The River

Pete Spande at Continuous Beta says:

Media hasn’t become social. It always was. I talked about the latest Dukes of Hazzard episode with anyone who would listen in 1980. My mother sent me newspaper clippings all the through my college career (for example – don’t use Bean0, it is made with penicillin! [I’m alergic.]) The difference now is that media is social with SCALE.

The other big difference, Pete, is that social media — word of mouth, to use the old term — is now measurable. I used to get a lot of gaff at ClickZ for writing about word-of-mouth marketing, because, uh… what’s digital or interactive about that?

My argument was always that the advent of digital media, and user-generated media, meant that you can now see and measure what people are saying about your brand. You can analyze positive versus negative; you can take that feedback and improve your products. And you can participate in the conversation and affect what people are saying about you. Pretty damned cool.

I’m a little bit jaded, and, most of the time that I look at social media efforts, it’s as a professional. I think, “how engaging is this call to action?” “How well have they managed to encourage user participation?”

But this week, I got hit right at one of my passion points, and was dragged into participation myself. The campaign is called Bake2Share, and it’s for King Arthur Flour, one of the more premium flour brands that’s based in Vermont. This is a brand that caters to serious bakers, but also offers easy-to-use mixes, including a line especially for baking with kids. And it’s making a significant commitment to e-commerce. Internet Retailer named kingarthurflour.com one of its Hot 100 retail Web sites for 2009, and the company just won top honors from the DMA and Multichannel Marketer as best online food retailer.

It’s also a brand that is sharp about social media. They have a blog, whose RSS feed I subscribe to, and, of course, a very active Twitter account. I’m a big fan of King Arthur, and, though I don’t order from them all that much, I open their e-mail newsletter pretty consistently. Tuesday, I opened an e-mail from them that contained some pretty compelling language:

It’s part of our mission to inspire community-building through baking. When we bake and share, we forge honest, caring connections that help create and sustain a vibrant community. We believe that baking and giving go hand in hand. We want to encourage you to bake and share with family and friends, neighbors, and your community. To get you started, we’ll send you a 2-lb. bag of King Arthur Flour - absolutely free. We simply ask that you bake it forward. We’d love to hear your bake2share stories, and invite you to poste them at kingarthurflour.com/bake2share…

And then, at the bottom of the e-mail, there were links to Twitter, Facebook, delicious and StumbleUpon, with the directive “Share this email”.

Nicely done. It practically oozes with brand values — giving, sharing, community — and even the call-to-action is about sharing and community-building. Not to mention that the free bag of flour — free shipping included — was a pretty pleasant little gift.

When I signed up, there wasn’t yet much on the site. But now — the day I received my free bag — it’s been updated to say they gave away 5,218 bags, all in fewer than 24 hours. They list 106 participating bakers and 4,189 recipients of baked goods. No stories have yet been posted, which is a little disappointing, but also understandable. Another thing they did right: they made submitting a story very very easy. There are fields for what you baked and who you shared it with — stories and photos are optional. This will help them gather plenty of input — both from casual participants (like I probably will be) — and from those who go all-out and document their experience both in text and images.

I’m impressed, King Arthur Flour. I already was pretty fond of your brand, but this has tipped me over into passionate brand advocate territory. Now, off to bake those blueberry muffins.

UPDATE: I’ve finally baked my cupcakes and have been trying to submit my story, only to discover a major social media FAIL in this campaign. Every time I hit submit (and I’ve been doing it over and over again), I get a Network Error message: “The server at ecomm2.bos.kingarthurflour.com is taking too long to respond.” Not good, but a good lesson for others to take note of.

There’s an interesting piece today in Inside Higher Education that discusses Columbia Journalism School and its mandate to educate journalists to handle the tumultuous shifts happening in media today (both consumption patterns and business models). Among the changes proposed by Bill Grueskin, the former deputy managing editor for news at The Wall Street Journal and the school’s new dean of academic affairs, is a course on the business of journalism:

Though he acknowledged that the course would bridge the longstanding gap between the business and editorial sides of the journalism world, he did not think this would present an ethical problem for students. If anything, he said, it might help them in a market where some journalists have had to become entrepreneurs to find an audience for their work online.

