Churbuck.com

Sony BRAVIA – The Advert

Check this out:

Our latest TV ad – featuring massive paint explosions – took 10 days and 250 people to film. Huge quantities of paint were needed to accomplish this, which had to be delivered in 1 tonne trucks and mixed on-site by 20 people.

Simon Dumenco – AdAge

This ought to be fun. I contributed some dogs to Forbes in my day, but nothing that would make a gallery of horrors.

Rosie, July 2001
“Staph is no laugh!” with the subhead “Rosie writes about the nasty infection that could have killer her”

To this day I’m thankful Rosie didn’t have, like, a really bad yeast infection.

RED HERRING | Lenovo Compiles NBA Stats

I know nothing about sports marketing, but Lenovo has just announced its partnership with the NBA.

“The NBA will regularly showcase Lenovo’s technology during its games with an array of computers deployed courtside to compile statistics for more than 1,300 NBA games throughout the season and the playoff matches, including points, rebounds, and assists.

“The numbers on the Lenovo computers at courtside will be crunched to produce the Lenovo Stat, a plus or minus number that shows the point differential for when a player, or combination of players, is in the game and the effect they have on the team as a whole.

The NBA will then publicize the statistics on TV and on a dedicated section of its web site after each game.”

Introduction

Technology has enabled customers to dramatically change their attitude towards marketing. As a result, they are tuning out in increasing numbers and talking back. Customers are shifting massively their entertainment and information consumption away from traditional media to the new web space.

Marketers are responding by shifting their advertising to web properties, but online advertising is struggling to gain trust. According to a recent Forrester survey of US households, only 6% trust search engine ads and 2% online banner ads. Customers trust themselves and each other in influencing their perception of a brand. Yet few marketers have embraced blogging, although it supposedly enables a more personal and two-way interaction with the brand.

So does blogging matter? All of us are senior marketing executives in established corporations but we also share a common passion for blogging. At the initiation of Eric Kintz at Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com/blogs/kintz), we decided to all get together to share our thoughts about the opportunities and challenges of this new marketing frontier.

Join the conversation.

• David Armano – Creative VP – Digitas – Logic + Emotion (http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/ )
• Peter Blackshaw – CMO – Nielsen Buzz Metrics – Consumer Generated Media (http://notetaker.typepad.com/cgm/ )
• David Churbuck – VP Global Web Marketing – Lenovo – Churbuck.com (http://www.churbuck.com/wordpress/ )
• Dan Greenfield – VP Corporate Communications – EarthLink – Bernaisesource (http://bernaisesource.blog.com/ )
• Eric Kintz – VP Global Marketing Strategy – Hewlett-Packard – Marketing Excellence (www.hp.com/blogs/kintz)
• Will Waugh – Senior Director, Communications – ANA – Marketing Maestros (http://ana.blogs.com/maestros/ )

#1 – PR and Blogging – A Love Story or Peaceful Coexistence

Dan Greenfield is vice president of corporate communications at EarthLink. His personal blog http://bernaisesource.blog.com explores the intersection of new media, public relations and journalism. He lives in Atlanta, GA.

Depending upon your perspective, bloggers and PR practitioners are either a couple in the early stages of a promising romance or Cold War adversaries seeking peaceful coexistence. To be sure, corporate blogs (official) and employee blogs (unofficial) and PR are fundamentally aspects of corporate communications. Ideally, they both inform, engage and help shape a company’s brand and reputation. On the other hand, they appear to be working at cross purposes.

Traditionally, PR has followed time-honored practices to reach mainstream media reporters — press releases, press conferences, message points, and media training. It is centralized, formalized, and top-down. PR rolls up into marketing or corporate and allows you greater control of the message. PR is measured, and it is mediated. PR speaks through a media filter to reach its audience. At its best, it can cost effectively extend corporate positioning and garner tremendous good will.

