Chlorine Detox

Back.

I’ve been out of the blog game for a while.  Clearly.

My bad.

The link between my brain and my fingertips has been rekindled, though - largely thanks to my job search.

A recent application asked for my thoughts on social media, and as I showed them, I may as well put my thoughts here, too.  The good ole’ copy-paste.

Question One:

What do you think will be the three biggest trends in social media in 2012?

Pinterest - Pinterest offers a personal interest profile that is much richer (and commercially valuable) than Facebook’s lists of interests can ever be.  The format and content is both aspirational and actionable, inspiring ambition and motivation along with the capacity to act or purchase.  Pinterest perfectly hits the sweet spot between social networking, discovery, and product marketing.

[I may have to expand on this one later.  Pinterest as a lot going on.]

Recommendations - Search is aging quickly for a lot of verticals.  There is enough rich social data on the web for retailers and content providers to offer a more intelligent way of connecting people to the information and products they seek.  Foursquare is heading in this direction with their Explore feature, but they have a long way to go before their vision of tailored recommendations truly works.

Customer Service - Most larger companies see social media simply as a medium to broadcast their marketing messages.  Social platforms are designed for a much richer two-way experience, though, and some smaller companies are maximizing their social media presence by quickly handling customer service issues.  Being responsive and helpful with all issues on social media bypasses frustrating and impersonal support call systems and can leave a customer with a positive impression of the brand as a whole.

Question Two:

What are 2-3 brands that you think are leading the way in social, and why?

GoPro - GoPro chose to crowdsource their marketing content, encouraging their customers to circulate homemade videos through their own social networks.  The result was an organic battle of one-upmanship in the form of crazy, visually stunning stunts caught on tape.  The product message ran subtly in the background, but the effect was both aspirational and motivational.  Their social strategy is engaging, interactive, and reads as one big challenge.  How can you resist that?

Warby Parker - Warby Parker has done a great job delivering a consistent brand image through numerous social media outlets.  They have a strong visual presence including Instagram and Pinterest that showcases the Warby Parker “look and feel” rather than a simple product lineup.  You can really see who their target demographic is.  Add in the demonization of competitor Luxottica and their one-for-one charity model, and you have a social movement.  Finally, they encourage organic growth through their showrooms and try-on boxes, as prospective customers will want friends around as they try on the glasses.

TOMS - Aside from the word-of-mouth sensation that is the one-for-one charity model, TOMS does a great job integrating their many social media accounts.  Like Warby Parker, their look and message is consistent, painting a strong picture of their consumer.  The TOMS Facebook page has large and effective links to Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube, showing that they have a number of ways for their fans to interact with the company and a range of content to offer.  Finally, the TOMS Ticket to Give campaign successfully conveys the philanthropic message of the company, encourages fan participation, and is newsworthy to boot.

In other news, I have discovered Chai tea.  About 15 years late, but hey, there’s progress.  Thanks Karen Bonner.

Excess

I said I would talk about my trip to Europe, and after a bit of a hiatus, I’ve got to get it out before I forget everything.  The occasion was my cousin Carlo’s wedding.  The festivities took place around Florence, Italy (it was amazing), but this post will be about the second leg of the trip, which brought me to the Chateau’s of Bordeaux.  The excuse was that we were conducting research (due diligence- strictly professional, of course) for my family’s wine-related venture.

As a quick briefing, the Bordeaux wine industry is heavily based on the “Official Classification” of 1855 that ordered the numerous wineries of the region according to supposed quality.  The top classification attainable was and still is “Premier Cru”, of First Growth, followed logically by Second and Third Growths, and so on.  There were only a handful of Bordeaux First Growths in 1855 and little has changed since, despite varying effort, quality, and cleanliness on the part of the winemakers over the years.  France isn’t big on social mobility.

The 1855 Classifications remain sacrosanct to this day (the hold is marginally weaker in a few of Bordeaux’s sub-appellations) and function as blank checks for the lucky few who possess the coveted “Premier Cru” title.

OK the lead-up may have been long, but here’s the point: BRANDING.

While the Classification system was intended to serve as a gauge of quality, it quickly spawned one of the world’s most robust brands.  Over 150 years later, the Bordeaux Premier Cru brand is stronger than ever and any bottle wearing those letters fetches a vomit-inducing price premium.  Regardless of flavor.

I have never witnessed such clear evidence of outrageous profit margins than in Bordeaux.  The Chateau’s ranged from lavish traditional…

To garishly contemporary.

