Speaking at Marketing Live Conference in Bratislava

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My next speaking gig is at the Marketing Live Conference in Bratislava. I’ll be speaking about word of mouth marketing and social media.

Free Starbucks coffee if you vote today

Excellent word of mouth marketing initiative by a brand promoted using social media by Starbucks, who are saying “If you care enough to vote, we care enough to give you a free cup of coffee.” Simply brilliant. Will be even better if Starbucks use their global dominance to repeat the move for elections in other countries. It won’t look so brilliant if they don’t.

Via Media Culpa

Making RSS feeds simpler

Word of mouth guru Andy Sernovitz has an interesting post where he argues that we need to make RSS feeds simpler for people to understand. He does an OK job, although Pat in his comments does it much better likening RSS to ‘home delivery’ instead of having to remember to go down the newsagents whenever a new issue of your favourite magazine is published.

But far from simplifying it Andy makes it far too complicated by recommending that people “get a feed reader” and saying that his favourite is Google Reader.

No, no, no. Nearly everyone will already be using either Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox, so why, why make it harder for them. If you’re only reading a small number of feeds then the basic reader built in to your browser is more than adequate. My Dad is a perfect example, he’s now well into feeds and happily shows others how to use them. But he does it in IE7 and would definitely not want to waste time learning something else, even if it is better.

p.s. It’s a shame Andy didn’t credit Microsoft with already making the biggest move in simplifying RSS by standardising on the   icon, rather than using its own new one (which nearly happened) and calling it a feed, which is reasonably self-explanatory and what Andy is calling for.

How to do PR in 2008

Shel Holtz has a great story that illustrates how really savvy PRs should be operating in today’s always connected society. It’s about a US magazine (MAD) and a big electronics retail chain (Circuit City). The magazine ran a spoof Circuit City ad (sort of sub-Private Eye style) and an executive at Circuit City took umbrage and order the mag to be cleared from the shelves and destroyed.

As you’d expect in today’s citizen journalist world the offending email was leaked and published in the blogosphere (on Consumerist). The story then took off and received 114 comments, an amazing 1935 Diggs (with a further 165 comments) and was picked up by AP.

But, this is where it gets really good. Instead of acting like a big, old, dumb corporate Jim Babb, a savvy PR in Circuit City’s corporate communications department sent a witty email that: a) Admitted the mistake; b) Tried to put it right; and c) Apologised.

The result was acclaim from The Consumerist and the apology received 63 comments – almost universally positive.

Shel quite rightly points out that the mistake should never have been made in the first place. It’s essential that potential reputation issues are run past the experts (i.e. the public relations people) and that every manager and indeed employee has a basic grasp of when they might need to take counsel.

The story illustrates how word of mouth marketing can be negative as well as positive, so it pays to get expert advice to help you manage it.