RSVP Site for Hive Awards

Just a note for Toad Stool readers, to let you know that if you're planning to be in Austin at SXSW for the Hive Awards for the Unsung Heroes of the Internet, you can sign up at the official RSVP site hosted by KickApps and make sure you're not shut out.

Hope to see many of you there.

Possibly Addictive, But Worth It: If I Can Dream

I'll start this by admitting that I'm good friends with the partners at Poke and that I do a lot of work with them. But I had nothing to do with their latest project, If I Can Dream, and it's well worth checking out, for the breakthrough factor, if nothing else.


If I Can Dream is an online reality TV show that tracks 5 hopefuls: a musician, two actresses, an actor and model -- who live together in a Hollywood Hills mansion and watches as they try to break into show business.

Produced by American Idol creator Simon Fuller, the catch here is that the reality is online at all times: you can see in every room of the house and follow the actors around from room to room 24/7. You can also spin the camera to look at virtual versions of their rooms, where the Pokesters have created digital versions of the actual furniture on the other side of the camera complete with photo albums.

And since it's 2010, you can also connect with the characters on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Fuller and 19 Entertainment have a history of tapping into the popular zeitgeist, and they've put a lot of time and effort into this.

Curious to hear what you all think.

Homeaway.com Makes Sure No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

From the annals of Poor Customer Service: We recently stayed at a vacation condo we found through Homeaway.com. It was a lovely condo and the owners were particularly gracious and accommodating and helpful.

Since Homeaway.com allows users to review properties they've stayed in, and since people seem to use these reviews as an important part of the decision making process, I thought I'd repay our hosts by writing one.

And so my troubles began.

It was a pretty straightforward positive review. Without recreating it in its entirety (UPDATE: You can find it here, on Homeaway's sister site VRBO, see explanatory note below.)  the outline was basically:

1. The hosts were very gracious, down to providing a welcoming bottle of wine for us
2. The condo itself was clean, modern and well-equipped
3. The condo is on the grounds of a resort hotel and access to all the hotel's facilities is included - so I included a few positive comments on those facilities.
4. The condo is very close to a few attractions, so I suggested renting a car to see them.

That was it.

But within 10 minutes I got an email telling me that  "The review you submitted does not meet our guidelines and it cannot be posted at this time."

It referred me to the guidelines, which did not provide a clue as to what was wrong with the review.

Thinking that perhaps they use an automated program to flag reviews (versus an actual human) that I had somehow set off, I emailed them to ask what was up and what in particular did not meet their guidelines as I was baffled.

I got back an incredibly unhelpful (and likely automated) reply from Kim in customer service telling me that

We received your email requesting to know why your review was rejected. In order for HomeAway to publish user generated reviews, we must create and adhere to a set of policies that govern how, when, and why content can be posted on our website. Your review did not conform with these Traveler Review Guidelines. We encourage you to take a few minutes to read over the guidelines: http://reviews.homeaway.com/unitreview/guidelines. When you’re ready, we welcome you to submit a revised review that complies with our guidelines.

I've emailed her back requesting that she specifically call out what was objectionable, but my suspicion is that Kim is a computer program and I will receive a similarly unhelpful automated reply.

Result: One formerly enthusiastic HomeAway.com customer lost, and the thousands of people who read this blog each week forewarned.

UPDATE: As I'd mentioned in a comment below, Homeaway.com also owns VRBO.com (Vacation Rental By Owner) which is maintained as a separate site, though the two have much overlap. I submitted the same review to both sites, as the property is listed both places. For some reason it was deemed acceptable for VRBO and you can see it here.

Interaction Burnout

It’s hard to believe it was only around two years ago that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh started following and (more importantly talking to) people who mentioned Zappos on Twitter. This was more or less around the same time that Frank Eliason started tweeting for Comcast, talking up-- and calming down-- people who were having trouble with their service installers.

What followed was a mad rush to social media, where the goal was to obtain the level of seemingly effortless one-on-one interaction, brand love (and glowing press) Hsieh and Eliason were able to create for their respective brands.

And despite the fact that most brands are still in the consideration stage when it comes to social media, the brands that have dipped their toes into the water are already driving us towards something I’ll call “interaction burnout.”

To put that in human terms, imagine needing to have a full on conversation with everyone you met over the course of your day. Not just a “nice morning” or “looks like rain” exchange, but a full-on conversation with the gas station attendant, the dry cleaner, the security guard, the guy in the next cube.

Now imagine that almost every one of these conversations feels forced and stilted.

Because that’s what it feels like with so many brands. They all want to talk to you. Show you some pictures. Get you to play a game with them. And you know, we’re all pretty busy and there are only so many unnatural conversations we can have during the day. And so suddenly we’re wishing they’d just run a banner ad or a TV commercial and be done with it. Anything that we could just read or look at without having to stop to talk to them.

Much of this unnecessary patter is due to the unrealistic expectations brands (and the agencies and consultants that enable them) have for social media. Where, in a misguided quest for easily understood metrics, success has come to mean x number of Twitter followers or y number of Facebook Fan Page updates each month

Period.