Blogging is everything that PR isn’t supposed to be. Blogs are conversations between company and customer. They are decentralized and informal, based on practices being created as we speak. Employee bloggers have a great deal more freedom. Their comments are not market tested and rarely reviewed beforehand by employers. Adhere to disclosure policies and provide a disclaimer, and you are more or less on your own. Blogging is not for the weak of heart in companies where management is uncomfortable with unpredictability, informality and transparency. Done right, blogging can help humanize a company. When employees ignore the rules, however, blogging can become a nightmare for the legal and HR departments.

Despite their differences, the cold reality is that blogging and PR complement each other. Companies are looking to find new ways to reach media saturated consumers who are tuning out more traditional forms of communication. With blogging, PR is no longer beholden to traditional media to legitimize a story. Corporate blogs can be used for the “long tail” of news that does not warrant a press release (or would not get picked up). And because real estate in cyberspace is infinite, you can escape the time or space restrictions of a news broadcast or publication. At EarthLink, for example, we have used our blog to make announcements and pre launch products to generate awareness prior to issuing a press release. We have also used our blog to address customer concerns.

Unlike the one way communication of a press release, a blog posting is two way, allowing for comments and feedback. As such, blogging lets companies personalize the news. It provides a platform for individual perspective and permits an informal tone that may be “inappropriate” for a more traditional news story. Blogs are more about opinions than just the facts. But that’s ok. People can contextualize the information and adjust their expectations accordingly.

We are living an age where boundaries are collapsing, definitions are changing and roles are combining. Blogging and PR need each other, belong with each other, even though they can sometimes appear to be working against each other. I don’t think blogging will replace PR, especially when the news is financial or material in nature. As in life, there is always room for both formality and informality. The key is to understand when each is appropriate.

#2 – Blogging and the “new influencers”

Eric Kintz is VP, Global Marketing Strategy at Hewlett-Packard. He authors a corporate blog – Marketing Excellence www.hp.com/blogs/kintz that explores innovation in marketing and the impact of new trends such as web 2.0. He is based in Palo Alto, CA.

The blogosphere has disrupted the economics of publishing, dramatically lowering the costs of content creation (most bloggers are not paid), content production (free blogging platforms) and circulation development (free links by other bloggers). This has allowed in turn a micro-segmentation of customer markets that was not economically viable in traditional publishing business models and the rise of new influencers, who are closer to those markets and are in the best position to appeal to their specific needs. As Paul Gillin highlights in his new book on the New Influencers, marketers have become fixated on big influencers in the second part of the twentieth century: national newspapers, broadcast TV networks and star radio personalities. Now the pendulum is swinging back and marketers should start paying attention to bloggers-influencers.

The Wall Street Journal relates a great example of this new trend with the emergence of influential fashion bloggers, who are now getting invited to Fashion Week. They cite the example of Pamela Pekerman at Bagtrends (http://bagtrends.blogspot.com/ ) and her influence on trendy bag purchases. A publication targeted at fashion bags would not have been economically viable in a traditional publishing model, but Bagtrends reaches a focused customer segment, which appeals to the organizers of Fashion Week. Similarly leading bloggers will influence brand perceptions and purchases through their recommendations: case in point, Guy’s detailed car recommendations (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/08/gadget_week_rev.html ), read by hundreds of thousand of readers (he is a top 50 blogger).

This will require traditional marketers to develop new skills and a solid understanding of the blogosphere. Marketers will need to identify first the new key blogger-influencers in their space, using tools like Alexa or Technorati, and treat them more and more like some of the other influencing constituencies such as analysts or journalists. However, this can prove to be more difficult to do than for traditional influencers as levels of blogging influence can move in either direction very quickly, for example when a blogger stops posting or when a new blog emerges and gains immediate momentum. It requires constant monitoring of the blogosphere to detect new trends. Marketers will then need to develop relationships with these bloggers from inviting them to traditional offline events, to giving them access to products or engaging in blogging discussions with them.

#3 – The role of blogging in the changing world of advertising

Will Waugh is Senior Director, Communications – ANA. His blog is ANA Marketing Maestros (http://ana.blogs.com/maestros/) He is based in New York City.

