Real Life & Second Life: One in the Same?…

I learned a new term at the Blog Business Summit 2006 – second life.

It was explained to me that we lead two lives – real life and second life. The later being the life we have on the net.

Believe it or not, I’ve been struggling with this concept since I heard it.

When I met with my CMO yesterday, he asked me “…well blog boy, how was your seminar?…”

I replied “…great, I think I’m witnessing the death of traditional marketing…“

To sum up his 30 minute explosion of baby boomer bred annoyance, he argued that traditional marketing is not dead – it is still alive and adapting and integrating with new technologies.

OK…

Then I read Steve Rubel’s Should Conferences Ban Blogging? and I reflected back on my experience at the seminar where “bloggers” were defined as “mutants”.

If that’s an accurate definition, then I’m the biggest loser geek mutant that ever attended that seminar as I am confident that I was the only person who attended all three days without access to the web and/or my laptop.

My point is this: Read Rubel’s article and look at the picture posted with it. Then consider my CMO’s statement that traditional marketing (a.k.a. in this case, real life) is simply integrating new technology. IF his statement is accurate in anyway, then maybe there isn’t a difference between real life and second life.

Maybe they are one in the same…

Blogosphere: A Faster Search?…

At the last session of the Blog Business Summit 2006, the future of blogging was “kicked” around. Robert Scoble brought up a good point regarding the current searchability of the blogosphere. Scoble stated that the search results (a) can get pretty ugly at times and should be faster. He sited the “free alcohol and sex” joke that was going around the seminar as taking too long to reach a simple search on a recent posting.

I agree with his comments, but would like to pose the question – how fast is fast? Currently with the still infant technology of RSS feeds, we can receive information as fast as it gets posted. How much faster can this get?

Obviously, the User must subscribe to an RSS feed initially – but that’s what makes his initial point all the more important.

In my opinion it’s not the speed that currently matters in the blogosphere, it is the quality of the searches that we do in our busy lives to find the right blogs to subscribe to.

It’s like what my favorite grad school professor (Marc Gertz) always used to say: “I don’t care what you know, I only care how you know what you know…“

Word of Mouth: It’s Everywhere…

On Friday Night, I found myself sitting at the African Lounge at the main terminal of SEA-TAC watching the 5th game of the World Series and enjoying a 20 oz glass of Fat Tire.At the bar sit 7 individuals including myself.

I like to listen to conversations and here I notice three.

The guy two bar stools down on my right is on YouTube apparently researching the latest goofball video while listening to his IPOD. He shares what he finds with the bartender who is checking up on him.

The guy immediately to the right of me (from Denver) strikes up a conversation with two guys from North Carolina about at “killer bar” right off I-95 just north of Florence. After 15 minutes of alcohol induced reminiscing about lost women and who know where the best Tiki Bar is, the first North Carolina guy asks Denver guy “so, what do you do?…”.

Having already established respect as the best source of beer prices North of South of the Border, Denver guy replys “I sell ‘x’ which gives businesses ‘y’…”.

“That’s interesting, me and “Bob” here are looking for someone to help us with that…”.

At that same moment, the middle-aged woman at the end of the bar giggles while feverishly pounding away on her MySpace account.

Isn’t word of mouth great?…

An Apology to Disney Fans…

I want to offer my apologies to all the Disney fans out there. I my previous post I labeled them as “freaks” and it’s rather ironic that I offer a blog about social media and word of mouth. These so called “freaks” are really just Disney evangilists in the purest sense of the word.

Disney Gift Card: What was Disney Thinking?…

Three years ago, my wife and I relocated from South Florida to Central Florida. It was a great move and I love the area. I’ve also identified two types of Central Floridians: those who visit Disney on a regular basis and those avoid it like the plague.

My family is the former rather than the latter. Trust me, I’m not one of those Mickey nuts who wear mouse ears in public and 100 plus pins. I actually saw a gentleman on Friday walking through Epcot’s France wearing a black trench coat completely covered from head to toe with Disney Pins – all the power to you buddy. If you’re happy, I’m happy – I love to see examples of product evangelism.

I appreciate and visit Disney for one reason and one reason only – they simply do EVERYTHING right. Every aspect is thought out – whether you’re taking your three year old to the Magic Kingdom, your wife to a romantic dinner at Citricos or simply catching a movie at Downtown Disney.

So I apologize to any anti-Disneyite’s out there, but I will from time to time write about my experiences because I believe they are a good benchmark for both basic customer care and hospitality overall.

Now let me get the point of this post. I turned 37 on Friday and I decided I wanted to take my family to check out Typhoon Lagoon for the morning. My wife and I recently upgraded our Annual Passes to Premium Passes which is essentially full access to all attractions – I highly recommend it.

So we arrive when the park and my wife informs me that I forgot my daughter’s bathing suit. Rather than drive back home and waste a 45 minute round trip car ride I suggested we buy her a new suit.

We end up at the main store and buy my daughter happiness in the form of a Tinkerbell bathing suit that she refuses to change out of for the rest of the weekend. At checkout, the nice cashier recommends that we take advantage of a Disney “Gift” Card.

