2009 August | Brandtailers

Archive for August, 2009

Aug

by Brandtailers

If you missed it (and I admit I did), United Breaks Guitars is a YouTube music video of a song that a guy wrote about United Airlines breaking his guitar and the terrible customer service he received afterward

Lots of people have seen the video, in fact the guy is now selling the song on iTunes.

In a recent Media Hacks Podcast (great podcast, by the way), they talked about the United Breaks Guitars incident, from the point of view of did it make any changes to United? Probably not. There’s a lot of news out there and even something that goes viral doesn’t reach everyone. And they were bemoaning the fact that the big corporation could just ignore the bad social media press and it would eventually go away.

I think they are looking at it from the wrong side. It doesn’t surprise me that it didn’t create any change in United. United is a huge company that doesn’t really seem to care about their customers, that’s the point the video made.

But I bet it made a huge difference to the guy who made the video (Dave Carroll, by the way) and his band. They took this negative incident and turned it into a positive for themselves by using the skills they have. That’s the potential of the internet. And it’s a pretty funny music video, though maybe a little long for my taste.

Tags: internet, itunes, Social Media, united
Posted in Social Media | Leave a Comment »

2 Responses to “Take Away from United Breaks Guitars”

Bert Hermanus says:

February 7, 2010 at 1:36 pm

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Audrie Tease says:

February 8, 2010 at 2:40 pm

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Aug

Intimidated by social media marketing? Don't be.

by Brandtailers

I added it up. I now spend an average of 32 hours a week online, mostly after hours (thus the bloodshot eyes) and mostly in my own self-made school of learning from the social media gurus who kindly share so much great information at no cost. I eat it up. And yet, with almost every blog post I devour or podcast I listen to, I am constantly intimidated by all that I don’t know. Compared to Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Mitch Joel, and CC Chapman (just to name a few) I am in social media pre-school.

But that’s OK. Because I still share their greatest power – and so do you. It’s the understanding that truthfulness, transparency and sincerity work. That’s really it. They know it, they preach it, and they’re creating some of the greatest business success stories in history with it.

How we ever went so far away from truth in marketing and advertising, I’ll never know. But with 28 years in the business I have to admit I’ve probably donated to the dark side. In fact, I can clearly recall conversations with clients over the years where transparency was considered too risky and, besides, did we really need to be sincere when we had (insert celebrity name here) doing our next commercial?

No more.

Thanks to too much media, too much razzle-dazzle, and too much abuse of consumer trust, those days are long gone. We’ve come full circle back to a wonderful place that is the nucleus of social media’s marketing power.

So next time you feel overwhelmed by all you’re hearing, reading and seeing about social media, don’t fall into the insecurity trap of “I don’t know code so I’ll never understand Social Media”. Go to your gut. Think of a world that does business by sharing the truth. Use that as your foundation for learning. Everything else will fall into place.

Tags: Marketing, Social Media, transparency, trust
Posted in Automotive Marketing, Social Media | Leave a Comment »

Aug

Weekly Links and Notes

by Brandtailers

How to Write an About Me Page

My least favorite page on a website to write, but a very important one, as this blog entry explains. This also applies to writing your facebook or twitter profile page or any profile page, for that matter.

Link Building Tactics 101, Part 2

Second part of a series on building links. This one talks about writing articles and where to submit them, also some tips on using twitter for link building.

A Brief and Informal Twitter Etiquette Guide

Good info from Chris Brogan and his friends.

SEO? That Sounds Like Work

It is work. There isn’t a magic wand you can wave that will give you good results in the search engines. You have to have stuff on your site that people are looking for. Just like using social media for marketing. It’s easy if you have something worthwhile to give to people.

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

Very cool interactive graph of how american residents spent their time in 2008 from a survey of thousands of people.

Tags: internet, links, SEO, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in SEO, Social Media, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

2 Responses to “Weekly Links and Notes”

Jay Politano says:

February 6, 2010 at 1:09 pm

To market in conditions of quality rather than cost, and in order to specialise consequently, you need to pursue the common format of the 4 Ps marketing plan. That is, Price, Product, Place and Promotion manifestly you know the serious attributes of the product, and the cost, but for place you should think about the type of mass who are willing to pay over 4x price of competing production whereas the inferior option may be sold where accent is on cost, your product will be suited to places/distributors where the clients will be willing to pay for high-performance. Thank you for this article! I’ve just acquired a absolutely incredible news site about seo advertising Try it!
Tom Brite says:

February 13, 2010 at 4:01 pm

yo this blog doesn’t displaying properly. I am utilizing Internet Explorer and windows xp. Any Help?

Aug

Two Nearly Worthless Numbers: Twitter Followers and PageRank

by Brandtailers

People (especially CEO’s it seems) love numbers. I suppose it’s a quick way for us to see who’s better, faster, stronger, etc. Unfortunately, the tangled web that is the world of social media on the internet has few hard and fast numbers and the numbers we do have are pretty much meaningless.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given web stats to a client and they’ve looked at the unique visitors number and asked me, “Is that a good amount?” It all depends. Compared to Amazon.com, probably not, but we’re not competing with Amazon. I’m relieved that most of the people writing about web analytics now admit that the page view & unique visitors numbers are meaningless on their own.

