As I’m writing this, I have had to opportunity to watch his video spread from a tiny comment on www.reddit.com to a full out internet meme.

(A meme ( /?mi?m/^[1]) is “an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. Pronounced like “cream” it was coined by Professor Dawkins)

Here’s the video:

Hilarious yes?

What makes this video great, is that Chuck Testa pops out and says “Nope! It’s Chuck Testa”. But if Chuck had said “nope” to the video producers creative ideas, he would have seen far less exposure for his content.

Published August 14th, the video saw minor success. Chuck was probably happy enough with the video too! But wait. Check out the insights below. Once there internet “found out” about the commercial, his views skyrocketed.

Not every viral video will work. In fact. Most don’t. Our city saw great success thanks to Rob Bliss and his team producing a Lib-Dub video for the classic song  American Pie. Rob and his team poured their time into that video – and views kept climbing. Grand Rapids got another 15 minutes of fame (more like, 4MM+ views of fame!).

So why did Chuck Testa’s video hit off with the internet? Simple. They didn’t try too hard, but they experimented with a creative solution that ended up becoming a booming success.

He’s actually hosting a contest right now on his website for the best “NOPE!” photoshop. (http://www.ojaitaxidermy.com – if you want to enter.)

Here are my key takeaways from the Chuck Testa ‘experience’ (and he still makes me laugh outloud, FYI.):

• First and foremost: don’t be afraid to be creative.
• Pushing the boundaries doesn’t have to be “offensive” – you can push boundaries and still be noticed.
• If the internet “finds out” about something you’ve done and it goes viral – let it. Heck, join it!
• Don’t. Be afraid. Let your brand explore a creative message that wouldn’t normally “fit”.

If you find any good Chuck Testa stories, share it with us on our Facebook or Twitter!

www.facebook.com/weareagentx

www.twitter.com/weareagentx

Addendum: I should add that the video was shot by professionals for “Commercial Kings“. Just note that while shot by professionals, the beauty of the video is how long it took to be “discovered” by the internet. Very impressive viral piece.

Stopping to smell the roses isn’t a new concept. In fact, it’s almost an overused expression. We rarely stop to smell the roses, let alone to stop to contemplate the power this phrase has over our lives.

In marketing, our consumers walk past flowers every day. They rarely will stop and smell the roses. Who can blame them? They’re over communicated. We all are.

As communicators, our industry has a responsibility to assure that consumers will stop and smell what we have produced. Ideally, of course, it would be a pleasant smell. Maybe an experiential event for the local sewage plant – actually, never mind. That’s just a bad idea.

So often, communicators do indeed make a rose. But they spend so much time painting their white roses red, they lose the beauty behind what was already there. Michelangelo said: “The best artist has that thought alone which is contained within the marble shell; the sculptor’s hand can only break the spell to free the figures slumbering in the stone”. He spoke to the inner beauty that most people ignore, while they assume they have to change something that is already beautiful.

It’s this respect communicators need to consider. Stop pushing messages that are bland and reused, try to find what really matters to your audience and go for it. Stop painting the roses red, chances are it took far too long to grow them in the first place.

Only once we start respecting the views of the audience and creating content that’s worth ‘smelling’, have we served our duty as communicators. It’s a big responsibility after all. Just…keep that smell pleasant.

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This post is also featured on my personal website, andrewrushmore.com

It’s that time of year again, the birds and bees are out and about making whoopie, and in the bustling metropolis of Chicago the Word of Mouth Marketing Association is preparing to welcome all (including a few of us from SGC) attending the 2010 School of WOM at Swissôtel Chicago, May 24-26.

The reason I say all this is to shamelessly promote the event and to encourage anyone in the industry that hasn’t signed up to attend to do so if you can. We’ve been involved with WOMMA for almost a year now, and the School of WOM is a “shouldn’t be missed” event, if you’re at all into WOM marketing. In addition to presentations by some of the leading voices from some of the world’s biggest brands on their approach to WOM, there will be a number of great discussions around creating sustainable word of mouth campaigns, how to measure the effectiveness of your efforts and more – much more than this simple post can hope to contain.

