The Kmiec Ramblings
Opinions And Ramblings By Adam Kmiec On All Things Media

Tag Archive: Blogging

Coaching Moments

Written on October 14, 2011 by in Misc.
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In a given day there are no shortage of coaching moments.  If you manage even 1 person, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Every decision we make can be evaluated, reviewed and improved upon. In interviews, I’m often asked about my management style/approach. For the last 10 years, my answer has been consistent:

  1. Inform: Provide your team member with all the information they need to make a good decision.
  2. Recommend: Outline how you would tackle the problem. This needs to be done as “guiding” not dictating.
  3. Empower: Despite your POV, empower them to make the decision. After all they have 2 critical pieces of the puzzle: 1, all the background info. 2, your point of view.
  4. Support: Unless the decision they make is so far off base, support their decision…especially in PUBLIC when it comes under scrutiny.
  5. Evaluate: Review the decision, how it was made, why they made, how it played out and how they’d improve on it in the future.

I don’t think there’s anything earth shattering there, but to consistently apply this maxim can be tough.  There are days I certainly fail at it.  The most critical part of this approach is #4.  Your team needs to know you have their back…that you won’t hang them out to dry or throw them under a bus.  Sometimes this can be challenging, especially when their decision is coming under fire in a public gathering.  But, this is the test of a good manager.

Public criticism offends not only the receivers, but the observers. No one wants to see another person publicly hung by someone too cowardly to address the issue one to one, face to face.

Credit for that great quote goes here.

I feel like that’s one of those obvious…basic…101 rules…that you learn at an early age. Heck, I can remember the rule being taught to me in Little League.  But, just because it’s a basic rule, like don’t swing on a 3-0 count unless you have the green light, doesn’t mean we always follow it.  I’m guilty of breaking the rule on occasion.  It’s so easy to do it when we’re all given a stage, a bullhorn and a distribution network to voice our opinions.  Just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should.

Yesterday, I saw a classic case of poor coaching and the ego-centric world of blogging.  Sarah Perez, an “influential” blogger/writer/editor/etc. received a pitch from Yahoo!’s agency asking her to review their new platform in exchange for some amount of reciprocal coverage and impact at Yahoo!  This type of stuff happens all the time.  If your someone who blogs you’ll eventually get pitched.  From what I can tell from Sarah’s scathing post about the pitch, there were 3 problems with the pitch:

  1. It was generic and over promissory - as such it felt dated
  2. There was a typo – the agency wrote “Tech Crunch” as two words instead of one
  3. She doesn’t seem to care for Yahoo!
The pen is mightier than the sword and that concept is very clear in the digital world.  Personally, I have issue with post from Sarah.  Let’s forget the fact it was snarky and clearly designed to embarrass the person pitching her.  Let’s forget the fact, there were 100 better ways to convey the same message.  Let’s instead focus on 2 things:
  1. TechCrunch says they are “…a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.” What does Sarah’s post have to do with news, startups, or internet products?  As far as I can tell…nothing.
  2. Instead of actually covering the new Yahoo! News Activity feature she chose to take shots at the company/person pitching her.  I’m all for calling people out.  There’s definitely a reason to do it. But, what was gained here?  If this was a coaching moment, what value was derived from publicly flogging this company?  She had more than a few options here: 1, cover the story from a news angle. 2, elect not to cover it and not respond to the pitch. 3, elect not to cover it and let the company know why.  I could go on and on.

When I was working at Fallon, a creative director explained to me that in this business, one minute you’re up, one minute you’re down…you may find yourself working for someone you’re managing right now.  In short, treasure relationships, because while you may think you have the “power” now, you may find yourself looking up at the people you exerted the power on.  Good advice.  Seems like some of that could have been applied here.

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Southwest Shows Us The Way

Written on February 14, 2010 by in Marketing & Advertising
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If you’re a normal person, you spent the weekend with your family, friends, relaxing, enjoying some well needed rest and relaxation, and tuning into the Winter Olympics. But, if you were like me, your eyes were transfixed on twitter instead of the TV. This weekend we watched a very angry Kevin Smith (yes, that Kevin Smith) vent his frustration at Southwest Airlines.

