The person whose home was searched believed the people searching his home and car were either with, or working under the authority of, the SFPD. He didn’t have to do that without a warrant, but he was cooperating with the police and he knew he was innocent.

Most of us want to help the police. But instead of the SFPD going into his home the Apple investigators conducted the search. (I could actually understand the SFPD conducting the search with the help of someone from Apple helping them identify a mysterious looking object, but not what actually happened.)

Am I missing something?

For all the hearts and hugs we have for Apple, it is a very big company known for its secrecy. I absolutely hate when people accuse a company of bad behavior, as though the company exists apart from the people that work for it. Like all successful companies, Apple has lots of good, smart people working there. That being said, someone at Apple allowed the company’s employees to go way too far here. I am really surprised I’m not hearing and seeing more from the mainstream press (and even the tech press) about this.

Where would this story be if it were Exxon-Mobil that had let its employees do this? (Would it have taken a local SF weekly alternative paper to break the story?) Or for a more apples-to-apples (no pun intended) comparison, what if it were Google? How about some defense contractor looking for classified information? You think that would have been huge news?

Instead, it’s Apple and even those who are shocked are shocked in that semi-detached, wry, “ooh-what-a-hoot-this-is” way the tech press seems to affect so well. They’re Claude Rains from Casablanca. (“I’m shocked — shocked! — to find out Apple is behaving this way!”)

Where’s the umbrage? Where’s the indignation?

Maybe someone can build an app for that.

That’s right, I was selected to test the new Google ChromeOS Notebook as a part of their pilot program. Hooray for me! If you’re even a little bit of a geek, getting a box in the mail with a free device in it is a good thing. (Who doesn’t love the smell of new electronics?) And when that device is a part of a highly-anticipated pilot program that lots of your friends want to be a part of, well, that just makes it so much more satisfying. I’ll have more to say about the program and how it has been handled by Google from a marketing standpoint in another post. (Promise #1)For now, let me just say that I like what they’re doing. There wasn’t a huge amount of information packaged with the notebook. I didn’t even receive an email that I had been selected. But the paperwork that is included is hip and irreverent. (They have some funny copy writers.) It makes me want to help Google out by testing their stuff. I’m betting some will find it off-putting, but I think it’s a good way to go about launching this program. As I said, more on that in another post.

So what about the notebook itself? I like it. I probably picked the wrong word when I called the Cr 48 a “beauty.” Honestly, it’s not very pretty. It’s a plain little notebook with no ornamentation, logos or anything. It looks very utilitarian, but that’s not a bad thing. (Google did include a sticker in the box which I immediately stuck on the back of the machine.) It’s what you want,meaning it’s small and thin. It has a little heft to it, but it’s not heavy. Even the keyboard is stripped down. The function keys that you would normally expect across the top have been replaced by web browser keys (e.g. forward, backward, refresh). It includes a few other items you need, like a webcam, mic and speakers for videoconferencing, but it’s a pretty basic little notebook. (The one thing I’m having a hard time with is the touchpad. It’s way too sensitive so that if you rest your hands on it your cursor moves.) From the standpoint of the machine, it’s not a very big deal.

And that’s where I expect to hear a ton of “yawns” out of the technorati. I’ve already read a few reviews that say something like “So what if Google makes a bunch of plain little notebooks? It’s not a ‘game-changing’ design like an iPad. And the operating system is just a stripped down version of linux with a browser to control it all. Boring.” That’s where I think a lot of people may be missing the point entirely. I think this may be a bigger deal than the iPad in the long run. (Let that sink in for a second.) The iPad is an impressive design. I think it’s a great little gadget. It’s entertaining and engaging and fun and cute. (It’s also relatively useless without a “real” computer or as a “real” computer.) The Cr 48 is unabashedly not a gadget. It’s too ugly to be a gadget. But it’s so much more useful. I could never write a blog post like this on an iPad. I wouldn’t even try. With the Cr 48 I’ve already written some client papers, done a presentation and worked on a spreadsheet using Google docs and some applications. It wasn’t perfect, but that had more to do with me and 20 years of habit working on computers. This is a test to see if Google can strip down an open source operating system to the bare necessities, stick everything “in the cloud” and make a real computer for everyone for under a couple hundred bucks (maybe less)–one that can actually be used for work and home. That’s been a goal of open source zealots like me for a long time. I hope Google is wildly successful. If being a part of their pilot program helps them achieve it, I’m in. More to come on my predictions about Google’s long term success later. (Promise #2)

As for the Chrome-browser-as-OS concept I’m still playing around with it. As I said, it’s not perfect (which is kind of the point of a test program). At this point it hasn’t been that difficult an adjustment. It helps that I’ve been using Google docs for a while. I’ll have to save a full review of the OS for another post too. (Promise #3) So much to say.