And a wild combination of the two, in the case of Cos D’Estournel, whose traditional-yet-Asian-themed facade…

Hid a neo-Asian hotel lobby…

A cellar from the Death Star…

And an awesomely random wine library straight out of an Indiana Jones set.

And Cos is only a Second Growth!  Their wine sells for a fraction of the Premiers Crus.  Here’s Cheval Blanc’s (a First Growth in Saint Émilion where the cachet of the Classifications is significantly weaker than in other appellations) brand new cellar slash modern art museum:

Compare these shining examples of excess to the flip side of the coin:

Because of the brand obsession driving French wine sales, those wineries not arbitrarily placed in the top two tiers in 1855 are suffering.  This is a teeny one-man winery we got to check out.  The conditions were awful, but the wine from here tasted better than those from the above state-of-the-art First and Second Growth facilities.

How could this be?  After 1855, these top wineries have never had to work to sell their wines.  Until very recently, there was no reason for them to keep their cellars clean or use updated equipment.  The little guys got scrappy.  Their product has to be good to sell a bottle (and at a very modest price).

The brand-over-product frenzy that has dominated the French wine industry took off in Europe with the classification system.  The next big adopter was the US.  The Europeans complained that these ignorant Americans had no idea what they were talking about and just bought labels.  Well some of us have learned (many haven’t), but next up was the Japanese and now China is the number one purchaser of Premier Cru wines.

Despite the quality of the product, the Classification branding in Bordeaux has created what I can only hope is a bubble of irrationally high demand and unnervingly high prices.  People will pay tens of thousands of dollars for a skunked, unpalatable 750ml bottle of vintage Chateau Latour wine.  Just because it says “Premier Grand Cru Classe” on the label.

Colored Lights: A Premature Post

I’m sitting at the office at 9:00pm, looking at the end of my first week as a full Gojee team member.  This has been a jam-packed short week, but I know the week doesn’t end for me on Friday night.  Quite a lot has changed since I got back from my two week long trip (thoughts on that to come), and as I sit here with an empty neon-colored table stretching out in front of me, I can’t help but feel contented—even with the mountain of work that lies ahead of me.

Today was a good day for goejee.com.  We lucked out and got a couple of good posts about the new site along with a bunch of generous mentions from some very reputable people.  This is the first real media exposure we have gotten thus far, and as a new marketing man, it’s amazing to see its impact.

So here I am, pleasantly watching the livestream of our site analytics, relishing the constantly changing flashes of colors that stream across the screen.  I hope I see many more days like today.

The 800lb Guerilla

A startup has to be scrappy and use any device it can to get the good word out into the wild.  There are quite a few powerful tools to do this, but in this already heavily clichéd “social” era, sometimes it’s best to go old school.  That’s right—we get down and dirty.

Setting aside how I may feel about being “that guy” handing out crap on the street, my real struggle is with the marketing objective.  I am torn between product advertising and simply driving unique visits.  The real battle here is between shock-value and message:  do we try to educate slash motivate or do we just want to spark curiosity?

My first reaction was to go with the former.  Our best-case scenario is that we connect, on a higher level, with true believers.  These will be young, knowledgeable connecters who will become ambassadors for our product.  These beautiful, intelligent twenty-somethings will have two million active friends on Facebook and three million followers on Twitter.  Everything they post goes viral and everyone loves them.  With users like that, our product will be a hit for sure!

Turns out it’s not too likely that we would bump into any celebrities who love to cook while we’re handing out Wet Naps glued to business cards in Union Square.

During my first few hours on the street and seeing peoples’ reactions to our marketing material, I felt stronger than ever that our shock-and-awe approach needed some context.  There was some disagreement ahead of our outing on this subject.  The line was between setting up your joke (good) and explaining your joke (bad).  To avoid the latter, we provided no context.  I will admit that this led to several awkward interactions.  I was happy for day one of guerilla marketing to be over.

The following day, however, our analytics told a different story.  Our conversion rate of cards to uniques was surprisingly strong.  While I was looking for true believers, the reality is that you just need to cast a wide net (my friends have told me this on more than one occasion with regard to girls).  Not surprisingly, guerilla marketing is a game of stats: get as many cards into as many pockets and purses as you can and a few of those people may check out and like our site.  Being based in New York, we are lucky enough to be able to skew our sampling towards a particular demographic—this is an advantage we do not take for granted.

