I have also found there are a lot of very smart people that are wishing to put their own blogs together. Many friends and relations have said, “I’d love to have a blog about something,” where “something” is politics, dogs, knitting or fish cookery. My advice to them? Do it. Now. There are some obvious reasons to express yourself in an online forum, such as it’s great for your psyche. Cleans out the brain, so to speak.

It’s also great for your professional development. It’s a hugely marketable skill. I have another post I’m working on about technology skills, the job market, etc., but for now realize that being proficient with designing and running a Web page shows a host of qualities that employers are looking for, even those not Web or tech-related. I’m not saying you should have a site to rival something professionally produced, but thanks to Wordpress and other WYSIWYG editors, you can create something worthwhile very easily.

The market is tough. I don’t doubt that. But those willing to market themselves well, spend some time on their “personal brand” (an overused but not worthless term) and put their creativity on display will have an easier time finding their next role.

Here is one more reason: there is a lot of real garbage out there.

I’m not one to judge, but…Well, actually, I am. Somewhere I heard a number like 4 gazillion blogs are rattling around the Interwebs these days. That’s a lot. And the 2 gazillion (?) I’ve looked at were pretty terrible. (No comments about this one!) So find your passion, fill your niche, sharpen your pencil, gird your loins and dive in. The myriad tools now available for the beginner blogger make it so very simple. Get started and maybe you can help drown out some of the noise.

Now get to it.

I wrote the following post after a particularly frustrating conversation with a fellow co-worker who had recently moved into the marketing department from an HR/training role. She was pretty certain that she knew more about marketing than anyone in the marketing department and wasn’t shy about telling us. When asked to provide some justification for her wisdom she made some mention of metrics that smelled a little fishy. It got me thinking about how often the topic of metrics comes up when I speak with other marketing people, especially the hardened ones who have been through it all.

There are a lot of people in “marketing.” There are also a lot of those people who have never once been held accountable for the failure of their ideas because they are “creatives” of some kind. That usually means they are designers or copywriters by training who have ascended to some leadership or management role. They have kitschy stuff in their offices, framed samples of their “graphic artwork” and a lexicon of “brand” words that sound vaguely important and/or meaningful. Lucky for them, they have usually been far upstream from the actual effort of getting a project off the ground on time and on budget. You know: work. Work requires adherence to certain fundamental rules, like “Don’t spend more than your budget” or “Don’t miss a deadline.” Of course, those rules are more difficult to follow when the people far upstream from the delivery, i.e. creatives, have wasted time and/or money at the beginning of a project. That puts the project managers in the bind of making things work by any means necessary.

The punchline is that project managers must show much more creativity in getting a job done than any creative person did in designing a piece that adheres rigidly to a brand architecture they probably didn’t design in the first place. (“Let’s put the corporate logo IN REVERSE TYPE! Wow!”) Sadly, such creative folk ascend to leadership roles specifically because they never have the stink of failure on them. This isn’t because they and their ideas have never failed, it’s because they are removed from the actual results of their ideas. That lot falls to the operations person trying to figure out how to get the logo made completely out of chocolate and mailed First Class…in August. When promotions are decided, management has a choice between the person who “thought outside the box” and designed the chocolate logo campaign or the operations person who failed to execute. Guess who wins.

Eventually, once those creative types do become senior management, some pesky person from Finance will ask them how they measure the success or failure of a project. That’s where they show their true creativity: They come up with something like the China Syndrome, i.e. they make it up.

I should note that I’m borrowing the phrase “China Syndrome” in this particular usage from a co-worker who told me that was the name for this particular phenomenon at IBM. It was a good name, so I’m lifting it from him. (Thanks, Aaron. There will be no remuneration.) I should also mention this has nothing to do with that terrible movie with Michael Douglas from the late ‘70’s that was instrumental in ending clean, safe nuclear power in the US. But that’s another post.

The China Syndrome is when some bright light in a marketing or sales organization looks at the total universe of potential customers and says “All we have to do is get 1% of that universe and we’ll (fill in the blank),” where the blank can be “make lots of money” or “see huge returns” or “get promoted.” It doesn’t matter what the goal is, what matters is that the universe is very large and the percentage needed is very small. That makes the goal seem so very easy to achieve. For instance, if you can capture just 1% of everyone in China, you’d have 1% of a billion people. That’s 10 million customers! (Thus, the name.) I believe that it in logic this is called a hasty generalization. (I’m no logician, so someone correct me if that is incorrect.)