Corporate blogs are on the rise. Marketers on the sidelines are asking ANA if they should enter the blogosphere; others are in preparations to launch in to the space. Some marketers, particularly in the B2B space, have blogs deeply entrenched in their integrated campaigns.

The level of involvement and engagement with blogs in the business space is considerable. Any marketer in the B2B space who does not have an accessible blog should seriously consider applying the resources necessary. What is the time requirement? It depends how you measure and does that include time spent reading and surfing the blogosphere? Or is that in writing posts, responding to comments and skimming a few select blogs from your reader? Maybe a couple hours? In fact, the manpower investment is inconsequential, particularly in a mid to large size company that loses hundreds of hours of productivity to smoke breaks.

More and more advertisers (B2B and B2C) see the blogosphere as a must in their integrated plans. The utilization of blogs is critical, particularly in a growing world where social currency is more and more important. They are powerful communication and business tools which can connect with a variety of audiences for your brands/products/services. These audiences range from core customers to prospects to influencers to investors.

While some might dismiss blogs as another fad that will eventually be rendered irrelevant by the next big thing, all signs point to blogs’ permanence. Right now they are one of the most cost effective tools you can use to reach influencers who will recommend you to others.

#4 – The role of blogging as part of an integrated web strategy

David Churbuck is Vice President, Global Web Marketing at Lenovo. David authors a personal blog http://www.churbuck.com/wordpress/

Justifying the presence of a corporate blogging strategy can extend beyond the usual “Cluetrain” sentiments of entering into a conversation with one’s markets and customers. Looking at a corporate blog or blogs in the wider context of an organization’s overall web strategy can yield some interesting benefits if applied tactfully and with basic measurement.

In context, a blog is an efficient way for a corporation to quickly publish onto the Internet and through a syndication pipeline, messages that may need rapid dissemination or a more personal voice than the corporate online edifices represented by so-called traditional web sites. Taken as a “light” content management system, blogs can be regarded as loosely associated sites that can have a strong effect on the organization’s primary web presence.

In terms of functionality, the primary differentiation between a blog and a standard site is the ability for the audience to comment and engage. Measuring that engagement on a classic ROI metric is nearly impossible, but some discussion is emerging on the proper ratio of postings to comments. Some bloggers attract more than 100 comments per post, but a ratio of three comments to every post seems healthy for a relatively new blog. That ratio is an excellent measure of engagement, one of the primary benefits held up by advocates of corporate blogging.

There is an interesting side effect of blogs which has been exploited nefariously by “splogs” and “link farms” – and that’s the beneficial lift a blog can bring to another web page through links to that page. Simply put, a blog can be a useful addition to one’s search engine optimization strategy, but if done primarily for lifting a page’s organic rank in search results, can quickly turn into an exercise in blog gaming and result in penalization by the major engines, or worst, a loss in faith by the audience who may regard the blog as little more than a lever to improve page rank.

#5 – Drive Harmony in Conversational Touchpoints

Pete Blackshaw is Chief Marketing Officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics (formerly Intelliseek), a leader in measuring and analyzing consumer-generated media (CGM), which includes over 40 million blogs. Pete authors blog entitled ConsumerGeneratedMedia (www.consumergeneratedmedia.com). Earlier, Pete founded PlanetFeedback.com (www.planetfeedback.com), a CRM intelligence portal, and co-led P&G’s first interactive marketing effort.

Whenever I’m asked by brands whether they should initiate an external blog, I always come back with the two simple requests:

- Call your 800 number

- And look into the mirror

The biggest risk for brand in initiating corporate blogs is creating what I’ll call “touch-point discontinuity.” Advocates for blogs (I am one of them), talk a mean and persuasive game of customer intimacy, community, engagement and so-called “participation.” The problem is that that vision is often at extreme odds with the company or brand’s existing listening infrastructure: consumer affairs, the call center, feedback forms, online surveys. What we need to avoid with consumers, at all cost, is coming across as though we’re speaking through two mouths. So many of the companies and brands waxing poetic about the “conversational” attributes of corporate blogging are divorced from everyday consumer listening protocols in their own backyard (http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3484316).