Let me give you the high-level version of the story:

  1. Kevin Smith is booked on a Southwest flight; he purchased two tickets…which equals two seats
  2. He changes the flight
  3. He flys standby…in flying standby he only has one seat, no longer two
  4. He’s a large man and does not fit into one seat; thus violating Southwest’s pre-existing policy
  5. Southwest kicks him off the plane, offers him a $100.00 voucher, and rebooks him on a later flight
  6. Kevin Smith launches an explicative filled tirade against Southwest on twitter

Southwest is known for great customer service. I, like many people, watched with fascination as Southwest tried to deal with the situation. Would they buckle under the weight (no pun intended) of Kevin Smith’s followers and clout?

Well, they handled the situation with calm, grace, honesty and most importantly EQUALITY. They offered up several tweets, phone calls and finally a blog post.  The Southwest blog has been inundated with traffic, which has ground their site to a screeching halt. With that in mind, here’s the full text of their blog post response to the situation.

NOT SO SILENT BOB

Many of you reached out to us via Twitter last night and today regarding a situation a Customer Twittered about that occurred on a Southwest flight. It is not our customary method of Customer Relations to be so public in how we work through these situations, but with so many people involved in the occurrence, you also should be involved in the solution. First and foremost, to Mr. Smith; we would like to echo our Tweets and again offer our heartfelt apologies to you. We are sincerely sorry for your travel experience on Southwest Airlines.

As soon as we saw the first Tweet from Mr. Smith, we contacted him personally to apologize for his experience and to address his concerns on both Twitter and with a personal phone call. Since the situation has received a lot of public attention, we’d like to take the opportunity to address a few of the specifics here as well.

Mr. Smith originally purchased two Southwest seats on a flight from Oakland to Burbank – as he’s been known to do when traveling on Southwest. He decided to change his plans and board an earlier flight to Burbank, which technically means flying standby. As you may know, airlines are not able to clear standby passengers until all Customers are boarded. When the time came to board Mr. Smith, we had only a single seat available for him to occupy. Our pilots are responsible for the Safety and comfort of all Customers on the aircraft and therefore, made the determination that Mr. Smith needed more than one seat to complete his flight. Our Employees explained why the decision was made, accommodated Mr. Smith on a later flight, and issued him a $100 Southwest travel voucher for his inconvenience.

You’ve read about these situations before. Southwest instituted our Customer of Size policy more than 25 years ago. The policy requires passengers that can not fit safely and comfortably in one seat to purchase an additional seat while traveling. This policy is not unique to Southwest Airlines and it is not a revenue generator. Most, if not all, carriers have similar policies, but unique to Southwest is the refunding of the second seat purchased (if the flight does not oversell) which is greater than any revenue made (full policy can be found here). The spirit of this policy is based solely on Customer comfort and Safety. As a Company committed to serving our Customers in Safety and comfort, we feel the definitive boundary between seats is the armrest. If a Customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a Customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement.

I love Kevin Smith. I love his movies, except Jersey Girl. Mallrats, specifically, holds a special place in my heart. So, as you’d imagine, part of me was pulling for Kevin Smith. Initially…that is. But, as I watched Kevin Smith act like a petulant child, my allegiance switched. And, then after reading their official blog post response, I was 100% in the Southwest camp.

See, celebrities love to think they are above everyone else. You only need to read TMZ to see the countless number of examples that validate that sentiment. Where as many companies would have simply kissed Kevin Smith’s derriere and treated him with kid gloves, Southwest did something simple, but remarkable. They treated Kevin Smith the same way they’d treat everyone.

Southwest has a simple policy. Kevin Smith was clearly aware of the policy…seeing as he normally buys two seats. Those two simple facts alone make this an open and shut case. If Kevin Smith and every other potential and current Southwest customer wants to avoid this problem in the future they should simply put the donut down.