This is what oftentimes passes for “metrics” or “marketing analysis.” It’s even explained away sometimes as a “back of the envelope” calculation. (I’ve never actually seen that envelope.) Unfortunately, that type of rough calculation is enough to keep a project running long enough for people to become invested in it. At that point, hopes of killing the project, even if it’s a really bad idea, become slim. It can be done, but it takes a strong person to stand tall as the snowball comes rolling inexorably downhill.

I have learned the hard way that I should be suspicious anytime someone uses a phrase like “only” in relation to a number I must achieve. I have also learned that whenever someone does a “back of the envelope” calculation, the math never shows the project is a big waste of time and money. Funny how that works.

Radian6 Brand Bowl: Go here. I’m not as clear what this one will look like in real time, but their site looks great.

Alterian SM2 Buzz Bowl. Go here. Their chart looks great. I’m looking forward to seeing how it performs in real time.

Believe it or not, marketing, as a practice, is real. It’s about more than “engagement” and “touching a customer” and “establishing a connection.” It should be able to prove its value to an enterprise. Value is best expressed in financial terms. Any value that is expressed in non-quantifiable, subjective terms like “engagement” is, in the end, too squishy to be worthwhile over the long term. It may make some consultants and speakers a lot of money to speak in those terms, and demonstrate to companies how they can “think” in those terms, but that isn’t really “business.” That’s motivation. As much as I hear that marketing isn’t about ROI anymore, I know I’ll have a hard time selling that to the powers that be. (That’s actually something I read recently on one of the “expert” blogs. I won’t link to it, because I truly think it’s one of the most idiotic statements I’ve ever read. I don’t want to drive the guy’s traffic up by a single click. Let’s just say that he describes himself as “internationally recognized” for his social media expertise. He doesn’t need my help selling himself.)

You may be asking yourself is there a point to this post or is this a simply a tirade? The point is that I believe the sun is peaking through the hype clouds. Sanity is beginning to prevail. The folks who jumped on the social media bandwagon as a way to become an overnight expert are beginning to run into the reality called data. It turns out that even social media can be measured. Who would have thought that possible? (I mean, besides everyone who actually has done any marketing and isn’t a tech guru turned social media gadfly.) At the forefront of this change are companies like Techrigy (now a part of Alterian), Radian6 and Nielsen. The tools they have developed to search through social media channels for references to brands, products, companies and such are very cool. They then score mentions for sentiment, placement, etc. and provide feedback on what the social media sphere has to say. It’s the same thing PR practitioners have always done, but automated to cover the much larger universe that encompasses social media. Their timing could not be better. The sooner companies begin using these tools the better.

I truly do not begrudge anyone any success. If a social media expert earns top dollar speaking at conferences about “Social Media 2.0” that’s great for him or her. (Slight digression here: I have a lot of respect of Tim O’Reilly, but I really do want to barf whenever I hear “two dot oh” placed after any phrase other than a software release. Mr. O’Reilly is not responsible for the proliferation of naming any online trend with 2.0, but I do wish he had never come up with the whole Web 2.0 stuff.) I wish the whole lot of them well. My advice to them is this: make your money while you can. (I’d suggest you invest in companies making social media monitoring tools!) Agencies and marketing departments have very different expectations from the channels they employ than fluffy concepts like what you profess. They expect results that can be communicated to clients or finance departments. Those results are almost always reported in data. And agencies and marketing departments are already beginning to discover the tools that convert social media results into that data. I, for one, hope it happens quickly.

I came across the Buttered Cat Paradox while doing some browsing on Wikipedia about the terminal velocity of cats.

I’m not making that up either. I really did need to know the terminal velocity of a cat. In order to make some bigger point about test designs and irrelevant statistics I was going to include an anecdote about a study that I read 20+ years ago about the survival rate of cats falling out of high-rises in New York. Mentioned in that article, and remembered by me two decades later, was that the terminal velocity of a cat is 60 mph. Heaven knows why or how I remember that fact lo these many years. I was concerned I had misremembered so was searching Wikipedia to verify that fact. Turns out it’s true. I also found information on the study itself.

The crux of the study was that cats falling from higher than around five stories seemed to have a higher survival rate than cats falling from lower floors as judged by 132 cats brought into veterinarian hospitals. The theory posited by the study was that once a cat hits terminal velocity, which requires five stories or so to achieve, it spreads out, relaxes and take the impact on its feet, thus minimizing, uh, cat-astrophic results. (groan) The obvious flaw in the research, of course, is that the cats used in the study were brought into animal hospitals. No one brings dead cats into animal hospitals, so those that perished from great heights likely never made it into the sample.