So, to all you WOMites out there, get registered, jump on your plane, train or automobile and make your way to Chicago. The weather is nice this time of year, the food is great and I’m sure we’re all going to walk away in an enlightened state of mind.

David

As we began to monitor conversations around the initiative and the participating cities in the digital landscape, several cities stood out as clear leaders. These leaders had over ten thousand Facebook fans alone, with some breaking twenty and even thirty thousand. Pictures, tweets, blog posts, videos and more all supported the digital media presence of active cities, showing how very hands on participants became – fiber became a catalyst for community growth in cyberspace and beyond. And I say beyond, and this is a key learning for everyone, because the cities that controlled the largest share of digital voice were those that not only pulled together strategies for deploying digital media but carried it through to PR and experiential activities as well.

As Google’s March 26th deadline loomed closer we monitored even more excitement online as many cities saw last minute increases to their fan bases. This was likely tied to the flood of nationally recognized events various cities used for promotion, as well as the effect of word of mouth and the variety of media coverage that backed the buzz around Google’s fiber initiative.

So here we are, just over a month since the fiber ‘storm’ passed. It’s been interesting to watch how conversation around the initiative in the digital landscape waned. The leaders in the Facebook space continued to grow, but each added just a few thousand fans since the deadline. And many of the cities vying for Google’s fiber have seen a significant drop in their online conversation since the deadline for the RFI. Basically, Google thanked everyone for applying and relegated share of online voice to its position in its decision making process, and, for the most part, most participants gradually stepped back their efforts. Really, the only major additional event since the close of the application process happened on April Fool’s Day (April 1st) when Google changed its site name to ‘Topeka’ as a tip of the cap to Topeka, Kansas which changed its name to ‘Google, Kansas’ as part of its campaign.

What is surprising is how little uproar there appears to be from all of the cities that invested a great deal of time and money in participating in this initiative. We were expecting to find a good of negative sentiment against Google for not choosing a city faster and leaving America waiting with no clear date on when the selection would be made. With the large number of content contributors in cities such as Grand Rapids, Duluth, Topeka, Greenville (South Carolina) and Pittsburgh, one could draw the logical conclusion that a high number of comments and negative content speaking out against Google would appear in the digital space, or at the very least, the conversations would intensify generating more content around their desire for Google’s fiber broadband. But that isn’t the case. Something more interesting is happening: there are new initiatives being driven by cities that submitted applications to Google focused on creating local support for broadband fiber lines, regardless of what decision Google makes. That’s an interesting twist and a really brilliant example of how powerful WOM can be. In this instance, though Google created the initial groundswell, generating a mass of interest on a large scale, the bit of subject matter seems to be of greater interest than the actual Google campaign itself. That sounds like it should naturally be the case, but think about it. This is a solid example of WOM being used to sell a simple, good idea. I like to think that even if Google never intended to pull the trigger on installing broadband fiber anywhere, the awareness for the technology that this campaign raised would justify the investments.

To illustrate what’s currently happening, on April 15th “Google Island” (Sarasota, Florida’s Facebook page) posted:

“Due to the overwhelming support and momentum from the community…our leadership at city and county are putting together a team of key people to continue to push a broadband agenda.”

It sounds like Sarasota is pretty committed to fiber broadband (whether it’s from Google or not). That begs the question: did the mayor really need to jump into a shark-tank to spark activation with consumers? The honest answer is maybe. We tracked spikes in online conversation and activity around events such as the Google, Kansas rename, Duluth’s idea of renaming all firstborns Google and many other similar events that all certainly raised awareness for the fiber initiative and educated consumers on the value of having it available throughout their respective cities. The question now shifts from “How do we get Google’s attention?” to “How do we develop a strategy that will take the online interest generated by awareness for broadband fiber and translate it into something tangible for our community?”