Full disclosure: If you’ve gotten to this point and you haven’t fully understood, Google sent me a computer to test for free. It came bundled with two years of free limited data service on Verizon. I got something from Google and I must disclose it. (See how easy that was?) That being said, I am under no obligations to Google except to use the wares as much or as little as I want to, report the bugs and provide user feedback as a part of their pilot program.

Photo credit: Google

At this point I’m holding to my earlier opinion that it’s simply too soon to tell how the Old Spice social media campaign has affected their shower gel sales. As I’ve stated many times here and elsewhere, the real measure of social media success if it is to be accepted as a “real” marketing channel is how it affects revenue. There are lots of sides to take in this debate (well, there’s my side and then the wrong side), but I think figuring out if filming 186 YouTube videos makes a difference in sales is a pretty important exercise for P&G. Anyone who says otherwise, or who is saying it doesn’t while using bad data without checking it out first, may be pushing an agenda that has little to do with the merits of the actual effort. I’ll get to that in a second.

What prompted this post is an article from Advertising Age that came out today. What’s interesting is that their numbers seem to be coming from the same source (Symphony IRI) that BrandWeek (and then Yahoo) got their numbers; and yet they show that even with the caveats I mentioned in my earlier post, the Old Spice Guy is helping shower gel sales and market share. I don’t have access to the full report, but I can’t figure out how BrandWeek/Yahoo could come up with a story that says the Old Spice Guy is a bit of a failure using the same data that AdAge says shows Old Spice “consistently gaining market share.” Something isn’t right.

So why is all of this important? Why am I spending this much time on the data and its interpretation and not the campaign itself? Let me answer that second question first. The ad campaign is getting plenty of coverage elsewhere. Go use your google muscles and you’ll find lots to ponder on everything from the making of the campaign to Isaiah Mustafa himself. All good stuff, but I’m not really about that, now am I?

What is more striking to me is how quickly the “Old Spice Fails” meme spread around social media chatterers and how fast it became “conventional” wisdom. I saw snarky comments popping up almost within minutes of the Yahoo post. I read the post, noted the issues with the data, and assumed that someone somewhere would defend the social media campaign on something more than creative arguments. But all I saw was “A for effort” posts.

I couldn’t figure it out until I realized that many trashing the Old Spice campaign have a vested interest in keeping social media nebulous. They like the idea that it’s somehow a new and different form of marketing where a specialized skillset separates them from traditional marketing types.  Along comes a very calculated effort based on creating solid, funny content and it simply has to be squashed (or at least devalued). It’s the exact opposite of the “no one knows what makes a meme go viral” ethos and the “content is dead/long live curation” stuff. What’s more, the campaign came out of a traditional agency, not some specialty shop set up to navigate the intricacies of the social media universe. (Here‘s a good AdWeek article on the digital/traditional divide as it relates to Old Spice.)

I am certain there will be lots written about the Old Spice social media campaign. (Probably some of it by me!) But one thing that may be overlooked is how quickly many social media experts either wanted the campaign to fail, or how spreading that idea demonstrated how many of them don’t really know what they’re talking about when it comes to measuring success.

Many thanks to Eddy Badrina (his blog here or follow him on Twitter @eddybadrina) and Ross Kimbarovsky (his blog here or follow him on Twitter @rosskmbarovsky). I found the AdAge article through Eddy and the AdWeek article through Ross. They’re good guys and I recommend you follow both of them. (Heed my words!)

UPDATE: Fixed the link to the AdAge article.

This may have to be quick, since I want to do this before I forget it, but simply put: you’re wrong about Old Spice. (More links to come later.)

If you’re retweeting the Yahoo post (here) referencing a BrandWeek article about how Old Spice sales are down despite the great social ads featuring Isaiah Mustafa in a towel (aka The Old Spice Guy) then you’re not looking at the numbers closely enough. There seem to be some serious issues with the BrandWeek data as far as I can tell. As I tweeted this morning, here’s where I see some problems:

1 – The numbers do NOT come from Proctor & Gamble but from an analyst firm. I have no reason to doubt the numbers are fairly accurate, but “fairly” is a word that can cover a multitude of sins. What does make me wonder about them, however, is issue #2

2 – Walmart numbers are excluded from the data. I’m not an old CPG hand, but I would think Walmart (y’know, the world’s largest retail company) could skew figures considerably in either direction and affect the data set. Plus, I’d bet Walmart’s shoppers (who are ridiculously hard to pin down demographically regardless of what you might think) tend to be above average Old Spice buyers. (That’s a total hunch with no data, but it makes sense.)