What does this have to do with buttered cats? The Righting Reflex. That’s the reflex cats have to always land on their feet, something I’ve always found to be pretty cool. According to the buttered cat paradox, the other thing that always seems to land the same way every time is buttered toast, i.e. it always lands buttered side down. The buttered cat paradox says that if you put a piece of buttered toast on a cats back, with the buttered side “out,” when the cat goes to right itself, the attractive force of the buttered toast will rotate it towards its back. This, in turn, will cause the cat to try to right itself again, and so on and on. Eventually, it is suspected that the cat and toast will end up in some kind of suspended animation, dangling in the air when the two forces reach equilibrium. (See comic left. It’s from Greg Williams, who does “WikiWorld.”)

In that little thought experiment is a perfect metaphor for much that takes place in marketing departments all over the tech world. It’s called “thinking outside the box,” or some such, and it leads to really terrible ideas parading as originality. Just combine a couple of features, some bells and whistles, and you can solve problems that weren’t even known to exist before the previous release or product. Mind you, it doesn’t matter that the bells and whistles were never meant to work together, or that the problem is more than a problem and more like a total failure, just pat yourself on the back for thinking “outside the box.”

Example: At one company I worked for, a bundled plan for service was slapped together to head off some customer attrition. It was thought to be a brilliant and bold strategic move, connecting two disparate needs and increasing customer “stickiness.” It turned out that for every customer saved to a longer contract, the company actually lost money. It would have been better to have let the customer churn. Ooops.

Lesson: Crazy ideas that succeed make great anecdotes, but most of the time they’re just crazy.

That being said, I’ve been going back through a lot of old posts about social media, and I am struck by all the praise for some marketing efforts that don’t seem to deserve it. For instance, recently a quick service restaurant ran a giveaway on their Facebook fan page. It was a pretty sizeable prize and attracted some good attention once the giveaway went viral. The company was patted on the back for increasing their fan following to several hundred thousand. Unfortunately, when the same company ran a campaign several months later aimed at those fans, asking for them to actually do something other than sign up, the campaign was a flop. Everyone knows where I’m going with this: It’s easy to attract followers when you’re giving something away, but harder when you require something in return.

As far as social media is concerned, and the self-appointed gods who rule it, it’s all about “building trust” and “creating relationships.” (Or maybe it’s creating trust and building relationships. Whatever.) You accomplish those goals, they say, by “listening to your network.” They tell you that social media is all about a two-way conversation with your connections. But what if your connections are simply saying, “Give me something. Free.” And what if that something they want you to give them is what you normally charge good money for. When do you draw the line? If all you’re doing is giving something away, at some point aren’t you either a slut or a sucker? And if you don’t give anything away, when do you cross the line to being a tease or a money-grubbing whore? (Sorry for the metaphors.)

I’m not sure I have a great answer, and that’s because I still think we’re at the front end of using social media as a productive marketing channel. I think it’s also because we’re still at the point where we’re looking at social media as some sort of distinct, special and sexy marketing channel, instead of being an integrated part of our communications strategies. Social media has the feel of something that can go viral and gain immediate attention. We assume, wrongly, that digital channels produce results quickly if done right. But attention isn’t the same as results. In that way, social media is more like traditional database and direct marketing. It takes time and effort to build up a good core database of customers and prospects, and that database has to be consistently and constantly cared for. It has to be analyzed, mined, tracked and cleaned. There is no quick way to do it. Anyone who believes there is will find out how fickle those followers and fans are when they find that the freebies have dried up.

After all, if social media is all about building solid relationships, and for all my criticism of the self-proclaimed experts who say so, I believe it is (though that’s hardly the earth-shaking revelation many of those experts believe it to be) Solid relationships, as any good touchy-feely couples therapist will tell you, are based on trust. And trust, those same folks will tell you, is the product of consistency and time. When people know you will consistently do the same thing over and over, they make the assumption that you will continue to do the same thing the next time. That works for people and companies.

I’ll be coming back to the campaign I mentioned above, because in many ways I think it actually had a negative effect at the end of the day. For now, suffice it to say that viral campaigns that quickly increase social media networks may make for a good story. They may make the marketing people who dreamed them up feel great. But if I can stick with my previous metaphor, in the end, are those hook-ups healthy relationships?

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.