and will have to live with the decision, good or bad.

3)      Time Consuming: You might turn to Yelp to find a plumber, because of the high stakes involved in taking the time and effort to search for a reputable service provider.

4)      Pain: Again, using the plumber example, making the wrong choice could wreak havoc in your home and to your bank account. The high stakes of choosing the wrong dentist or leg wax service could also be extremely painful.

5)      Information Scarcity: Choosing a restaurant in a new town is a gamble without services like Yelp. The high stakes are if you choose the wrong place to eat, your evening is ruined.

The problem with a consumer goods rating site like Consumr, is that these high stakes motivations are totally missing. Buy the wrong yogurt and you waste a few dollars. It takes little effort to return to the store and buy another brand. A yogurt mistake just doesn’t have major implications. Furthermore, most people already know what yogurt they like. They don’t need to invest time in doing research. And how many people in our over-scheduled world are going to carve out time to earn “flair” so they can be known as a yogurt connoisseur  on some random Web site?  Those people are probably already too busy friending Ziploc bags on Facebook.

But, common sense is not as common as you might hope.

A purported social media expert working for a leading social media agency tweeted this for Chrysler: “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the Motorcity and yet [...]]]> “Don’t use the F-Bomb” is a seemingly common sense rule when using social media for corporate purposes.

But, common sense is not as common as you might hope.

A purported social media expert working for a leading social media agency tweeted this for Chrysler: “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the Motorcity and yet no one here knows how to fucking drive.”

If a pro can make such a big mistake, how can you protect your brand when your employees tweet and post on your brand’s behalf?

While you can’t create common sense through policy, it does make sense to provide guidelines.  A social media policy does more than make clear what mistakes to avoid. It helps you use the social media more effectively.

Here are some basic points to cover:

• Make sure people know they are personally responsible for what they write. Once something has been said, it can’t be unsaid, and there is no telling who will see what is written. Everyone should think twice before hitting the “share” button.
• Be real. Don’t create a fake persona or a faceless corporate presence. Use your real name and identify your relationship with the brand. Compare how Toyota uses real people vs. Chevy’s faceless corporation approach.
• Think about your audience. You will be talking to clients, future clients, employees, bosses, suppliers, competitors—everybody. Be careful not to alienate them. Ray Catena Lexus, a New York area car dealer “likes” The Mets on their Facebook page—how do Yankee fans feel?
• Stay away from religion, politics and sex. Good advice for polite company at a dinner party is also good advice for using social media. Be especially careful when thinking of voicing a negative opinion about anything—and never badmouth the competition.
• Don’t get defensive. Your company may come under criticism. Resist the urge to fight back. Be polite to detractors and use the opportunity to present additional information and resources. Don’t call people names or denigrate their thinking.
• Don’t misuse copyrighted material. Be sure to provide attribution for any material you share. Never post confidential material.
• Be helpful, bring value, be amusing. Don’t just blare out commercial messages and public relations fluff. If you get a reputation for being a walking, talking commercial, you’ll be considered a spammer and will be tuned out—often rudely.

The Social Media Governance Web site has an impressive library of real social media policies from many different types of companies. These can provide a template for your company’s social media policy as well as give you an idea of what issues other companies have faced and how they dealt with them.

Don’t try [...]]]> Rance Crain has an interesting post in Advertising Age: “Back in the Mad Men days, when the “pioneers of advertising,” as my old boss Stan Cohen calls them, ruled the roost, it was commonly held that a little exaggeration was not unreasonable to accentuate the selling points of the ad messages.”

Don’t try that today.

Between bloggers and Tweeters, your advertising “exaggeration” will be called out as a lie and your brand will suffer.

Consider these two recent stories:

On the one hand, Chevy Volt initially claimed a 40 mile range per battery charge. Check Twitter and you will find it is between 23 and 25.  GM has “revised” the claim to between 25 and 50 miles–still not quite in line with what consumers who use the product are reporting. The buzz on the Volt brand is not positive. Despite GM’s revision, angry tweeters and bloggers continue to attack the discrepancy. The lack of range and lack of “clarity” on the part of GM is one of the reasons depressing demand for the product.

