Tag Archives: Social media marketing

August 6, 2013 · 8:41 am

Soundboards

This TunesDay, let’s talk about recordings. Specifically, concert recordings.

English: A shot of the control surfaces of the...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now, we’ve all heard live albums – your favorite band recorded in concert. What you might not realize is that many “live”albums are as carefully mixed and “sweetened” as a studio album.  They can often capture the energy of a band live but they can also hide some fundamental flaws – a flat vocal tuned up, a missed solo punched in and the bad one removed.  It’s sort of audio Photoshop.

I prefer soundboard recordings, the black coffee of music.  These are recordings right off the mixer used at the show.  Many have circulated as bootleg tapes or discs for years.  They are generally of high quality and they can be thrilling.  Yes, there are some “audience tapes (recordings made with good equipment by a member of the audience) that can capture the raw performance but I think soundboards have a leg up since every mike is accounted for in the mixer.  I have an Eagles soundboard of a live show that shows how brilliant they were as a vocal band (oh, and Joe Walsh can flat-out play…).   I have many others – some of which unmasked  the bands as studio creatures; others of which (pick any good Dead show!) put anything the band ever did in a studio to shame.  Soundboards are the ultimate test of a band to me.

I was listening to a soundboard yesterday (a Talking Heads show from the mid-1980’s – boy they were good live!) and a business thought hit me.  While marketing used to be studio music – sweetened, totally controlled – it’s become soundboards.  Customer comments, social media, review sites – they’re raw messaging about your company or brand.  That’s why we need to get it right as we play it live – there won’t be any chance to fix it later.  A Tweet to a customer that sets the wrong tone, a questionable Instagram photo, or just heavy-handed censorship of comment boards will all be heard as those actions get played back over and over through the digital echo chamber.

If you can’t play live, don’t try to fake it.  Inevitably someone will make the soundboard public and you’ll look foolish.  It’s why The Beatles felt they should stop touring (even thought the soundboards of the rooftop concerts filmed for Let It Be are spectacular) – their sound had become so complex that they didn’t think they could do it justice live.  Be at least that smart and err on the side of caution.   The soundboards won’t go away if you’re wrong.

What’s your thinking?

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July 31, 2013 · 8:34 am

Why You Suck At Social

I’m feeling a little snarky this morning so I’ll apologize in advance if this comes across as yet another bitter old guy (all you kids get off the lawn!).

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

I ran into yet another so-called “social media guru” the other day.  OK, I ran into the chaos they left but felt as if I’d been smacked across the face by their incompetence in person.   Oh, they market themselves far better than I do – that’s how someone of their abilities manages to get nice gigs with otherwise smart clients – brilliant marketing.  They excel at leveraging themselves online.  Bringing those tactics to bear for clients in a manner that grows the client’s business?  Not so much.  Let me explain.

Even as we’re five years into the age of social media marketing (I hate that term), many clients aren’t told the truth about it by those of us they employ to bring them up to speed.  Some of my so “peers” don’t explain that social is hard work and it’s not a place to stash the interns (since they’ll be on Facebook and Twitter all day anyway).  Make a page and magic will happen!

That’s an apt analogy except very few of us point out that when “magic” happens as we watch a performer do a trick, hundreds or thousands of hours of prep and practice have gone into making it seem seamless.  There are often specialized boxes or mirrors involved and one false move brings disaster.  Of course, “smoke and mirrors” is not exactly the type of reputation I think we’d want for our brands but I could be wrong.  Magicians put in the work and have the right tools.

So let’s try this one more time.  To do social well, companies have to blow up a very fundamental part of their thinking.  While most marketing is all about the product or brand, social is not.  It’s about your audience, and you need to focus squarely on them with the odd brand message here or there.  What’s helpful to them?  If you’re not willing to make that investment as well, maybe think about print or TV or some other medium where you can just barf out messages about how great you are.  You need to have a plan and tools and people with enough business acumen to assure all the stakeholder interests are aligned, including those of your customers.

And you “gurus?”  Get off my lawn…

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July 18, 2013 · 8:15 am

Meet HAL, Our CMO

Anyone remember HAL? Or more specifically, the HAL 9000, one of the great screen villains of all time? Sure you do – it’s the computer in 2001. Throughout the course of the film the computer runs almost everything, including the humans. When the humans rebel, it murders them (trust me, that’s not a spoiler and you MUST see the film if you haven’t).

Hal 9000 D - Chrome

(Photo credit: K!T)

HAL is on my mind this morning because of something I read in Media Post:

Adobe Systems released an updated version of its social media platform Thursday allowing marketers to predict the effectiveness of posts before they are published.  Using predictive analytics, the feature in Adobe Social learns as it goes, refining recommendations and increasing intelligence with each action. The platform pulls in historic data from similar posts and integrates it with image data on Flickr, check-ins on Foursquare and videos from Instagram, to determine the outcome for sharing, comments, and likes.

I’m well aware that many companies use testing to plan advertising.  Focus groups are a tried and true method and I’ve used them myself.  Copy testing is part of that.  What I find creepy, however, is when this moves over to social media and it points out a flaw in many companies’ thinking.  Part of using social is being real.  It’s why I have an issue with any sort of programmatic content in general.  There needs to be a human on the other end, and not just a human running an algorithm.

Another problem is in the last sentence, above.  Programming to generate likes and sharing is specious reasoning.  That’s the sort of goal that someone looking to impress a boss who has no understanding of social media would have.  After all – things can go “viral” and generate a ton of comments when they’re used as the butt of a joke or as something negative.  Nice metrics, horrible outcome.

I don’t know about you but I can feel when it’s a computer on the other end.  It’s the digital equivalent of those nested phone menus where you type or say a response to a series of questions.  Those infuriate me .  Maybe they do you as well.  As marketers we need to have the courage to be human in social media.  Auto responders aren’t as good as human responders (properly trained, of course).  Letting a computer dictate what does or doesn’t get posted over the nuanced judgement of humans is not going to be as effective in the long run.

What do you think?

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