As someone who flies every single week, I can tell you that it’s simply not fair that I pay for a seat, but only get to use 2/3 of it because the person next to me is taking up 1 1/3 seats. This wasn’t a new policy from Southwest. They weren’t singling Kevin Smith out. What Southwest was doing was being simple, honest and fair. If only every company out there was like Southwest.

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Guest Post – Marketing Is Supposed To Be About Relationships

Written on February 18, 2009 by in Marketing & Advertising
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I’m out on vacation this week. The keys to TheKmiecs.com have been turned over to a few, select, awesome guest writers. The following has not been edited by me and is the work and effort of the original author. I appreciate the time and thinking that went into this post and hope you will too. Enjoy!

Marketing is supposed to be all about relationships. Based on this belief, it stands to reason that marketers would want to use media that has as its distinguishing feature being part of the connective tissue that holds people together. Thus the enthusiasm for social media and its ilk.

Lots of different vehicles these days are put under the heading of “social media.” Pretty much anything that can facilitate two-way communications between two or more people could be classified as “social media.” Depending on whom you ask email would technically fall into the category of social media. Depending on who else you might ask, so would the telephone or CB radio.

But the kinds of things that have the interests peaked of those who work at the bleeding edge of marketing are tools and technologies that atomizes our expressions, globalizes their reach, and localizes their targetability all at the same time.

We’ve got Twitter to micro-blog every crumb that falls from the buttered toast of our lives. We’ve got Facebook to broadcast the expression of those crumbs to the Etherverse via TwitterSync. And soon to follow will be marketers using the likes of Loopt or Google Latitude to find us where we are when brushing those crumbs from the fronts of our shirts and send us location-based messages on where to buy the bread, where to buy the butter, where to buy the knife with which to spread that butter, and perhaps where to buy the cleaning agents that can clean the shirts from which we are brushing the aforementioned crumbs.

Micro Blogging
Twitter is awfully interesting. I twitter sometimes not at all and sometimes several times a day. Most of the time, posts I read are not here or there in terms of their relevance to my life. They rarely offer a depth of insight on a given subject. But they are sometimes interesting, funny or just downright cute (one fellow I follow posts only things his kids say). Every once in a while there is a link to an article or a video or some other bit of bytes that lead me to that depth and insight Twitter, due to its character constraints, lacks.

Will Twitter hurt how we think and, thus, act, which in turn will change how we market to one another? Maybe. The structure of our language –even our syntax – dictates how we think, it forms the way we conceptualize; the means by which we articulate the world and what is in it informs what it is we think is in the world.

My concern is that the diminishment of formal structure – be it due to a lack of familiarity, willful rejection of it because of some belief that it is authoritarian or elitist, or a restriction of the characters we can write with — will lead to structure’s eradication for the sake of utility. Utility only and always without at least knowing what formal structure needs to be violated in order to achieve it leads to homogenizing, standardizing and monotonizing.

In an environment where infosnacking and reflex replaces deliberation and practiced experience, how we define intelligence and reason will become unrecognizable.

How can something like this be tamed for marketing?

Facebook, MySpace, et al
Marketers are drawn to social networks as an adverting vehicle for the same reasons they are drawn to any media vehicle: the size of its audiences and the popularity it enjoys. That does not, however, always translate into viability as a means for delivering advertising. Toilet paper, after all, is also rather popular. Certainly everyone I know uses it. But I have yet to see ads on it. This is not to equate delivery systems, but rather to demonstrate that widespread use is not a sufficient condition for carrying an ad message. There are reasons why social networking properties should be approached with care:

