You Talkin’ to Me?

My wife and I were out for a drink a while back, and we went to one of the most poular bars in Moncton: St James’ Gate.  It’s a great little spot.  In fact, it’s a lot like I’d like my someday bar to be.

One thing we noticed, though, was that the two bartenders had no interaction with the people sitting and standing at the bar.  Granted, it was a busy night, but I can have a conversation and pour a drink at the same time.  Why were these two not doing so?

I think part of the job description of a bartender is to be interesting and engaging.  It’s certainly true in Montréal, where bartenders sometimes rise to the level of celebrities, with their own fan-club of clientele that will follow them to whatever bar they choose to work in.

Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t think hospitality workers in general  should have sparkling wit and personality.  In fact, in most cases, I prefer my server to be almost non-existent (except when I want/need them, of course – that’s what makes the good ones good).  I don’t like the, “Hi, my name’s Brandi (with an “i”), and I’ll be your server tonight!” from a table-waiter.  But if I choose to sit at the bar, I’m doing so because it has something the table doesn’t – a built-in person to talk to.

A Man Without Things – Part 2

A few days ago, I posted the first half of a short documentary about a friend of mine who lost everything he owned in an apartment fire.  Included in the loss was his entire 25-year photography career – tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and hundreds of thousands of images.  This is the second and final segment of the film.

Wow – The Power of Tiger Woods

Nine days ago, I wrote a piece about how important it is to have complete faith in your marketing message; because if you don’t, there’s either something wrong with what you’re promoting or something wrong with your ability to promote it. I used Tiger Woods’s total belief in his ability to win the U.S. Open last month as an example of someone who totally believes his own “story.”

Notice what happened to by blog traffic in the ensuing days. I had been poking along at anywhere from 1 to 50 visitors per day since starting this blog in April. Imagine my surprise when I checked my stats last night. A peak of 238 visitors Monday, and over 150 every day since. I struggled to think of the cause, since it looks like the Friday post (about Crocs) or Monday’s piece (about TV viewership) would be the cause for the sharp increase, and neither of those seemed like particularly compelling topics. But then I noticed the list of terms people had searched on to find my blog:

Search	Views
tiger woods	139
tiger-woods	2
always right	1
wrong customer	1
tiger woods us open 2008	1
cresent street montreal	1
broox wordpress	1
picture of tiger woods	1
pilot	1
viral epmotion	1

Seems like my star-power is slightly eclipsed by Mr. Woods’s.

This reminds me of a stunt pulled by my colleagues at Multiactive Software shortly after they purchased Maximizer (the company) in the mid-90s. They loaded up the maximizer.com home page meta data with terms like “Pamela Anderson,” and our traffic skyrocketed. They were actually quite smart to think of doing this – this was before the term “Search Engine Optimization” had even been coined – but they weren’t smart enough to realize that traffic in and of itself is worthless. People seeking porn or celebrity gossip are unlikely to pause in their quest and say, “Hmmm – forget Pamela, this contact management software application seems quite interesting!”

Anyway, please do not think I was trying to ride Tiger’s coattails. I am smart enough to understand that Tiger fans are not going to magically turn into Stephen fans – I just wasn’t smart enough to realize what writing a post about him would result in. And, of course, I’ve just done it again.

Some Suits Do Get Viral, It Seems

The headline is in reference to a post last week entitled “The Suits Don’t Get Viral Marketing.”

Please follow this link to watch a hilarious video, then return for the discussion period. 

I found this on www.yesbutnobutyes.com, a blog that compiles interesting content from around the Web.  When blogs like this start picking up your content, it’s a great start to a successful viral marketing campaign.  And there is no doubt that this is what Eppendorf is trying to do here.  It’s not like they put this together for any other reason than hoping it would go viral.

So my hat is off to this large (annual revenues of over €340 million), stodgy German laboratory supplies manufacturer.  It surprises me that they would not only have the guts to poke fun at themselves and try something different, but that they would put this on their home page!  When I saw the complicated URL (http://www.eppendorf.com/int/hawkpopup.php?contentid=13) leading to where the video is hosted, I thought, “OK, some forward thinker in marketing talked them into doing this and even hosting it on the corporate site, but it will be buried somewhere.”  Not so!  It has primo location right on their home page.