This “all weather card” that one wears around one’s wrist is ingenious. You simply add money to a debit account and use this card for all purchases. In fact, the cashier advised us to leave our credit and ATM cards “back in the room” once we get set-up with this program – this was reinforced by the store’s Manager. We jumped at this opportunity and I saw it as one of the best customer enhancement’s Disney has come up with since the “FastPass”.

My family and I go on to enjoy Typhoon Lagoon until lunchtime where we end up moving on to Epcot to enjoy the food and wine festival. In three hours, we ended up visiting about a dozen “country” tents and enjoyed appetizer sized offers of food from around the globe. In addition, we probably made 6 additional purchases throughout the park along with a round of sodas at Typhoon Lagoon.

Guess What? – NOT ONE EMPLOYEE had heard of the Disney “Gift” Card. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, sometimes employees refused to try it – regardless, we ended up having to explain to the employee what the card was and how it worked. It was a joke and I am confident that I will not use this system again.

I think Disney has a great thing here which will allow patrons to spend more money via convenience – but the way they implemented it was unprofessional and counterproductive. I believe they lost an opportunity to turn me into an evangelist for this product rather than raving lunatic.

By the way, I ended up getting food poisoning on Friday which put me in bed for the rest of the weekend. I’m not pointing fingers, but I’m confident it was the South African “bobotie”…

Word of Mouth: An Argument…

I work in a very competitive industry – travel. It’s also an industry that has taken a lot of lumps and seen an incredible amount of change in the last decade. In on way or another I was always involved in marketing and I never understood using traditional tactics for converting customers. I has always been a shotgun approach.

But let me ask you this – the last vacation you took, how did you decide on it. Did you see a Sandals commercial or a Carnival Cruise Line commercial or even a Texas Visitor’s Bureau commercial and say “Yeah!, I doing that regardless of the cost! sign me up…“.

Chances are this may have generated some interest which was already fueled by your experience or someone else’s. Bottom line: before we invest hard earned money on the one or two vacations we take a year, we do so based on what we already know and if we don’t know it, we seek out someone we trust who does. This is WOM in it’s most simplest form.

Again, if we don’t know something, we question someone we trust about it to gather information before we commit.

Let me give you another example outside of the travel industry to prove my point. About four years ago, my wife and I were looking to purchase a new car. Personally, I’ve always liked Honda’s because they are reliable. I know this from personal experience and a lot of my friends own a Honda for the same reason.

When we went to visit my parent’s for a weekend getaway, we were surprised to see that they had recently purchased the new recently re-designed Honda CRV (remember this was 4-5 years ago). I had remembered seeing it on t.v. but the commercial really didn’t do anything for me.

My parents (people I trust) were extremely excited about their purchase (which was based on wom from some trusted friends) and were determined to show us why. My Dad is already a car “nut” and knew everything about that car. BUT, he was able to take that information a relay it to my wife and I in such away that met our needs based on our relationship.

Not only that, we were able to experience our needs through touch and feel of the product. Within and hour or so, we were converted CRV evangelists just like my parents. By Monday, our choice had been made and we were the proud owners of a new CRV!

It gets more interesting, my wife and I were spending some time with some good friends about a month later and we came to find out that they too were looking to purchase a new car. We pulled the same routine on them that may parents had and guess what? They bought the same car within a week based on our recommendations. These were people that had been devoted Toyota fans and we had just converted them (and they later converted another Toyota fan 6 months later).

Later that summer, my wife and I found ourselves in North Carolina for a family get together. We were happy to share the “smooth and easy drive of our new car” from FL to NC with anyone who would listen. Guess what? Her sister did and bought a new CRV later that week and she wasn’t even looking!

The morale of the story: don’t underestimate the power or wom. This is an extreme example but this stuff happens everyday and current technology just makes it easier and more productive. I urge anyone in a customer service field (not just the travel industry in general) to jump on this bandwagon ASAP and learn more.

By the way Honda, you owe me a new car!

The Google Gooble…

I read Cuban’s blog whenever I can. Critics will say he’s out of touch with the current state of blogging and he’s way off base on the recent Google “gooble” of YouTube – he very critical for a number of reasons. I read his blog because in any community you need to hear all sides to make progress and he definitely lives outside the bell curve.As mentioned in the title description, I came into a Product Development position at my company back in December and I was completely unaware of the power of word of mouth (wom). Given this, I was sent to San Francisco in June to attend the WOMMA Basic Training Conference #2 and I my head exploded with the current advances in wom.It was at this event that I became aware of YouTube. I was blown away when I say the “chicken mcnuggets yah’all” video. I personally dislike mcnuggets but after seeing this I was determined to make this my next feast for lunch with “ketchup and mayo…”.My point is this: Don’t get upset over the Google gooble – if they didn’t do it, someone else would have. I also understand his concerns over copy right violations and a possible end to DRM, but I think let me say this: WOM has always been here and will always be here.YouTube is a concept that I don’t think the average layperson ever saw coming much less could comprehend it’s potential 2 years ago. And this is yet another example of communication exploding over the past decade. I feel the issues he’s getting upset about are essentially mute. I don’t think anyone really can predict the future of this deal much less what copyright violations from wom will be like in 5-6 years much less, next year. IF there truly is a lawsuit storm coming, it’s out of our hands and in the courts along with new regulatory laws passed by Congress.Relax man. I see this as a good thing.