Two people seem to be addressing that question. Jay Ovittore and Craig Settles started an initiative to carry the momentum of Google Fiber into something tangible by supporting communities and their leaders as they try to create fiber broadband on their own, without ‘winning’ fiber from Google. You can get more information on Communities United for Broadband here.

In another initiative that has popped up after Google’s deadline for RFIs had passed, Greenville, (South Carolina) has taken the initiative to make a website where people can vote for cities which they feel are most deserving of being awarded Google’s fiber. Not surprising, Greenville’s enthusiasm, which has been constant throughout the submission period, earned their city over 300,000 votes on the site. However, Asheville, North Carolina recently took the lead with over 400,000 votes. Duluth, Minnesota came in ‘third’ with over 12,000 votes with other cities on the list having far fewer votes, but the ‘ranking’ is open until May 6th.

The initiative is a great vehicle to continue to generate awareness, but there are questions as to how this site will ultimately contribute to getting broadband fiber connectivity. However it plays out, it will need to generate an opportunity outside of the Google initiative, because according to Greenville Online, a South Carolina news outlet, Google’s Product Manager Minnie Ingersoll said, “To be clear, our decisions will be based entirely on the responses and data we’ve gathered for our Request for Information.” She added, “This web site is not authorized by Google.” But the brains behind Greenville’s efforts thus far have been diligent, and it seems likely that they’ll look to create an angle to position their cause.

So where does all this leave us? Shark tanks, babies named ‘Google’ and more brought us to here, and now all the people who put so much time and energy into their efforts on behalf of their respective cities are playing a waiting game while Google decides how they want to proceed. And yet, many of the people involved in all of this don’t seem content to wait and are now turning their efforts toward picking up the broadband fiber torch independently of any help from Google and continuing their local groundswells in pursuit of what they set out for – better connectivity.

No matter how things turn out, the most relevant insight in all of this is that a good idea is a good idea (high speed broadband fiber connectivity), and if you craft a solid strategy for communicating its value proposition (like Google did), people will take ownership of the idea and respond. And regardless of who owned or owns the share of voice online for this initiative and ultimately who Google chooses to work with to install Google Fiber, this campaign is a fantastic example of how effective (and ineffective) traditional and non-traditional communications can be used together to not only generate awareness, but to inspire whole communities and affect real change.

On that note, and based on Google’s post on its official blog that it will be making its selection “…by the end of the year,” we have decided to take a step back from our weekly reports, evaluate the number of cities participating in online efforts around the initiative to make sure that we have the most inclusive list possible and then resume our efforts on a regular basis until Google makes its final decision. Again, we’re not saying in any way that Google is using online share of voice as a factor in its decision making process, but we still want to make sure that everyone knows who the top contenders are around this metric and what they are doing to try to get Google’s attention online. And given Google’s tip of the cap to Topeka today, the question has to be asked: does it hurt to go out of your way a bit to stay top of mind in the digital world?

So, look for our next report sometime in April, and thanks to everyone who continues to send in insights and requests on behalf of your city – we are taking as much relevant information into account as we can. In the meantime, make sure you continue to include your city in your tagging strategy, as we’ll continue to base our search for data on the participating cities, and please don’t hesitate to email me at david.greiner@sgandco.com with questions, concerns and anything else I should know is going on in your world.

Finally, and this is way past due, thanks to Martin at Zettaphile for his efforts in compiling the original list of Google fiber cities on his blog. It was our starting point.

Thanks and again, best of luck to everyone!

David

Before you hit up the comments section and start a debate over which one of you hates ME more, please hear me out. I am not trying to be a rogue designer that just wants to be different (and tick people off in the process). And it’s not that I didn’t pay attention during Typography 210 (or something like that), where we were told which fonts were good, which were bad and which was the greatest (Helvetica, supposedly).