The disconnect stems in part from schizophrenia in corporate operating structures (http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3528906). The marketing department is typically divorced from consumer affairs and customer service; even worse, there are often competing reward and incentive structures around managing consumer attention. Most customer service departments are rewarded for minimizing consumer attention, while the pro blogging community (derived from marketing and PR and digital strategy circles) usually sings an enticing tune of attention cultivation and recruitment. This can create difficult disconnects, and not so insignificant spending inefficiencies.

In fairness, one could argue that isolated corporate blog initiatives grounded in meaningful participation and “conversation” can help catalyze, ignite, or inspire impenetrable brand bureaucracies into getting to a better “conversational” place overall. But the principle of consistency still holds: you can’t sing through too many mouths in the eyes of your consumers. Consistency matters. Consistency drives credibility.

Here we need to take a step back and reflect on actual blogger behavior. Bloggers not only like to be “first to know, first to tell” but there have exceptional radar when it comes to spotting disconnects, discontinuities, and outright inconsistency. Corporations put themselves at risk of external criticism by allowing incompatible silos of activity endure too long. Bloggers notice. The media and financial analysts harvest cues and tips from bloggers.

This is one reason why I think consumer-affairs is a very smart starting point for corporate blog initiatives, and why the approach Dell Computer (Full Disclosure: my company has worked with Dell and other computer/electronic companies) is taking with the Direct2Dell blog (http://notetaker.typepad.com/cgm/2006/07/in_this_first_t.html) – after an onslaught of negative buzz over customer service and one particularly bad experience with one of the web’s most prolific bloggers — is a smart one. It’s certainly not the path of least resistance — the bloggers out there are holding Dell to a very high standard of expectations — but it has high potential to drive more consistent cultural change across the organization, and bring powerful new learning to the CRM operation. Laurent Flores hit these points exceptionally well in his Customer Listening blog (http://customerlistening.typepad.com/customer_listening/).

At the end of the day: we need present ourselves consistently across all consumer touchpoints. (http://notetaker.typepad.com/cgm/2006/10/whats_the_bigge.html). Blogging is a great way to put a fresh new face on a corporate structure, but the rest of the organization can’t be too far behind. As corporate leaders, we need to develop the right strategies and tactics to ignite and catalyze positive change leveraging blog tools and methods while keeping the rest of the organization in tow. What’s most needed right now is a holistic vision and discipline around what I term “Listening-Centered Marketing” (http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623564) which presumes from the get-go consistency across all consumer touchpoints.

#6 – Creativity, Innovation + Blogging

David Armano is Creative VP at Digitas. David authors a personal blog Logic + Emotion http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/

Blogging is becoming a powerful tool in the creative process. Here are some of the ways blogs can be used in regards to creative ideation, insights and marketing
1. Instant feedback from a qualified network of peers
One of the things I’ve experienced while blogging is the ability to solicit feedback from a diverse group of peers who offer invaluable insights, The process is simple, if I have an idea—I put something together in a format that people can relate to. Then I post it on the blog. The interesting stuff happens in the comments area—but I also get e-mails. In a short amount of time—I am able to test, validate and refine my ideas. The next step is to post the iteration of the idea and see where it goes. Blogging acts as a collaboration tool in some ways and the collaboration can spill over into other peoples blogs as well.

2. A digital journal, scrapbook and sketchpad
Looking back at my blog after nearly eight months, I realize that in addition to building a community and gaining momentum—I have created a the ultimate digital sketchbook for myself. In it, I can easily recall thoughts, images, and comments not to mention links. It’s all been documented. I can pull it up on any computer and even use search tools to track down something I am looking for. So it’s portable as well. Blogging is a great way to document your creative process for future reference for say, writing a book.