At FM, especialy in the author services department, this is a topic we deal with every day, and it’s fascinating to see my alma mater deem it worthy of study. I wholeheartedly agree.

P.S. I would love to be an adjunct professor for such a course.

Just got — and really enjoyed — Doug Weaver’s musings on the new Yahoo! CEO in his Upstream Group newsletter, the Drift (latest not yet posted). The gist is that Carol Bartz is an outsider to the insular little Web 2.0 world, but that may be a good thing rather than a problem:

Those not part of our echo chamber “don’t get it” or “can’t possibly keep up.” Well, as Dwight Schrute famously said on “The Office” in a PG outburst: “That’s Bullcrap.”

My colleague James Gross got me thinking with today’s post, “Pick up the Weight. See what you can do with it.”

You see, before I took my current gig, I was something of a “thought leader.” I had a bi-weekly column (and wrote news articles) on ClickZ where I pontificated on the issues of the day — at least where it concerned interactive marketing. I thought big strategic thoughts. I talked to the major players. I updated this blog a hell of a lot more than I do now.

But I consciously chose to give up the free conference passes and the complimentary dinners at fancy restaurants hosted by PR people. Why? Because I wanted to practice what I was preaching. I wanted to do something — pick up the weight, so to speak. If nothing else, I thought it would make me an infinitely better reporter and pontificator on the space.

I’ve learned tons and been a part of creating some really amazing things. I’m too busy to talk (read: Twitter, blog, etc.) about it, mostly, and I’ve occasionally been frustrated about that. But James’ post today cheered me up a little and validated the unsung heroes of our industry (I fancy myself one of these, I guess) — those who may not speak the loudest, but those focused on doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

Maybe I’ve buried my head in the ground regarding media other than the Internet, but I’m just learning of the dispute between Time Warner Cable and Viacom (MTV Networks) that may prevent me from seeing many of the shows beloved by my family after the New Year. The Daily Show on Comedy Central? Gone! Dora, Diego and Kai-Lan on Nickelodeon? Gone! Even our old stand-by on-demand channels will be affected, according to a statement on the Time Warner Web site.

But I’m not actually writing about the dispute. What has gotten my attention is the impressive array of online marketing tools that the companies are using to muster customers to their sides. Besides the statement I linked to above, Time Warner has even launched a Web site, TWCFacts.com, that begs, “MTV please don’t do it!” Viacom is asking “you” to pay “millions” more, the site says, adding, “Those demands would be unreasonable any time, but given the current economic conditions, they are outrageous now.” Interestingly, one of their arguments against paying more is that much of MTV’s programming is already available online for free.

Meanwhile, visitors to MTV.com are greeted by a pop-up that says “Alert! Alert! Alert!” exhorting readers to call Time Warner’s 800 number to demand they come to an agreement with MTV Networks. (Screenshot above.) Impressive.

I don’t see any search ads, and who knows whether Time Warner cares on Twitter (as @Comcastcares). But even these baby steps show some awareness of the relevance of the Internet audience — not to mention the huge impact digital media (and time shifting) are having on media monetization these days. I imagine this impasse won’t last long. I wonder who’ll be most successful in getting customers to rally to their side, giving them a possible leg-up in the negotiations. Viacom, as the home of those beloved brands, has a leg up over the most-hated cable behemoth of Time Warner. Sadly, as my husband and I discussed this evening, we have few options other than Time Warner. Thankfully, we’ve got a nice backlog of Dora and Diego taped on the TiVo and TiVo to Go.