3 – The numbers are for a 52 week period ending June 13th. The viral component of the campaign only began on July 14th. (I may be off by a day or two, but it was well after June 13th.) I would have said the numbers were too soon to draw conclusions even if they ended a day after the social media effort, since not everyone ran out of shower gel on the same day and it isn’t something you run out and buy spur-of-the-moment. But the fact that the numbers end well before the ‘second wave’ of social videos featuring the Old Spice guy makes them almost meaningless.

So before you begin dismantling the viral campaign as an “epic fail,” maybe you should check out this from PR Week on July 21st. It says JULY sales to date (as in the month containing the actual viral efforts) are UP 107%. And these are numbers coming directly from P&G (as in the folks who actually know).

I’ll come back and fix links, add some pics  and some clarifications to this post later, but I wanted to get this up right way.  Feel free to comment.

Now I’m on a horse…

Photo Credit: Michelanglo. It’s Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel. It’s funny. Oh, shut up.

UPDATE (already?!): I’ll do some follow-ups on this post. I’m also digging out some old posts I did after the Skittles social media campaign. It seems like what I said then is still apropos now.

UPDATE II: Added the pic and made some spelling fixes. My original post was rife with typos but I did it quickly lest anyone think I was late to the party on this topic. I hate to be a tooter of my own horn, but I was actually pointing this stuff out as soon as the Yahoo post came out (I admit to not seeing the Brandweek article) and the social media ‘mavens’ began pushing the “Old Spice Guy Fails” meme. I was actually surprised that meme caught on the way it did.

UDATE III: My new post on this topic here. BrandChannel has a more in depth look at the numbers here that echoes some of what I said in my post. It looks like I was right. (Woo hoo!) Some discussion on the BrandChannel numbers with lots of insights from Stephen Denny here. (Follow him on Twitter @note_to_cmo.)

Not long ago I was listening to the local news radio station. They interviewed a researcher from some North Texas mental health facility or research group. The topic? Increased mortality rates during economic hard times. His projection? Expect to see deaths, things like stress-related heart attacks and strokes or suicides and homicides, rise due to the recession. What’s more, the worse the recession is, the more dead people we’ll see.

Boy, was he a breath of fresh air.

I’m sure the good doctor is a fine man who is loved by his wife and family, but he could not have been more depressing. I have to blame the radio station for scheduling the topic, but I think the palpable sense of gloominess even surprised the hosts. Of course they didn’t help the situation by asking questions like, “Will lack of affordable healthcare cause people not to take their medications and maybe commit suicide or seek treatment for stress-related illnesses?” My favorite question was: “Is the stress of the economy what causes people to go into an office building and shoot people?” There was almost a glimmer of excitement in the doctor’s voice when he said something like, “Yes, we do see an increase in murder/suicides during times like these.” So we have that to look forward to, I guess.

(If I can find a clip or transcript I’ll try to get exact quotes. I don’t want anyone to think I’m making this up.)

Nice topic, eh?

There’s more to discuss here, I’m sure. For instance, there was also a point made during the interview that being poor and uneducated makes people die earlier. That seems to make intuitive sense, but shouldn’t that be something we tell kids when they want to drop out of school? If the standard “You’re never going to succeed without an education ” message isn’t strong enough, how about “Drop Out and Die Young!” That message may resonate a little more.

I feel as though I should apologize for such a downer of a post, so I’ll mitigate the mood a bit by providing you an uplifting image from that time of happiness and harmony known as the 70′s. Hang in there, baby….

Update: I’ve done everything I can to locate the actual copyright holder for this picture or the story behind it. I can’t find it. I seem to remember there were many versions of this poster, but this is the one that Mrs Scott, my 9th grade English teacher, had hanging in her classroom. If you know the story behind the poster, or can point me to the company that manufactured this and all the other dreadful motivational posters from the 70′s, I’d love to hear from you.

In that time I have seen vast sums of money spent on bad ideas, watched enormous quantities of shareholder value dissipate and participated in more than a few Whacking Days. (No, not this kind.) I know the ups and downs that come with working for a technology company. You wear your experiences like badges of honor. When you start at a new company, you and your new co-workers share your histories.

“You were with Synegistix? I worked for Ingeniko Corp before they acquired them.”
“No kidding. I was a part of the transition team on that.”
“Really? Yeah, I took the package right after.”
“Yeah, I got laid off during the next round.”

You start a job knowing that your tenure will likely end one of two ways: move on or get whacked. Retirement is not a part of the picture. The people I know who have been with a job longer than 10 years is very short indeed. The people I know intending to stay with a company longer than 10 years is even shorter. It’s not that anyone wants to leave a company, but no one believes that to be possible. No one.