I also understand that Helvetica is arguably over-used, but that doesn’t even bother me. Honestly, it is a nice typeface; it has great, safe characteristics which make it viable for a lot of applications and mediums.

But…I can’t stand the capital ‘R’. The descender is awkward to say the least. For a typeface with such little connotative character, where did this rolling leg come from? The rest of the family is so sterile, so defined, so geometric, but the ‘R’ is so, so confusing.

To me, it looks likes Max Miedinger played “Pin the Tail on the P.” Sure, he put it in the right place (impressive for having been blind-folded), but that is to be expected from such letterforms displayed in the rest of the  family.

Or maybe his hand slipped when finishing out the letter. Many long nights have been put into his work, the accidental yawn / slip could be expected.

Whatever the case may be, I can’t stand it. Now, I realize that I have been praising the rest of what Helvetica has to offer, so I guess I have to retract my previous statement a bit. I actually hate 1/26th (not counting numbers or punctuation, who needs those anyway?) of the entire family (from 27 to 93).

And I thought I was the only one that had this growing internal irritation with Helvetica. I mean, it’s so universally loved that there was a movie made because of the impact and popularity of the typeface. But I have 2 “R’s” in my last name, and seeing it set all caps in Helvetica makes my left eye twitch a little.  Luckily, in my research (to prove I am not crazy) I found this guy. It’s comforting to know I am not alone.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I will ever like the capital ‘R’ in Helvetica. I don’t change my appetite much, considering I still don’t like grapes, bananas or many other forms of fruit.

I want to hear from you though. Let me know whether your a lover or a hater (of Helvetica that is, not me).

Cheers!

Kyle

With all of that said, our next report will cast a broader net in hopes of pulling in some of the disparate Facebook pages and other digital channels that need to be included for participating cities to be accurately analyzed and ranked. We will also be including some insights along the line of what I’ve explained above.

In the meantime, thanks to everyone taking the time to comment. Please continue to contribute any data that may be relevant to our efforts and tune in late next week for the next report.

Good luck everyone, and keep the conversations going. We’ll be monitoring.

David

With community events for Google’s fiber initiative beginning on March 19^th and the growing level of online community involvement that’s building here in Grand Rapids, we put together the first in a series of reports measuring the digital conversations and online efforts surrounding the participating cities looking to have Google’s hyper-speed fiber communications lines installed, creating a rank of the top 10 candidate cities by share of the total conversation happening around the initiative online.

This first report ranks the aspiring cities by share of total number of mentions in conversations happening between February 15 to March 17 on digital media channels, and we’ll continue to publish reports weekly showing the collected digital efforts and rankings of the top 10 cities until Google makes its final choice.

Google has multiple factors in their decision making process, including how interested a community is in working with Google, community support, local activities, needs and resources, approved construction methods, local regulatory issues and area broadband speeds. Most participating cities assert that online interaction in their campaigns will increase the chances of favorability in their selection by Google, and we’ll be presenting the data and insights that will ultimately show how important a factor online share of voice is in the process.

The first report is available for download here. Just click on the image below. And stay tuned for additional reports in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: As we continue our research and measurement for our next report, we’ve noticed that some cities’ online efforts are being conducted around nicknames relevant to their campaigns or local communities, rather than the direct name of the city (Ann Arbor and Sarasota, we’re looking at you!). Based on this, we’re filtering at more detailed levels to make sure we’re capturing that information and reporting accurately. We invite any city involved in the initiative NOT directly using their name for their online efforts to reach out to us (either through a comment below or through our Twitter feed – @steketeegreiner) with any specific search terms to make sure that we have your city represented properly.

Thanks! David

Check out Judy’s “un-resolutions” for 2010 from adage.com.