UPDATE: They reached an agreement. And TWC is on Twitter. Over on the ClickZ Blog (thx for the link!) they comment:

Hi — I’m the digital communications director for Time Warner Cable. It may interest you to know that we’re on Twitter — follow me at jeffTWC and my co-workers at alexTWC and MsmarTWC

I suspect more than a few folks are scratching their heads about the whole #motrinmoms scandal du weekend. As my friend @fuzheado said, the divergence in reaction might make a good Mars/Venus case study. He didn’t get what all the fuss was about, but his wife honed right in on the problem.

Not surprisingly, I’m with the wife. Like the super-vocal moms who took such offense, I immediately “got” the problem with the ad — its tone. As a mom with a 5-month-old, I “wear” my baby all the time. But it’s not because it’s “in fashion,” because it’s “supposedly” is a good bonding experience or because I want to look like “an official mom”, as the Motrin ad implies. It’s because it works. The kid doesn’t cry and I can do whatever needs doing. And of course it’s a bonding experience, because any time you meet your child’s needs that’s the case.

And, yes, sometimes my back hurts. Others out there are admitting this, too, even though the conventional wisdom is that babywearing doesn’t hurt if you’re doing it right. So, I don’t think J&J is far off in targeting moms who wear their babies. They’re just going about it wrong. (And let’s not dismiss this as a Twitter crisis. For everyone that’s tweeting about this, there are many others that are hearing about it, or just seeing the ads themselves and having the same reaction. Twitter is just surfacing the word-of-mouth that would have been happening anyway. )

But all is not lost for the brand. Right now, everyone’s saying they will boycott Motrin. This bodes ill for their product for adults and may also impact their product for kids, given they’ve now offended the target that controls the purse-strings.

The silver lining is that Motrin has gotten everyone’s attention. They need to grab this opportunity, while they’re in the online spotlight, to connect in a positive way. They need to apologize and retool their condescending message about babywearing. To make sure it gets seen, an ad spend on mommy blogs is in order. Motrin have shown that they’re not the experts on babywearing, but they can certainly get involved with and sponsor conversations on the topic — a topic that inspires an amazing amount of passion. Whaddaya say, J&J?

Other links:

Sarah Evans on Mashable has a prescription for Motrin, as well.

Battelle in AdAge on CrowdFire:

“We want to get a cloud of media to become something fungible that people can see and work with to create new things,” he said. “I want the performance to go from one-to-many to many-to-many.”

Very cool.

With action in Canada around Bisphenol A, the last few days have been hopping with online activity among parents — parents worried about the safety of plastics their kids are using; parents looking for information and products that will help them avoid this threat to their children’s health. From what I’ve been observing, most of the discussions are taking place on sites like Z Recommends — a “mom and pop”-type blog, not affiliated with any major media company — where the information in the comments are as valuable as the posts themselves.

This is the phenomenon documented in a BabyCenter/Keller Fay study released today, which finds that pregnant women and new moms engage in 1/3 more word-of-mouth conversations than other women, and 2/3 of those conversations involve product recommendations. Though the study found that most of the conversations happened in person, the Internet was the #1 driver of word-of-mouth among media.

Stuff like this is one reason I’m so jazzed to work with the highly-influential authors in our BabyCenter Parenting Federation (which FM runs in partnership with BabyCenter). Well, there’s that and the fact that I’m both pregnant and a new mom myself, so I personally love immersing myself in this world. Luckily for me (and marketers), the folks in this world are making tons of buying decisions (and having lively conversations about these decisions) every day.

I loved Kent Nichols’ (of Ask a Ninja) explanation of what we at FM — specifically our salespeople — do. Paraphrasing here, but the moderator asked how AAN has been successful courting brand advertisers. The secret, Kent said, is “sweaty people who drink” — aka hard work building real-life relationships with agencies and advertisers, sometimes with the lubricating influence of alcohol. It’s the non-engineerable aspect of advertising, he said, and it requires the sweat of people who do “voodoo bullshit” and “close deals.”

This panel has completely rocked — best of the SXSW interactive conference so far — and Kent Nichols is a great instigator. He totally gets it, and he expresses it in a laugh-out-loud hilarous way.