Although, oddly enough, if you navigate into their site via the choose a country page, you can’t find the video anywhere on Canada or USA’s sites, but it does appear on all the other geographies that I tried (France, Italy, Middle East, China, South America).  Perhaps those Germans think that it’s we North Americans who are stodgy!

BTW, here are the lyrics:

Pipetting all those well-plates, baby, sends your thumbs into overdrive
And spending long nights in the lab makes it hard for your love to thrive

What you need is automation, girl, something easy as 1 2 3
So put down that pipette, honey, I got something that will set you free

And it’s called epMotion (whisper: ‘cause you deserve something really great)
Girl you need epMotion (whisper: yeah girl it’s time to automate)
It’s got to be epMotion (whisper: no more pipetting late at night)
Only for you epMotion (whisper: girl this time we got it right)

DNA
RNA
Proteins
Cell Cultures
Less reagents
Faster workflow
Saves you money
Well, well, well

How to Pay Us in 13 Easy Steps

I received this in the mail recently. It came from Rogers, one of the major communications services providers here in Canada. I use them for cell, broadband and cable TV (they also do landline, but we use another company for that). This document is an instruction manual for how to interpret the new format that my monthly invoices will soon be sent in. Shown here is the cover page of the 7-page pamphlet, and a sample interior page.

 

Does anyone have a problem with this? Should a document you send to your customer asking him or her for money need a freakin’ User’s Guide? Let me break down my righteous indignation into sections:

 

1. It’s made of dead trees. Both this brochure and my (soon to be 11 pages long) monthly bill. They know I have internet access – I have a @rogers.com email address for heaven’s sake. Can’t you bill me electronically?

 

2. This is a platform for regularly communicating with me. If you made it interactive, you could learn a bunch about how to serve me better, which I would gladly pay for. If this were presented online, there could be feedback questions scattered throughout. E.g., they might ask me why I don’t use their landline service. Perhaps I have a fear that it will slow my internet access, which they could then allay. They could ask me about my level of satisfaction with each of the services I do use. They could get better, which would make me happier and more likely to recommend them to my friends.

 

3. If you put all this effort into redesigning the presentation of your bill, and then feel the need to send instructions on how to read it, maybe the design isn’t that hot. It’s called the drawing board, guys: get back to it.

 

A Man Without Things

This is a short, and unfinished, documentary about my friend Michael Dubrule, who lost everything he owned in an apartment fire in February on Toronto’s Queen Street West.  I just saw Michael last weekend and he mentioned a student filmmaker was putting this together…

[UPDATE:  The film is now finished.  Part 2 is here.]

Where Do You Get Your News?

I got back from a great 3-day weekend of camping, where no TV was watched for 60 straight hours. I then saw a story in the Times & Transcript about how more and more people are consuming their “television” on the Web (I use quotes because if it’s not being “telecast,” it’s not really “television,” is it?). That made me think of this graph I came across a couple of years ago when I was doing research for a presentation I did for an e-commerce symposium at the Sobey School of Business. It shows the total viewership of all networks’ evening TV news shows. I’m too lazy to look up current stats, but I think we can safely assume that the trend has continued and likely accelerated.

When more and more people turn to alternate sources for what they consider to be the “truth,” then the power of traditional media to influence our thinking is diminished almost to vanishing. It used to be that when a revolution started, the first thing that the rebels tried to take control of was the radio station, the TV studio, and the printing press. Now everybody with a computer and a WordPress account (or a Facebook page, or a YouTube membership) has as much information sharing capability as those things put together. You can no longer “control” a message through mainstream media. In fact, it’s tough to say which media are “mainstream” any more.

This is why traditional advertising, by itself, simply does not cut it today. Sure, you can buy an ad during the Super Bowl broadcast, and eleventy chinchillion people will see it. But they won’t believe it until it’s been verified by their alternate information sources, and those are almost all online.

No Crocs For You!

This week my wife Cindy was looking around for Crocs for her and our daughter.  We all agree that they’re ugly, but apparently they’re really comfortable – so much so that both my girls have worn out their last pairs.

 

The first store she visited didn’t have any in stock.  The sales clerk told her that the popularity of Crocs had dropped off so much recently, that they hadn’t even bothered re-ordering.