3. The ultimate marketing and brand challenge
Anyone who runs a successful blog should consider themselves a marketer even if they are not. The reason for this is simple. The blogoshphere is filled literally millions lf blogs—over five and a half million and growing. That’s a lot of noise and clutter. It’s not very different from the traditional marketing challenge which entails developing content and experiences that break through clutter and connect with the consumer. And further, most influential bloggers act as “personal brands” meaning that they connect with their readers on a personal if not emotional level and foster “brand” affinity and loyalty. So if you’ve been able to do this a blogger, then you’ve learned something about the meaning of brands and relationships.

Of course there is more, but these are some of the biggies. For me personally, blogging has opened up the floodgates of creativity and insight. It’s a highly interactive way to share ideas, educate and be educated in the process.

Seven Steps to Creating a Data Driven Decision Making Culture. » Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

I’m sorry I missed last week’s eMetrics conference in Washington, D.C.. Avinash Kaushuk presented and posted the highlights on his blog, Occam’s Razor. There are some strong insights here, especially useful as metrics/analytics come under my management in the weeks to come.

“Web Analytics is “rear view mirror” analysis, by the time you get the data, even in real time, it is already old. This complicates things quite a bit. In order to get ahead don’t wait until someone stops by asking for a report. Get ahead of the game. Attend strategy and operational meetings. Be aware of what the upcoming changes are to the site or your campaigns or acquisition options. Before you are asked have a plan to analyze the impact and proactively present results. You will win kudos and you would, because of who you are, have provided better analysis than what might have been asked for (or worse they might just keep doing stuff and never know if it works).”

Just returned from watching my daughter row in her second Head of the Charles Regatta. She rows for The Brooks School, my alma mater, and is a US National rowing champion in the women’s fours. There was much anticipation for today’s race as she is being courted and recruited by college coaches.

A “head” race is a form of rowing invented by the British which permits a huge number of boats to compete — against the clock — on a narrow river. Boats line up in order of their bow numbers, and cross the starting line at 15 second intervals, racing upsteam to a finish 3 miles, or 5000 meters away. Passing other boats is a good thing. Being passed is a spirit crusher. The best places to watch are the curves and bridges where some magnificant crashes take place.

My daughter’s boat started 12th in the Youth Women’s Fours, but it’s too soon for an official result and finished 38th out of of 50. Not good. But they had a blast.

Video to follow once Adobe Premier finishes rendering the clips. Video was a failure. Out of focus and tons of wind noise over the microphone.

I did not row, having missed most of the summer training season due to May’s bike accident. Also, entries in my event — Senior Master Singles 40+ is very competitive and come down to the luck of the draw. Next year perhaps. This is a very good fall event and one I miss, having rowed in it about a dozen times since the early 70s.

This is what happens if you chew your butt too much. They break out the shaver and turn you into the mythical terpsicore — half Terrier-half reptile — even better with the Elizabethan lampshade around the neck.

HOCR – 10.22

Cotuit – 10.23

RTP – 10.24-10.26

Cotuit – 10.27

I’ll be hanging around the Northeastern Univ. boathouse and watching from the bridge by the Cambridge Boat Club. 508 360 6147 if you want to connect. My daughter’s boat is 12th off the line at 10:08 — I probably will be Cape Cod bound by noon.

The Third Moment of Truth

Pete Blackshaw is smart:

“Take the idea of opening up literally: open the brand door and put out a friendly welcome mat. Make every consumer who knocks on the door feel important and empowered. Co-create a response in the form of an answer, an acknowledgement, a thank you, a solution, or, in some cases, a form of compensation for their willingness to share their ideas and suggestions with you. Do this even if there’s a wee bit of incremental cost in making the effort. Trust me, it’s more efficient than the way we throw paid media at consumers, and it targets efficiently against influencers.”

Content: Quality vs. Clicks « Magnosticism

Rob O’Regan is bemoaning the decline of editorial standards in a click-driven world. I hear him, I commented over there about what’s driving it. But it occurs to me that good content is rising to the top. I’d point at zeFrank as an example of excellence in emerging media or GigaOm. The victims in this world are in traditional media who can’t get beyond the dying page view model.

Excellence lives, but it’s gone freelance.