After seeing the data, I reevaluated my position somewhat.  I still believe in inspiring motivation with a marketing campaign and I still believe in setting up a joke.  A New York Times article on Groupon’s ad copy noted that, “Every joke has a setup and a payoff…  If the setup is confusing, the payoff will never land.”  But I better understand the marketing objective of just getting people to “check it out”.  Thinking back to that day, we got a surprising number of people walking towards our displays rather than avoiding us at all costs.  In the end, the answer to the question of educational vs. shock-value marketing is in the true conversion rate—which tactic can draw the most regular users.

The long-run follow-up question I guess, is which is better to build a brand?  But that’s for another time.

One More Week…

I’ve been telling my friends and family that our web app is one week away for roughly a month now.  Everyone has been working at least as hard lately, but as we close in on a compelling product, the farther we seem to be from the finish line.

After 3.0 was designed, our engineers hustled to create a recommendation engine.  When the program was up and running, we worked to refine the results to fit our vision.  Two plus months’ work went into getting the right the output. 

Only after we launched our alpha did we consider the input.  We had forgotten to check whether the questions we were working to answer were even questions that our users were asking.

The situation reminded me of an academic building that was competed in my freshman year at Pomona College.  The Lincoln-Edmunds building was to be our new flagship: a solar powered two-part behemoth, housing several of the school’s departments.  For years it hid behind tall tarp-covered fences and only after the finishing touches were completed and the fences came down did anyone notice the blunder:  the building was in the wrong place.  Each window was where it should be and each wall was the right length and height—but the entire building, from the foundation up, was roughly twenty feet too far south.  The northeast entrance to the building was meant to line up with a prominent pathway that cut across campus, leading to an iconic fountain and finally the main dining hall.  Well it didn’t—and quite noticeably so.  For the next three months, the construction team had to tear up the old walkway and pour a new one that made the now slightly diagonal trip from Lincoln-Edmunds to Frary Dining hall.

And so we had built a wondrous thing—elegant, intelligent, and to specifications.  It was just ever-so-slightly off, and in the most fundamental way.

Now, once again, we are one week away from a product as we hurry to re-position the walkway.

Only at the end of a project do you see the many small but important flaws that had been quietly accumulating throughout.  These little kinks tend hide deep within the structure, even down to the foundation.  As a result, they can take quite a bit of time and thought to work out.

Workouts

“Going to the gym” has always been a foreign concept to me.  As an athlete, workouts have always been a means to an end.  While swimming has a much higher training-to-competition ratio than most sports, workouts always are always focused on meet performance.

To me, working out as part of a team is sort of an action-comedy.  There’s a serious story line accompanied by a colorful cast and many hilarious interactions.  We had fun, but always worked towards increasing our performance in competitions, both for ourselves and for our teammates.  We didn’t think twice about two-a-day practices because our focus was on the goal: on beating oxy, catching up to our rival, CMS, on going fast.

I always had my teammates in mind, and in turn, they kept me focused and helped to distract me from the monotony of the training.  It was a dynamic, active and colorful effort.

Working out post-sports is a much duller experience.  There is no real goal, no push, no communal experience.  “Going to the gym” feels to me like an early black-and-white silent film.  It is ‘For your entertainment’ only.  There doesn’t really seem to be a point—no real story arc.  I see me goofily messing around with some weights or trying out a treadmill in that choppy, sped-up, old-fashioned-film cadence.  My efforts are sometimes slapstick, though generally boring.

Admittedly, a lot of the problem is breaking the ice.

I finally sacked up and started going to a gym by work (thanks Gojee for paying my way!) and I will admit that some of the awfulness has passed.  Falling into the routine of going in before work a few times a week keeps me from thinking about what I am doing (tends to be a good thing).

Though I’ve grudgingly started to accept this new form of physical activity, there is no getting around its one-dimensional nature.  Sure, sure, it’s healthy or whatnot, but it still seems a bit like masturbation.  There is no goal, it doesn’t get me anywhere, and it doesn’t help anyone else out.

I guess it makes the mirror a little more attractive if you’re really into glass…

Distractions

It seems divine intervention.  Every time I try to sit down and write a post, something big comes up to distract me.  The interferences also seem to be escalating.  First it was a high school friend in town for the weekend calling about a gathering of old friends.  Next, the Egyptian revolution, then Libya.

Now the trump card:  bin Laden is dead.

And so be it.