This past weekend, I gave a presentation at BarCamp Tampabay about the changing media landscape, which we’ll post here sometime later.
Hopefully the attendees were able to get some value out of what I had to say, but creating the talk taught me a lesson as well: every business should be producing media and sharing knowledge. Jason Fried has said many times that the greatest byproduct of any business is knowledge, and I agree completely. The reason it’s called a “byproduct” is because it’s indeed a product, in that, it can be monetized. Even better, it can be a self-sufficient form of marketing.
The barriers to entry are low, too. People tend to forget that just 5 years ago, HD video cameras were expensive, there was much less bandwidth, and video sharing platforms like YouTube hadn’t been created yet. All that’s changed now, and the explosion of online video has made it apparent. Perhaps more profound, is the fact that any business or individual can create their own television show. Think about that for just a minute…
Anyone can make a TV show.
Jim and I have been producing Rock the Job in partnership with ADS for several months, and recently we picked up the Friday edition of the Ruby5 podcast that was started by EnvyLabs. Even though both of us have prior experience with media production, these two productions have really helped us learn a lot about the realities of actually putting together a show every week.
Now, we’re working on a new show called “Doctype” and we’re really excited about it. We’re not ready to announce its release, but if you enter your email over at Doctype.tv we’ll let you know when it’s up.
After Fabio Sasso’s awesome presentation at this year’s Front-End Design Conference, we caught up with him to find out what inspires him (which was the main focus of his talk). If you’re unfamiliar with Fabio, be sure to check out his AMAZING design blog, abduzeedo.com
In episode 7 of Rock the Job, Rob and I talk about finding your passion. This is something that’s really tricky to do, but I’m happy with the way this episode turned out. Check it!
It’s no secret that the Ruby (programming language) community likes to put out content in video format. However, video isn’t always the easiest thing keep track of when compared to text content like blogs, so it can be tough to know where all to find all the best videos.
If you’re in Orlando and you’ve never been to an Ignite event before, here’s your chance. Ignite is a unique event in which several speakers present on a variety of topics. The catch is, they only have 5 minutes and 20 slides, and the slides auto rotate every 15 seconds. As you can probably imagine, this makes for a very interesting show!
Jim’s presentation is called “Robots, Kids, and the Future of Engineering” and mine is called “Things I’ve Learned About Marketing.” If you can’t make it out, we should have videos here soon after. Don’t think that’s an excuse to stay home though. Did I mention that there will be beer?
Well, not so great I’m afraid. I grabbed Subway’s attention on Twitter by posting the following tweet:
Subway just responded today with this:
I have to give them credit for responding, but even so, there’s roughly 36 hours between my post and theirs. Normally this isn’t bad at all, but when the community is responding faster than you are, you can’t take a break. Take a look at all these retweets from yesterday, prior to their response:
When we released IE6Update, one of our motivations was our claim that most people don’t understand the difference between a browser and the Internet. Admittedly, we didn’t have any statistics to substantiate that assumption, and we were going on direct experience. Interestingly enough however, some Google employees in New York interviewed random individuals in Times Square and ask the question, “What is a browser?” Here’s what happened:
Tonight in marketing class, we had a guest speaker named Jeffrey Ganssle, the CEO of DiPasqua Enterprises. Jeff is responsible for allocating the marketing budget for over 90 Subway franchise locations in the Greater Orlando area, and while he was very knowledgeable about things like profit margins and customer loyalty, Internet marketing (namely social media) was barely a blip on his radar. Out of a $500,000,000 annual marketing budget at the national level, Subway only spends 2.5% on Internet marketing, most of which goes towards the unremarkable; banner ads. Pretty risky for a higher quality brand that has historically done very poorly when competing on price (sans the highly successful $5 foot long sub, of course).
A quick search on Facebook revealed about eight different fan pages carrying the Subway branding, the largest of which has over one million fans. Here’s the shocker though: None of the fan pages were “official.” Rather, they were started by either franchise owners or random people. The situation on Twitter is similar. When I asked Jeff about this, his response was that some franchise owners are more comfortable than others.
What? The fan page for TechCrunch, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, numbers in the mere thousands, even though the Internet is their home turf. So how can a Facebook fan page with over a million fans (not to mention the other Subway pages with hundreds of thousands of fans), go so unnoticed by their corporate marketeers? We live in an age where customer interaction is oftentimes what defines a brand, and many traditionalists have trouble loosening the reigns. There’s a point though, where the “official” brand needs to step in and bring order to the conversation.
But wait… there’s more! When I asked Jeff how he would react should he have a Domino’s Pizza situation on his hands, he was laser focused on prevention and censorship. Probably the most laughable thing he said was that cell phones with cameras shouldn’t be allowed. I can’t remember the last time I saw a handset without a camera.
He later admitted that he, along with others in the QSR industry, were scared out of their minds over this happening to them. The truth is, these things are going to happen no matter how rock solid the preventative measures are, so it’s the brand’s response that truly matters. Domino’s did an outstanding job recovering from the disastrous YouTube video by (imagine this) posting a YouTube video of their own from the President of Domino’s USA, immediately addressing the situation head on. They took a beating on Twitter, but they responded swiftly and did a great job answering people’s questions. Overall, Domino’s is probably better off because of the whole situation (this is called the service recovery paradox).
I’ve seen a lot of traditional brands miss the boat, but Subway takes the double meat cheese steak on this one.
UPDATE: Jeffrey Ganssle is in fact the COO, and not the CEO.