Contrast that with Taco Bell and the “not beef” controversy. A law firm in Alabama sued the company claiming it was not actually using beef in its tacos–and it invested plenty in promoting its beefless claim to get major coverage from media major and minor. Taco Bell has shown that when your brand is honest and does a good job of getting the true story out there, it can weather a public relations storm. Witness how Taco Bell responded to a lawsuit charging the company with not using real beef. The company responded with an integrated campaign combining traditional public relations and newspaper advertising along with new details on its website, offering to give away 10 million tacos to people who “like” its  Facebook page and a straightforward  video on YouTube featuring Taco Bell  President Greg Creed saying, “Our seasoned beef recipe contains 88 percent quality USDA inspected beef.” In addition to listing the beef content, he provides a detailed list of the remaining ingredients. The response has been overwhelmingly positive.

From Wikileak threats to Twitter snipes, the truth about your brand will get out. Exaggeration no longer sells, it repells.

Consumers pretty much always hate change–witness the initial flack when the [...]]]> Gawker.com fans were in full rebellion. Some threatened to never visit the site again. The Twittering class hated Gawker’s redesign launched February 7th. On February 9th, that all changed. Gawker.com broke the story of the “classy” Congressman showing off his flabby torso and traffic boomed.

Consumers pretty much always hate change–witness the initial flack when the new Starbucks logo launched last month. For Gawker, the reaction to their new design was as hate-filled as it was predictable. From Twitter:

FruitMuffin The new gawker redesign is terrible! @Gizmodo and @Lifehacker, I’m sad to say it, but you just lost a reader, it’s too annoying to use.

Zombie_Rights Wow, ok. Who decided to let Satan himself redesign all the Gawker sites, anyway? I was wondering what the big deal was about, and yeesh

norahpdx gawker‘s site redesign makes my face hurt. what a disaster.

Wise companies use design for strategic purposes that may or may not initially please the masses. In Gawker’s case, their new design makes it possible to put their important stories first. The old design locked them into a a reverse chronological order, making an important story disappear off the home page as new material was posted after it. Strategically, the move made sense.

Consumers don’t always understand strategy–they are driven by familiarity. The wisdom of Gawker’s redesign hit two days after the new site look launched. The icky pictures of a congressman who imagines himself hot proved irresistible. Traffic was still up by 22% as of yesterday, the latest available Alexa stats as I write this post. And this hot story is on the Gawker front page (though a Tom Cruise/Scientology Slave article–with an equal creepy factor–has nudged it further down towards the bottom.) The new design makes it possible for Gawker to squeeze this story for all it is worth in terms of site traffic and time on site–and that makes strategic sense, whether you like the design or not. Likeability is a direct function of familiarity.

Design is important to brand, but in the end, product is more so. A great logo and great packaging can’t save a crappy product. In the case of Gawker,  supplying “gossip from Manhattan and the Beltway to Hollywood and the Valley,” is something they continue to do very well.

As for the Gawker redesign haters, they can chill a bit. The new design will grow on them. Most brand redesigns do.

It appears Facebook Connect is succeeding where others have failed (most notably Microsoft’s Passport product). They are becoming the default internet ID card, saving users from having to create user names and passwords for every site they interact with.

Facebook Connect’s success is partly due [...]]]> More and more Web sites are offering the “Connect with Facebook” option.

It appears Facebook Connect is succeeding where others have failed (most notably Microsoft’s Passport product). They are becoming the default internet ID card, saving users from having to create user names and passwords for every site they interact with.

Facebook Connect’s success is partly due to the fact that many people don’t understand Facebook’s many security flaws, partly because people really do want to share articles and commentary with their friends, and partly because site owners are happy to outsource their identity login systems and push Facebook Connect. Microsoft’s Passport never enjoyed these adoption drivers.