  • Social networking is just a communication format, not a media vehicle; per se. Social networking is the first decade of the 21st century’s email. Aside from being a domain, do any of the free online email providers, even Gmail, really have a brand? Do any of them offer any specific value to marketers looking to advertising that can’t be had anywhere else? Not really. What they offer is scale (the audiences are huge) and some targetability. Certainly the kind of information available about users will lend itself to greater levels of targetability, but as we’ve already seen, the community is going to police itself against that targetability going too far.
  • The relationship aura an advertiser might hope to benefit from doesn’t always really exist there. It’s a place where people allow others to be connected to them, but they don’t really have relationships there. While expanding the number of “relationships” we have, it degrades their quality for the sake of quantity. Like slicing a peach, with every cut, you lose some juice.
  • Advertisers will have to compete with the brand of ‘Me’ in a social networking environment. Social networking is really a platform for self-branding. People are opening their kimonos to show off their rock-hard abs or their gorgeous breasts or the funny image they shaved in their back hair. It is an opportunity for a kind of narcissism that doesn’t ostensibly put us at physical risk. A Facebook page is like driving down the street with the radio turned up loud and the windows down; it is wearing a concert T-shirt; it is a way of advertising who we want others to think we are.
  • People in marketing and advertising always like to think that the general population likes what we do as much as we do. The general population’s relationship with advertising is at best one of managed hostility, regardless of what one might say about it when the advertising message coming to him or her has been sent by their “BFF” (Best Friend Forever). Will an ensuing deluge of advertising — whether or not it was endorsed by the Lil’ Green Patch friend of a friend — be accepted?

Location Based Services & Targeting
There are as lot of GPS-type applications out there now that, with the growing popularity of smartphones, is experiencing their own surge in popularity. This has the marketing community talking about whether apps like Loopt, Google Latitude, Navteq and others can be used to serve advertising to people based on where they are.

First of all, aside from helicopter parents who might want to know what their kids are doing at every second, are these tools even valuable? Knowing my friends are near is quaint, but, if I’ve already mediated my relationship with them to the point where I’m only communicating with them by posting a note to their Facebook wall, which in turn sends an email to them to tell him or her to go to their Facebook page to read the note I left on their wall, am I REALLY going to make the effort to see them and have a beer, physically, even if they are a few blocks away?

Second, the long-held belief in advertising has been that location somehow makes advertising

a) more meaningful

b) more relevant and thus

c) more effective

But does it? Just because I’m near a McDonald’s doesn’t mean that I’m ready to eat there. Knowing where stores are is valuable, but that’s search addressable more than it is advertising. I think we in advertising and marketing overvalue the tricks of targeting. Most people have a relationship with advertising that is on average one of managed hostility. I don’t know that “adver-stalking” would endear a brand to a potential consumer. I suppose it could operate on an opt-in basis and entice purchase or trial with incentives. But I have my doubts about a marketing application.

What’s the solution to all of the above? Marketers’ least favorite form of advertising due to its lack of forced reach and potential glamour, but it is among the most effective: “Pull” advertising.

It’s what search is, yellow pages used to be, and what widgets are becoming. You approach the opportunity as one where the audience you are trying to reach reaches out to you instead of you reaching out to them, then you’ve got something here.

Jim Meskauskas
VP, Director of Online Media
ICON International
www.twitter.com/mediadarwin

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Send In The Guest Writers

Written on February 8, 2009 by in Misc.
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I’ll be offline in starting February 23, 2009 for about a week and a half.  Thanks to the power of Twitter, I was able to score some fantastic guest writers.  Be kind to the them while I’m away :)

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2008 Top 10 Buzzwords

Written on December 29, 2008 by in Funny, Marketing & Advertising
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So the New York Times has a list of the top political buzzwords in 2008.  They did a nice job of picking through a see of words and terms to create a short list of the best.  Trying to pick the top 10 marketing buzzwords of 2008, wasn’t easy either.  I’m sure I’ve left some great ones off the list.