As any reader of this blog who uses IE will attest, I could care less about Microsoft Internet Explorer as indicated by the sad state of this blog’s WordPress template and the breakage that occurs when the right sidebar gets lumped at the bottom of the page. If I cared I’d fix it.

And I don’t care. In fact I have little interest anymore in cross-browser compatibility. This is a sad commentary on how selfish I have become in my singular view that world needs to be using FireFox. When I run across perfectly intelligent users who were on past versions of IE, and try to demonstrate how to use - to open links in a tab, only to see nothing happen I throw up my hands and question how anyone can operate without tabs.

So, someday soon my Windows Updater is going to suck down IE 7 and I’ll look at it, but I certainly don’t feel compelled to rush to Microsoft’s site to download a copy manually. For a page designer/usability geek, IE needs to be their primary interface for page checking; for me, as a selfish/self-centered user and operator, Firefox will continue and I look forward to the release of 2.0

1. Hope they say your name before they ask you a question. If they don’t, be completely honest and say “Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”
2. Set your audible “keyword” filter. Me, whenever the words: “web” “blog” “online” and “interactive” come across, I start paying attention.
3. Don’t watch funny video clips or anything with an audio track.
4. Use a headset so you don’t nuke your neck.
5. Don’t jump into the conversation unless you really need to. You usually will be restating a point that you weren’t listening to. Answer questions only.
6. Use instant messaging to other participants to get caught up if you lose the thread.
7. Hit mute if you need to visit the bathroom.
8. Have no dogs in the room with you. They will always bark when you go off of mute.

eBay.co.uk: Limited Edition Ronaldinho Cardboard Cut Out (item 250040603989 end time 26-Oct-06 15:00:00 BST)

My buddies in the UK are using eBay as a marketing play. Kind of cool – you get to bid on a cutout display of Brazilian football wizard Ronaldinho, proceeds go to Unicef, and we get a little marketing message in the auction description.

Bid away, but this is for UK delivery only.

I was approached by a headhunter two weeks ago recruiting an “editorial” manager for a venture backed company that had accumulated a large pile of domain names. The business plan was this: take advantage of the eight to ten percent of internet searches that occur not in the search box at Google, Yahoo, Ask or MSN, but directly in the URL bar of the browser and deliver a page with some “lite” editorial and a ton of links purchased by small businesses seeking people associated with the typed in term.

We’ve all hit them, especially when mis-typing a URL. The domain squatters and “seagulls” that collect domains build pages that either offer the domain for sale or cover it with links as part of an affiliate marketing program or existing paid search inclusion such as AdSense. This, to my thinking, is the bottom of the barrel in online marketing, similar to the bandits who played the 900 number game in the 90′s.
Now, according to today’s New York Times, the model has grown up thanks to the likes of Demand Media (founded by the ex-CEO of MySpace) and Oversee.net (the subject of the Times article), and Marchex’s purchase of the Name Development Company. Given the ease of scooping up expired domain names from the registrars, it’s a minor investment to accumulate a portfolio of domains, map them to loosely related editorial, and then plaster the pages with paid links.

This strategy works on a couple levels. First, it works on an SEO basis by creating link farms within a network, juicing the page rank of the network as long as the engines don’t catch on and penalize it. Second, “lite” editorial models are cheap. Splogs are the extreme side of this game, scraping other bloggers’ content and passing it off as their own.

The downside is this plays to the absolute bottom of the foodchain in terms of user intelligence. It assumes that one out of ten users are too ignorant or rushed to be bothered with a Google search and will use the address slot in their browser to type in “www.dogshampoo.com” or “www.beachvacation.com” in the hopes of satisfying their desires. It’s not dumb business to play on people’s natural proclivity to take a shortcut, nor did anyone go broke underestimating consumer intelligence, but …

As the Times point out, this is the direct mail business grown up and gone digital. Instead of hoping one out of a hundred envelopes will get ripped open and acted on, this hopes that one search out of a gazillion is an address typed into the right domain at the right time. I suppose it’s great for small businesses, but it smacks of domain squatting and pop-ups without the pop-up.