Posted by Judy Shapiro on 12.29.09 @ 04:38 PM

1. I will not get seduced by any new digital marketing toy just because some industry pundit thinks it’s the coolest thing to hit the street. Nor will I believe every promise made by every new marketing technology company.
2. I will not abandon common sense in digital marketing and be blinded by digital agencies’ promises that their “new” campaigns will go viral and get millions of people engaged. I will continue to listen to my gut and if it sounds too good to be true, that’s a red flag warning I will heed.
3. I will not abandon newspaper, magazines, radio and other forms of traditional media if it is the right vehicle. No matter how sexy digital media may seem because of the perceived lower cost, I will continue to create integrated programs that weave together the best of both the traditional and digital worlds.
4. I will not give up my attachment to e-mail marketing. Sorry folks — but e-mail marketing done well drives real business results. If your e-mail campaign did not work, either you had a bad list or an inadequate call-to-action or maybe your agency did not know what they were doing.
5. I will not be fooled into thinking that the ad market is going to rebound in 2010. Nope. The ad market will continue to be buffeted by the tides of an evolving economic landscape and by consumers’ ever fickle attraction to new tech toys like mobile devices. These trends will continue to dampen ad revenue for publishers for some time to come.
6. I will not blindly follow Google as they chow down every tech industry from telecom to digital publishing in their relentless march toward digital dominance. In the process, they stifle competition and kill real innovation by companies who deserve to succeed.
7. I will not diminish my slavish devotion to data-driven marketing no matter what new platforms come out that can behaviorally target any audience any way I wish. I know, I know — the BT folks can slice and dice an audience so many ways that it makes a marketer salivate. But unless I can see, touch and feel the data, I will pass for now.
8. I will not start following every Tom, Dick and Jane to gain more Twitter followers. OK, so I only have about 185 folks following me but at least I know they read what I tweet. Quality, not quantity, is what drives social media.
9. And my final un-resolution: I will not try appear to be “30-something” (with a suitable amount of hair product) just because I love digital marketing. I know that the median age of people in digital marketing tends to be 27, but my depth in this space has yielded real-world, hard-won recognition. What you see (gray hair and all) is what you get.

SRM focuses on three areas: Engagement, Crowdsourcing and Monetization.  Social Networks offer so many fantastic features it naturally creates an engaging experience. Brand-to-fan dialogue, photos, videos, polls, custom content, etc. It is a rich tool kit for brand managers.  And, as fanbases grow, they can be mined for valuable insights.  Which name do you prefer for our new granola bar?  What feature would you like to see on our next video game?  Your fans have opinions and they want to be heard.  For most brands, the numbers are not there to be statistically significant, but it is a fast and free way to get a quick read and supplement your market research.  The real question is how do we leverage our fans to increase sales? Certainly there are tried and true options: special offers, promotions, discounts, sweepstakes, gwps, etc.  However, the risk lies in breaking the brand-to-consumer unwritten social code.  “Do not heavy sell me on my social network” or at least too much.  Social networks are not advertising channels, and fans are very leery of brands that sell rather than engage.  An exclusive offer every now and then is welcome and keeps the site valuable to the fans, but excessive promotion, especially those found in other channels, is just advertising.

So what is an ideal SRM ratio?  Certainly there are no clear rules on this, but the 80/20 rule is a great place to start.  80% of communication should be engaging content revealing more brand insights and drawing the fans in closer. The remaining 20% should align with the brand value.  I’ve seen a large discount retailer provide numerous promotions and offers on their site and judging by the extensive comments, it is very well received.  It aligns with the low-cost value offering and it is what their fans expect.  Obviously premium brands would take a different approach.  To start, I recommend an 80/10/10 content platform then let the testing begin.

Social media is evolving so quickly, the industry is still determining the best practices to take advantage.  We take what we know and evolve, test and mold into actionable strategies for today’s social business environment.  If you don’t have a clear SRM strategy for your brand’s social presence the 80/10/10 Engagement, Crowdsourcing, Monetization ratio is a good place to start.