  1. Transparency: I loathe this term.  Just can’t stand it.  It’s over-used and often used incorrectly.  I’ve already talked at length why I have problems with the term, so I’ll try to make it quick here.  People don’t want transparency.  They don’t want to see how the hotdog is made.  I promise you, no one wants to see meet crammed into a casing.  However, they do want to know that the nutrition label is accurate and a fair representation of what’s in the hot dog.
  2. Conversation/Dialogue: How many times did you hear, “we need to start a conversation.”  Or, “it’s about having a conversation.”  Yawn.  It takes two people, at a minimum, to have a conversation.  If you’re having a conversation with yourself, I have someone you should meet with :)   There’s 24 hours in a day and with all due respect we/me/you/they don’t want to have a conversation with your/their company.  Do you really want to talk with person X at Sprint?  Guess what?  Sprint doesn’t want to have a dialogue with you either.  There isn’t enough time in a day to have a real conversation or to carry on a dialogue for several days.  We don’t want story telling, we just means for communication.
  3. Micro-Blogging: Sigh.  Whoever started this needs to be shot.  People, for whatever reason, feel the need to put things into defined boxes that they can make sense of something.  That’s exactly what happened with micro-blogging.  Someone realized they didn’t understand things like Twitter and decided to give it the phrase micro-blogging.  Do you realize how silly we sound?  While we’re at it, let’s create the term mobi-sode for video content viewed on a mobile device.  Yes, that sounded dumb :)
  4. Streaming: “Hey, I’m live streaming right now.”  Hey, that’s great.  I remember in 1999 when the term streaming was big.  Broadband penetration was increasing and content was actually being streamed.  This whole concept of people life-streaming, live-streaming, etc. is silly.  Please stop saying it Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis :)
  5. User Experience: It’s all about user experience.  Well duh.  We aren’t selling products to ourselves.  The fact that the concept of user experience has been created in a functional discipline, with people billing themselves as user experience experts is mind boggling.  You know who’s a user exeperience expert?  The user.
  6. Integrated: Oh boy, what a whopper.  We’re a full integrated agency.  We need to make sure the creative is integrated.  Sigh.  Creative shouldn’t be integrated.  Well, not in the way the term integration is used.  When the term integration is used in marketing/advertising it’s used to denote that all the work should look the SAME.  Hate to break it to you, but it shouldn’t.  Should a 60 second TV spot look the same as your website?  Gosh, I hope not, since they are two differen’t communication channels.
  7. User-Centric: Similar to user experience.  But, where as user experience has people and companies claiming to be experts of a discipline, user-centric is a philosophy.  For example, user-centric design.  Wait a second, you’re designing for the user?  Isn’t that what we’re paid to do?  If we start designing/creating for ourselves, well you’ll get Orville Deadenbacher and no one wants that.
  8. Web 2.0/3.0: Oh boy, this is a big one.  By my count we’re on version 8 or 9 of the web.  Using the term web 2.0 simply dumbs down the conversation.  Web 2.0 is used as a catch all phrase meant to dumb the conversation down and avoid discussions about technology like APIs, AJAX, embedding, etc.  Instead of creating terms like web 2.0 or web 3.0 (the person at Razorfish that used this should be shot) we should be educating people, especially decision makers, so that everyone is a little smarter.
  9. Media Agnostic: Really?  You don’t care, nor have an opinion on media?  And you have a job?  Wait, and you’re considered smart for being agnostic.  Damn, I want that job.  Media agnostic isn’t a point of differentiation…well not when every company is claiming they are media agnostic.
  10. Thought Leader: I cringe when I hear this term. Wikipedia says, “Thought leader is a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a futurist or person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights (thinklets).” Well, even they call it a buzzword. Some how a thought leader is supposed to denote how smart you are and give you instant credibility when you walk into the room. If that’s the case, let’s just change people’s titles to Sr. Thought Leader and Director of Thought Leadership. I’ve me a lot of the supposed thought leaders and I gotta tell you, not impressed. Becoming a thought leader, if we’re going to continue using the term, should be like getting knighted. Only royalty can denote that you are a thought leader. Seeing no other hands, I will take on that role :)

My one request for 2009 is not world peace.  It’s please stop using buzzwords and instead be more transparent about your thought leadership when you integrate your micro-blogging, life streaming, and other web 2.0 tools via a media agnostic user experience and user-centric approach to maintaining a dialogue.  Does that make sense?  Good, I didn’t think so…and that’s exactly what you sound like when you talk in buzzword speak.