The only rational comment in the Times article (which is pretty naive in my opinion), was this:

“A longtime player in online commerce sees an evolutionary pattern. “The world of search engine optimization and marketing is very crowded, with players big and small looking for revenue opportunities,” said Ian Chaplin, of Galloway & Chaplin Capital, a founder of several businesses including Red Envelope, a gift site, and BidShift, a hiring exchange for hospitals and nurses and other medical personnel. Ultimately, Mr. Chaplin says, the “only sure winners will be Google and Yahoo and other major search engines.” “

I agree the engines are the ultimate winners, and, in theory, the biggest threat to the gulls should they decide to change the rules.

One of my favorite expressions, brought to me by my larger-than-life stepbrother, is “He/She gets the joke.”

It denotes whether someone is tuned to the same radio station, one step ahead, connecting the dots. I love it when my boss, Deepak Advani, the CMO of Lenovo, sits in a meeting and hurries along the PowerPoint presentations by saying, “Okay, I get it.”

He’s not being rude, he’s just acting like a modem handshaking with another modem, figuring out the bandwidth and adjusting throughput accordingly. Me, I tend let people drone along out of good manners, then when I am good and bored I blurt out something to show I too “get it” and push it along. I’ve also figured out that when I start nodding off in meetings the best way to wake up is to say something.

So I write while living on a day of conference calls and powerpoints ….

Lenovo/IBM, Apple Top RESCUECOM’s Computer Reliability Report: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

Reports like this make me proud to work for Lenovo.  We came out on top in a recent study of computer reliability.

“The Report calculated the following “Reliability Scores” for each computer vendor based on the percentage difference between their overall U.S. market share and the percentage of calls into the RESCUECOM call center about the particular computer vendor. The higher the score, the less likely it was that calls about the specific computer vendor to the RESCUECOM call center were received (scores are in parentheses).

* IBM/Lenovo (243)
* Apple (201)
* HP/Compaq (12)
* Dell (4)
* Gateway (-12)
* Others (-16)”

I watched a Tivo’d copy of the Giro di Lombardia last night, the last of the one day classics in cyclings ProTour. This is the traditional end of the professional cycling season, a 240 km circuit through the Lakes region of Northern Italy starting in Switzeland’s Ticino canton before circling the shores of Lake Como.

I know Ticino and the Lago Lugano region from my days working with a Swiss entrepreneur who had a weekend estate just over the Swiss-Italian border in Porto Ceresio. I used to envy the pelotons of cyclists who rode the lake roads, and always wished I had a bike with me when I was over there.

This year’s Tour of Lombardy was extra-cool because of the performance of Paolo Bettini — “The Cricket” — the current world champion of pro cycling and the winner of the gold medal in the Athens Olympics. He’s a little guy who personifies the traditions of Italian road cycling, a superb tactician with amazing heart. Two weeks ago his brother died in a car accident and as the commentator, Phil Liggett said, two people were pushing the pedals on Bettini’s bike.

His descent into the finish was insane. After attacking on the climb Bettini went for broke, nearly wiping out at 60 mph as he dove into the hairpins. I was literally on the edge of my seat as he held off the attacks of the German rider and crossed the line, tears on his face, looking upwards to heaven and his brother.

Doping scandals aside, cycling is still my passion.

10-16 & 10-17 — working from home on the Cape

10-18 — Washington, D.C.

10-19 — New York

10-20 — Cape Cod

10-21 & 10-22 — Head of the Charles Regatta, Cambridge

Lots of blather and navel gazing has been expended about proving a blog’s ROI to one’s corporate overlords. Emotional appeals founded on Cluetrain sentiments: “But it’s the right thing to do!” or “We’ve got to adopt a conversational marketing model with our customers” aren’t going to win one high marks in the current culture of Measure-It-to-Manage-It.