Yet how far will Facebook Connect go before it hits the same brick wall that stopped Microsoft?

Trust will be the ultimate limiting factor. Facebook makes constant security blunders. Just this last weekend, they enabled third party partners to access users’ private information without giving users clear notice and without explicitly allowing users to control access. ZDNet reported this latest bungle with the tongue-in-cheek observation, “I know I want the likes of FarmVille, and all their partners, to have my home address and phone number.”

More than likely, Facebook Connect will work fine in social settings, but won’t gain any traction in commercial settings. It is one thing for a hacker to break into your Huffington Post identity, but quite another for them to access all your bank accounts. The Facebook brand just has too many well-deserved trust problems.

(If you seek to thwart Facebook attempts to exploit your private information, read ZDNet’s advice in their Definitive Facebook Lockdown Guide.)

Read more on Facebook brand trust problems

The brand [...]]]> Burson-Marsteller released a study that claims 76% of blogs were off message. They analyzed more than 150 messages sent out by companies listed  in the Financial Times Global 100 and discovered a large gap between the official brand messages and how they were reflected on blogs, in tweets, and on other social media posts.

The brand message problems stem from a number of deficiencies by corporate marketing operations including:

1) Having no clear plan or objectives for communications on the social Web. An example here: Ziploc: Boring Doesn’t Work as a Social Media Engagement Strategy

2) Failure to understand that how social media is used is as important as what is said. More detail here:  Social Media Brand Engagement Rules:  Toyota vs Chevrolet

3) Failing to have a social media policy. A great library of social media policy examples from companies large and small that you can freely access, download, and adapt can be found here.

4) Not providing communicators outside of the marketing department with writing guidelines to explain how to write freely, but still stay “on brand.” This example from Diebold explains the brand’s voice. Diebold’s Branded Voice Guidelines. At Merriam Associates, we also include example messages so that people can see guidelines come to life (and re-use pre-written, pre-approved content.)

5) Lack of adequate control–things get “published” without enough oversight or double-checking. Once something is “out” it can’t be pulled back “in”. This article Viral Marketing Making Your Brand Sick is one example as is this mistake from Target from Halloween.

Google “New Starbucks” logo, and you’ll see page after page of negative reviews.  Negative response to change has always existed. That social media [...]]]> Okay, the new Gap log did suck.  But EVERY new logo design ALWAYS kicks off a spate of negative logo reviews, and many new logos don’t suck. Crowd sourcers beware: consumers hate change.

Google “New Starbucks” logo, and you’ll see page after page of negative reviews.  Negative response to change has always existed. That social media magnifies the negativity doesn’t mean that initial dislike signals a brand disaster. If every company making a logo change backs off when hit with inevitable Gap-like criticism, no brands will ever visually improve and great design will cease to exist.

Anyone who has tested new names or logos in a focus group knows the dynamic: when people are faced with something new and different, they recoil. Companies that back off change because of that knee-jerk reaction totally miss the point of doing something different. If you want to attract attention, convey a new message, become memorable, you have to unsettle people. In my naming practice, I know that names people like are names within the comfort zone. They are familiar, known, and understood–and totally the wrong choice for a winning brand. The same is true for logo designs. The best creative choice for a name or a logo is the idea that makes people stop and say, “whoa!”

When choosing a new logo, you want to get the associations right. Don’t ask non-designers to evaluate the art. You’ll get as many people saying “it’s too simple” as you will get saying “it’s too busy”. Dive past the inevitable superficial negatives and get to the specific feelings: “What does this logo make you think about?”

For a logo to become “liked” or even “loved” takes time. As Michael Bierut writes in the Fast Company review of the immediately much hated new Big Ten logo: “But let’s remember that the previous Big Ten logo, which fans now absolutely love, also met with resistance when it was first introduced twenty years ago.”

For the record, regarding the Starbucks redesign:  The new logo is great. But the ability of a new logo to move that company beyond coffee is negligible. Starbucks has spent over a decade trying to be coffee + something more and has failed. The new logo won’t fix that problem.