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Blogging Vs. Tweeting

Written on December 4, 2008 by in Marketing & Advertising
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I blog.  I tweet.  I read blogs.  I read tweets.  I’ve been doing this for a while now :)  Lately though, I’ve been noticing that people are blogging less, just like me.  They are trading their blogging for more and more tweeting.  Matt Dickman, David Armano, Steve Rubel, Peter Kim, Joseph Jaffe, and many of my other favorite blog authors seem to be blogging less.  It’s not just the frequency of the posting that’s changing.  The quality seems to be going down as well.  SPECIAL NOTE: This isn’t an attack on any of them; just an observation that you can choose to disagree with.  There are exceptions.  Jeremiah Owyang, bless his heart, keeps up with his blog and tweets really well.

Tweeting is easy.  Often times it doesn’t even require any serious thought.  You can tweet simple things like what you’re reading, a link you came across, or ask a basic question.

Blogging on the other hand requires a great deal of thought.  Well for me it does.  You have to pick a topic.  The topic needs to be something interesting and desirable.  From there, we need to develop the content to support the topic.  That often requires research to substantiate the point of view.

Effort.  Blogging requires effort, it requires an investment in time.  It often takes me an hour to identify a topic, write my point of view, pull the research (when needed), and then enhance the point of view.  In that 1 hour I can easily read through a few hundred tweets, write about 25 of my own, respond to 50 or so tweets, and flag enough content to follow up on for the next day.  Tweeting just doesn’t require a lot of effort.

I’m continually amazed at the signal to noise ratio of people’s tweeting habits and their blog habits.  My favorite example of this is Jason Calacanis.  I follow Jason on twitter.  For the last 2 weeks I’ve been categorizing his tweats into two categories: USELESS and USEFU.  Jason’s ratio was roughly (I’m rounding) 115 to 1.  Think about that.  I have to read 116 tweets, just to get 1 gem.  Contrast that to Jason’s new email list distribution, which is nothing more than a private blog.  Those emails/posts rock.  They’re well thought out, on trend, and 100% useful.  In my opinion he hasn’t missed yet.  He hasn’t offered one useless post.  You can see the posts here; he’s started posting his email as blog entries.

It’s clear that tweeting and blogging are different forms of communication.  They can be used complimentary.  It’s not about picking one or the other.  They’re used for different reasons.  But, that said…I feel a sense of concern for the future of twitter.  If the ratio for the quality of tweets remains low and twitter is simply airspace to talk about what you’re eating; can it survive?  I see so much promise in twitter.  I want people to realize the role they have to play in the twitter eco system.  There’s a certain level of responsibility we all have in keeping the eco system afloat.  I think we all need to acknowledge that responsibility.

It’ll benefit us all.

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Blogging vs. Tweeting

Written on September 22, 2008 by in Misc.
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I’ve noticed that I’ve been blogging less, but tweeting more. I’ve also been using Facebook a lot less.

What I really want to do is figure out a way to cross publish my thoughts. Twitter does a great job of syncing tweets with my Facebook status. But, what I want is the ability to write something once and publish to my blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

For example, I maintain a Colle+McVoy internal agency email. The email is sent out to 30+ people at the agency who’ve opted in for communication. Throughout the week I gather great content, thoughts, links, etc. and share it with this list. I would love to be able to grab that content and sync it with my blog and Twitter profile.

There has to be a way to do this, but I haven’t found one yet. If you have a recommendation, please share it.

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About
Head of Social Media at Walgreens. Interactive marketer, innovator, boat rocker, continuous learner, movie lover, risk taker, dad and all around good guy. I'm always up for a spirited conversation. These are my thoughts and ramblings, not those of my employer.
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