How can one position corporate blogging as a crucial part of a company’s overall strategy? Let’s put aside reputation management, and focus on the relationship of a blog to a company’s web strategy. In my case, that strategy is to sell stuff online. Sales and blogging seem highly incompatible and counter to the general ethos of Blogistan. As ads creep into some blogs, the economic imperative becomes less jarring, but using a blog to forge a relationship with an audience and then slam that audience with “Buy Now!” starbursts is not generally regarded as a cool thing to do.
In July Lenovo launched its first blog: Design Matters. It is about design, industrial design, technology design, the design heritage of ThinkPads, and the new design principles behind Lenovo-branded products. We think design is our strength, the point of differentiation from our competitors in a vicious commodity market, so the thinking was to blog about it because it might spark a conversation with our fans.

It did. I won’t go into how I built the traffic for the blog, but let’s say it was purely organic for the most part. No ads were bought, no press releases released. It received some homepage linkage from Lenovo.com for a little while, but didn’t take off until the fans at Thinkpads.com and Notebookreview took notice of its existence.

Okay, so on October 5th, our chief designer, David Hill, tells me to look in the drafts folder in the blog’s WordPress dashboard at a post he’s written about a new USB camera. We’re talking about an accessory. A $79.95 device that clips onto the top edge of a monitor or laptop screen and captures video and audio for teleconferencing. Whoopee, right?

Actually, the device is pretty cool; looks like an old Minox spy camera. A nice departure from the usual Orb-Ball. Couple pictures to whet the blog’s readers’ desires, some commentary by David, a link to the Minox site, and we’re done. Wrong. Let’s put it into perspective. This little accessory never got so much exposure in its life. It didn’t get the homepage of Lenovo.com. It didn’t get a massive press rollout. It’s a nice camera, a $80 (why do we continue to inflict $0.95 pricing on our intelligent customers?) add-on, nothing like a $3,000 ThinkPad.

Let’s look at what happened.

First; the blog’s traffic through SiteMeter shows no significant spike due to the posting. The post garnered 17 comments (including two by David and someone on his staff) over five days. Not bad. Fourteen reader interactions. As of today, it is the third most popular post on the site in terms of first page viewed, which means the post is getting some linkage as the eyeballs aren’t going to the homepage first. The blog’s traffic spiked on Friday, when I started to detect a lot of inbound links from other sites. Here’s the chart:

… so turning to Technorati, I ran the search “Lenovo AND Webcam.” This gives me a buzz indicator. Did the blog post move the needle in terms of the pre-post chatter about Lenovo webcams?

I’d say so. And a scan of the verbatims indicates lots of nice commentary. Remember, these are posts, not posts and comments, so the overall chatter is doubtlessly higher.

Now, comes the “BFD” question — big frigging deal. Did you sell any? This is where I turn to Omniture SiteCatalyst, our high-powered metrics and analytics engine to see if we actually sold any
Omniture tells me, thAT of all units sold between Oct. 5 and the 10th, the “40Y8519″ was the 17th best-selling item on Lenovo.com in the U.S. and racked up 23 sales. Okay, so we’re not talking billions served. But still, a look at most popular pages on the U.S. site shows that the little web cam was in the top 100 pages viewed, with more than 1,500 views (yes, I formatted a link to the product page in the original post). Furthermore, I learn, that the top referrer was Engadget. By a mile, with nearly 70% of traffic coming from its pickup of David’s post. Sales, globally, are probably double, so I can make the case that the blog pushed some sales, but more importantly, that by blogging about a specific SKU we were able to plunge a spoke of traffic deep into Lenovo.com, bypassing usability and navigation architectures, bypassing change-requests and stodgy content management systems, bypassing legal, PR, and everyone business undevelopment operation in the business (no aspersions to Lenovo’s teams, I speak in general cynical terms).

In retrospect, I blew it by not offering David’s audience a specific reason to buy one. Beauty and cool factor aside, they aren’t getting a reward for their attention. A discount or special offer needed to be provided, some prize inside the post to thank them for their attention. After all, no where else is there such a public manifestation of ThinkPad fandom than in the comments of the Design Blog. We owe them something for that.