To the grizzled IT veteran, a layoff isn’t the end of the world. It comes with the territory. But there’s something a little different to me about the recent economic troubles and the rise in unemployment numbers. This time, it isn’t just us (or is that “we?”). When Internet companies began to implode around 2000, technology companies contributed mightily to the rolls of the unemployed. Then the recession following 9/11 hit sending more companies into “restructurement.” It happened so frequently that even when times began to get better, tech companies still shed jobs on a regular basis. Again, to those of us who had been through it a few times, we never considered that the companies we worked for wouldn’t have layoffs. (There’s a post in there somewhere that I’ll have to tease out sometime. Something along the lines of technology companies and the poor managers who ran them using the Q4 layoff as a means to fill a budget gap.) You pack up your necessities, leave the company t-shirts, tchotchkes and awards (MARKETING EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH) in your cube and drive to the after-layoff party. It’s the way it’s done.

On this go-round, even though there are people from tech companies being kicked to the curb, for the first time in my career they are being joined at the curb by a lot of people with surprised looks on their faces. There are some layoff newbies who are coming from companies and departments that have been relatively untouched in past cycles; people who seemed to think that they were untouchable.

To those poor folks I say this: Welcome!

Welcome to the world of the newly unemployed. You’ll have a couple of weeks of telling everyone you’re fine and that you’re actually glad to have been let go. It was a good thing, you’ll say. The company was on its way out, you’ll contend. Then you’ll tell yourself how glad you are that you were let go while there was still some money for a package. Then you’ll begin the process of rewriting your resume a couple hundred times trying to make the last few years of your life sound like you were curing cancer. (“Hmmm….Did I ‘interface’ or ‘liaise’ with the project budget operating unit? And was I ‘crucial’ or ‘imperative’ to the success of the Q4 Logistical Re-engineering Process?”) Oh, and just wait until you see the typo you missed before you sent it out to 200 prospective employers. Sometime after the third or fourth week you’ll discover that one of your cable channels in the upper 150’s (Is there an 80’s Channel?) runs Magnum P.I. marathons on Thursdays. At that point, you’re nearing the bottom.

But don’t worry…

Just like that “friendly” break-up you once had after college that sent you into a tailspin where you gained 25 pounds and became addicted to the original Duke Nukem, you will survive. After all, if nothing else there’s 75% of the stimulus package still waiting to be spent putting you to work on our nation’s infrastructure.

Good luck, my friend!

I ran across this factoid today on Twitter (H/T @marc_meyer): Australian courts have said distributing legal documents via Facebook is acceptable. I had no idea. After doing some additional research, I found that New Zealand (New Zealander? Zealandish?) and Canadian courts have also ruled that posting a document to a Facebook account is fine. (Link here.) US courts have not held that to be the case, but the idea that Facebook–a for-profit, American, public company run by non-elected employees with their own set of interests, ideas and agenda–should be placed in the position of distributing legal documents in any country just doesn’t seem smart to me.

I’m sure some would think that’s a little overboard; after all, why should Facebook be any different than UPS or Fedex or a bicycle messenger or a process server in distributing legal documents? In principle, I don’t disagree with that. But then I ran across this story that has received very little notice in the press. That’s right, Facebook was socked with a $9.5 million judgment in a class action suit for divulging user’s private information through its misguided (and now defunct) Beacon project. And these are the folks that should be handling legal documents?

This is in no way an attempt to single out Facebook or its employees as irresponsible or bad. Someone made a boneheaded decision and Facebook is being asked to pay for it. But the payment is being made through a civil proceeding, not criminal, so it means that consumers were responsible for policing this part of the social networking world. (Sadly, the affected class of consumers are getting next to nothing while class action attorneys, as is usually the case, are getting about a third of the judgment. Nice.)

I’m no fan of criminalizing everything, and I don’t know that a criminal case against Facebook would have yielded any better results or encouraged Facebook to rethink its privacy standards. These two cases simply underscore my growing feeling that it is up to consumers to be vigilant in monitoring their online presence and the data that is being used to define them more and more. I’m going to revisit this topic in my next post because the sheer volume of data that is collected, analyzed and distributed is mind boggling. Don’t worry, it’s not an anti-big-brother screed. In fact, I think consumers are now better positioned to understand and control their ‘data fates’ than ever before.

There’s a new sheriff in town and that sheriff is us…

(And before you send me an email that the correct usage is ‘we,’ don’t bother. I know. I’m just paraphrasing the famous saying. Relax, ok?)