 

Then she tried another store that had only a few left but that clerk said there was a regional scarcity of them because of a recent surge in demand.

 

I don’t want to cast any doubt on the honesty and integrity of retail salespeople as a caste, but isn’t it curious that the person who could sell my wife Crocs was the one who told her they were selling like hotcakes; while the person who had no Crocs to sell was the one who said that no-one wanted them anyway.

 

Show Me the Money

In an earlier post, I wrote about the power that a friendly competition like a trivia contest has to keep patrons in your bar and keep them coming back.  Another sure-fire trick is to induce them to gamble on some (future) sporting event.  It pretty much guarantees that they will return to your establishment to watch the game and (hopefully) collect their winnings.

The most popular form of bar gambling when I worked in Montréal was what we called a “football grid” – although the Internet seems to prefer the term “football squares.”  The bartender would divide a large piece of paper, or even better, bristol board, into a 10 × 10 grid, with room on the left and top to fill in numbers later.  The visiting team’s name is written on the left and the hosts on the top.  Then, the individual squares would be sold to patrons, let’s say $10 each for this example, and they write their name in the square they’ve chosen.  It can be any empty square on the grid.  Once all the squares are sold, and this is key, only once they are all sold, the numbers 0 through 9 are written on small pieces of paper and drawn one by one from a hat.  With witnesses present, the bartender fills in the numbers in the order they are drawn, first down the side, then across the top.

The random selection of numbers is important, as you’ll see.

On game day, the winners are chosen by looking at the last digit of each of the teams’ scores.  So if the score is 28 – 17 for the visitors, you find the 8 on the left and the 7 on the top and the person with their name in the intersecting square wins.  Because you want there to be more than one winner (more people with sudden disposable income in the room), you usually have a prize for each of the quarters, but building up to a larger one for the final score.  In our example (100 squares × $10 = $1,000), it might be broken down like: first quarter, $100; second, $150; third $250; final score, $500.  Of course, all the money must be paid out – there is no cut for the house.

The reason the randomness is important, is that certain numerals are much more likely in football scores than others.  Without explaining all about the different ways to get points in a football game, just believe me when I say that the best numbers are, in order, 7, 0, 3, 4.  So someone with their name in the 7-7 square will feel pretty good with their lot, but the schmo in 5-5 is essentially hooped.  If the numbers were put on the grid before  the squares were sold, no-one would buy 5-5.

Turns Out This “Tiger Woods” Fellow Can Golf

I presume everyone has heard by now that Tiger Woods won a little golf tournament called the U.S. Open last month.  Yawn.  What’s another major championship for Tiger?  What’s different with this one?

Well, he won this one without practicing.  With a badly torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee.  With a broken (in two places) tibia in the same leg.  With the 100% knowledge that every time he drove the ball, his knee was going to scream with pain.  With having to recover from horrible drives, caused by that knowledge, on nearly every hole.  With having to walk the course not just the 4 regular times, but an entire extra round in the playoff.  And all that on top of the usual Tiger stuff: having to prove that you’re the best in the world every single freakin’ week, etc. etc.  (Been there, brother.) 

Oh, and did I mention it was the   U.  S.  OPEN!?!?!

There is the story (probably apocryphal, but good nonetheless) told by Tiger’s swing coach, that two weeks prior to the event, after the fractures to the tibia occurred, Tiger’s doctor told him he had to be totally off his feet for three weeks and on crutches for 6.  Tiger’s calm reply was, “no, I’m going to play in the U.S. Open in two weeks, and I’m going to win it.”  To invoke MythBusters’ Adam Savage, he rejects the doctor’s reality and substitutes his own.

The marketing story that is Tiger Woods is so powerful because the most important consumer of that story completely and wholeheartedly believes it – Tiger himself.  I don’t want to get all Anthony Robbins on you, but the total belief that he can (and will) win is a big part of why he does.

When I worked at Maximizer, we made the best damn contact manager software there was.  I didn’t just write marketing bumf to that effect, I absolutely KNEW it to be true.  That’s why I could be so effective at convincing others that it was true.  If you’re not 100% sure of your message, maybe you shouldn’t be telling it…