Here are a couple of other numbers you can safely ignore: Twitter Followers and Google Page Rank.

Twitter Followers

Twitter is the new, bright shiny object. Seems like everyone is on it and one of the numbers easily available for all to see is number of followers. Seems like more = better, right? Not really. What are you trying to do on Twitter? Are you trying to influence millions (perhaps start a new religion)? Then more followers is better. Are you doing research into who’s talking about your product? Then who cares who follows you. Are you trying to become an authoritative voice in your field (usually social media)? You need followers. Are you giving your company a presence where you can make announcements? Well, it might be nice if someone is listening, but Twitter is searchable, so those announcements will become part of the web.

PageRank

This one’s a little more obscure, but you’ll see it thrown around when talking about SEO. I’ve always been a big suspicious of it, but that may be because I tend to work with smaller websites. We rarely even show up on PageRank. What is it, you ask? It’s a way to measure a page’s popularity and authority on the web. A number created by Google that may reflect whether one site ranks higher on a search result than another site. Note that I said ‘may,’ as with everything with Google search algorithms, we’re all guessing here.

There is one time when PageRank does matter: if you’re selling links from your site to others or getting links from other sites. The ‘juice’ those links have is probably affected by the site’s PageRank.

Other than that, it’s much more important to actually look at where your site ranks for your targeted keywords (as many SEO experts have said and keep saying).

Oh, and by the way, it’s not called PageRank because it ranks pages, but because it’s named after Larry Page, at least according to the Wikipedia entry on PageRank.

Tags: google, internet, SEO, Twitter
Posted in SEO, Social Media, Twitter | Leave a Comment »

Aug

How Not to Run a National Rebate Program

by Brandtailers

cars

Most of you reading this know Brandtailers expertise includes extensive automotive marketing. That being said, I humbly defer to our level of industry knowledge when I say, “Wow, the fed sure knows how to screw up a rebate program…even ones they create!”

If you’re not up to speed on the latest federal government fiasco because you’d rather read the obituaries than the automotive trades (actually there hasn’t been much difference between them this year), here’s the short version of what’s happened so far with the “Cash for Clunkers” program.

After eight months in Congress, Cash for Clunkers gets approved. Obama signs it. Three weeks later (last week) it launches. It gives $3,500 or $4,500 rebates to consumers trading in eligible clunkers for eligible fuel efficient vehicles (Don’t get me started on where the money is coming from because I don’t want to use that kind of language).

The auto industry finally has something strong to offer. Within 72 hours car sales are going crazy. Dealers are gladly taking clunkers in return for federally subsidized rebates. The plan is designed so that the dealer can cover the rebate amount for the consumer and, after submitting the necessary paperwork, get reimbursed by the government. Uh, oh.

The fed sets up one website for the dealers to submit their reimbursement paperwork – about fourteen pages per sale that has to be uploaded, one at a time. You can guess what happens next. The system overloads, the site slows to a crawl, dealers get timed out, the site crashes time and time again. It ends up taking hours per sale, that is, if the dealer is lucky enough to get through the process at all. In less than four days a program designed to last four months is in chaos.

The NHTSA (National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration) is in charge of the program’s administration. They panic appropriately and, after estimating that less than 10% of actual sales have been processed, they send out an emergency alert halting the program. Their assumption is that the one-billion dollars in federal funding is already gone. Meanwhile an estimated 225,000 vehicles have been sold, with millions, and millions, and millions of dollars fronted by the dealers who assume they will be getting the money back. I’m amazed we didn’t hear about the highest number of heart attacks in under one hour when that alert went out.

So where does it sit now? Well, the House generously passed a quick $2 Billion financial increase to the program last Friday. Then they left on vacation for five weeks. They told dealers, “We’ll cover anything you SUBMIT through Tuesday, August 4th at midnight. But after that we make no promises until the Senate approves the increase.” Meanwhile dealers are left trying to explain this debacle to customers, while they hold their breath to see if they’ll actually get back all the money they fronted on the customers behalf. If the program fails to deliver its promise to the dealers, there will be an all new level of bloodbath in the automotive industry. For once in many peoples lives, it’s time to feel sorry for the car dealer.

The moral of the story? It’s the one we already knew – government and cars don’t mix.

Tags: Automotive Marketing, Cars.gov, Cash for Clunkers, NHTSA, rebate
Posted in Automotive Marketing | Leave a Comment »

One Response to “How Not to Run a National Rebate Program”

Cory O'Connor says:

August 16, 2009 at 3:43 pm

Much to think about here. I had no idea how this program worked (I guess I had my head in the obits) and certainly didn’t understand the debacle it had become. Thanks for the clarity.