Here’s an opening sentence that tells you everything you need to know about the piece that will follow it:

“No one can deny the Internet is a life-changer.”

In one sentence it says, “You are about to be treated to the blatherings of a person so confident in her opinion that she will start her piece by speaking for the entire human population.” It is straight out of a high school journalism class. (I wonder if she tossed out the original opening, something along the lines of “Webster’s Dictionary says “change” is….”)

It comes from this fluffy piece of opinion at US News. It is so very, very bad for so many, many reasons. It boils down to the shockingly new argument that (get ready!) the Internet and bloggers are (here it is!) destroying newspapers and respectable journalism! (Grab the smelling salts.)

Here’s a sample:

“[The Internet] is causing the demise of American journalism—as we know it or have known it for centuries. The Internet is single-handedly responsible for the death this year of the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, and the conversion to online publishing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor.”

Get that? The Internet is single-handedly responsible. That’s right: The Internet did it. It walked up behind the Rocky Mountain News while it was straightening a picture and shot it in the back. The Rocky Mountain News never had a chance. Shame on the Internet! (I also love the line about the centuries old history of American journalism. I can picture a young Ben Franklin being taken to task by a hard-driving editor for not have two sources for his story.)

Here’s the best part:

“[Bloggers] are the technology age’s equivalent of reporters and columnists, but without the degree of separation that used to protect readers and consumers from being targeted for commercial or political purposes, that old-fashioned edited newspapers and magazines used to (and to a limited extent, still do) provide.”

and later:

“Consumers need a filter.”

Isn’t that great? Consumers need to be protected! They don’t know when they’re being manipulated. It’s up to the sage warriors of journalistic truth to protect them.

And here’s the punchline: This wonderful insight is being written in a blog! (“Only other bloggers are unreliable. Not me!”)

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s a parody.

There are parts to this story in the Wall Street Journal that are truly tragic. No one wants to think about the utterly poor becoming utterly poorer. But the very foreignness of the Mongolian cashmere goat farmers juxtaposed with the same tendency to overextend on credit that is being seen in the American housing market makes for an interesting story. And then you get sentences like this:

“Some herders, betting on continued strong cashmere prices, borrowed more than they should have, and spent the money on the Mongolian equivalent of conspicuous consumption: motorbikes and solar panels to provide electricity for their tents.”

There you have it: Whether it’s trying to flip already overpriced condos in Miami or buying a motorbike to trek from one electricized tent to another, consumers will sometimes behave foolishly. When you get lots of them all behaving badly at once, you get a zud.

Little piece of advice: If you’re willing to make the trek, it sounds like buying depressed cashmere goats (meaning the price is depressed, not the goats themselves) might be a bargain. Hold on to them long enough and you might corner the market. I don’t know if I’m kidding.

The new content begins with a paean to my first technological love: the Mac. 26 years ago this week, Apple introduced the Macintosh. It was on such a machine (well, a Mac SE) that I first got my geek on as a graphic designer and in-house “system expert” (we had two Macs and a laser printer) at a Kinko’s. It was the dawning of desktop publishing and I loved everything about Macs. I had learned BASIC programming on clunky old school-furnished IBMs, but the Mac was everything that people say it was: cool, sleek, smart, etc. And for a time, they just got better and better.

I left Macs behind in the mid-90’s when Apple decided it wanted to suck and Microsoft made us all believe that Windows was just as good. I also didn’t have access to company-provided hardware and couldn’t afford a Mac. Looking at Wikipedia articles for this post I was reminded about how expensive Macs were (and still are). In one of the Wiki articles it says original (or maybe it was the second generation “Fat Mac”) was something like $5000 in today’s money. That seems outrageous to me now, but that was the price you had to pay for a mouse and GUI back then. (Kind of funny considering I now have to throw mice away from time to time to remove the clutter.)

So what’s the point, you ask? All the hype over the introduction of the Apple Tablet, and the subsequent announcements that other manufacturers are (again) looking to release tablet computers, has me wondering if tablets are really what the world is clamoring for. In other words, is this a Mac or a Newton? I’ll have more to say as I cogitate over the question and talk to smarter people (and non-lapsed Apple adherenets). For now, however, I’m still not convinced that a tablet computer is really all that great an idea, and if it is a great idea, that Apple really has the secret formula (design, operating system, dependability, etc.) to make one a success. (

Don’t get me wrong: I’m still excited to get a look at them, and it almost goes without saying that Apple’s designs are brilliant, but for now I’m not so sure I’m all that sold.

More to come, obviously. For now, expect additional posts on this topic, as well as links to be added later today. I’m typing as fast as I can!

Thanks for stopping by.