Which basically recreates the old push media model, only with different media vehicles and ignores the presence (or lack thereof) of any actual interactions.

But there’s another side to all this I keep thinking about too. Which is that the early social media success stories happened because they were both unexpected and real. I mean most people were pretty shocked that the person tweeting as “Zappos CEO Tony” really was the actual CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh and not some behind-the-scenes PR person. The fact that Hsieh was actually  funny and had real personality only added to the mystique.

And that’s the thing: most companies don’t have a cool, funny CEO. Or one who is as comfortable being out there as Hsieh is. Brands, especially bigger ones, don’t really know how to have actual conversations (or their legal departments won't let them) so they resort to the sort of fake party banter (“Great! See you there!”) or plastic sales pitches (“Check out our new spring line!”) that only serve to make interaction painful.

We also expect them now. We’re not all that shocked when a brand follows us and then tweets offers at us. Or has a fun-filled Facebook page waiting for us to fan it. It’s kind of old hat and much as we like wasting time on Facebook, we don’t have time to interact with every single brand we like, especially if we’re mainly there to interact with our friends.

And, as we all know, Your Brand Is Not My Friend™.

So what to do?

Well, social media, to repeat one of my favorite mantras, is not a series of websites with no discernable revenue streams. It’s a behavior: the ability to interact with a site or application and have that interaction recorded, publicly, online.

And that behavior is not going away.

But rather than force consumers into awkward conversations or pseudo conversations, thus guaranteeing that they’ll do their best to avoid you, maybe the thing to do is just listen. To respond when appropriate and not try and butt into the conversation every four hours because it’s an easy way to justify a community manager’s salary or because you're paying your agency based on the number of tweets they issue.

We also need to realize that the same way most people don’t become the life of the party, not every brand is going to be a wiz at charming customers. And the solution to that isn’t to try and force them to be, but rather to accept that either:

1. You’re going to need to change and that means everyone in the company, not just the intern you hired to run the Twitter feed.
2. You need to find one particular area of social media you feel comfortable with - which might just be a blog or a YouTube channel -- and concentrate on being really, really good at that, especially if it makes sense in terms of who your customers are.
3. You may decide it’s not for you and stick to a 100% traditional paid push media plan. That’s not a great long-term strategy, but it’s a lot better than keeping up a really awkward and uninteresting social media program, thus contributing to interaction burnout.

I’ll leave you with this quote from a smart young guy named Matt Daniels “Marketing has a bell curve–most companies create average marketing and achieve average results.”

Why did we think social media was going to be any different?

What 'Thug Life' Can Teach Us About Twitter (new Ad Age column)

This ought to stir the pot up a little:

This Ignored Demographic Shows What You Can Learn When You Look Beyond Social-Media Elites

While most in the social media bubble would have you believe that Twitter's output consists solely of links to "relevant articles," "breaking news stories," "unique insights" or retweets of all three (along with the occasional "what I'm having for dinner" tweet from the latest Asian-Fusion-locavore bistro) a look at Twitter's Trending Topics reveals otherwise.

While the aforementioned geek patter is certainly in there, it's generally dwarfed on the trending topics list by tweets about Disney Channel stars the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus (put out, one can safely assume, by middle-school-aged females) and tweets from another demographic, twenty-something African-Americans tweeting in what can best be described as ghetto slang. (READ THE REST OVER AT AD AGE)

UPDATE, 2.10.10: The article got picked up by Gawker, where it sits amidst snarky posts on American Idol and Gossip Girl. (All press is good press though, right?)

Super Bowl Ad Viewer

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My friend Ian Schafer turned me on to this Super Bowl ad viewer, courtesy of Forbes magazine. Given how much people like to talk about these commercials, I thought it would be a good idea to add it here.

I'll throw out an initial thought: how many of you, having spent the past year pretty much avoiding commercials of any sort (by using DVR, iTunes, Hulu, etc.) are actually kind of psyched to watch this year's crop since you rarely get to see :30 or :60 TV spots anymore? (And yes, I realize that readers of this blog are way ahead of the curve in terms of media usage.)

The iPhone, The Kindle App & Me

In the swirl of debate around the iPad, one of the things I kept reading from iPaddies was that it was "impossible to read books on an iPhone."

And so I feel compelled to point out that's just not true.

I've been reading books on my iPhone for the past six months, using the Kindle app and it's been a very positive experience. I'm reading a lot more in total, able to read in a lot more situations and I'm reading things I might not have tackled previously due to their sheer volume. That's 32 books in total, ranging from history books like Harrison Salisbury's 900 Days, The Siege of Leningrad to business books like Gary Vaynerchuk's Crush It! to novels like the (excellent) City of Thieves by David Benioff and Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese. (And yes, reading City of Thieves did indeed lead me to the Salisbury book.)

I did not expect to like reading books on an iPhone. In fact, I'd probably have bet a four-figure sum of money that I'd hate it. But Random House was giving away some books for free, one of which was Whiskey Rebels by David Liss, a book I'd been meaning to read anyway, so I figured I'd give it a try.

I was hooked. Here's why

• I always have my book with me. No more realizing I left it on the nightstand or on my desk.
• It's easy to take it out in situations where a full-on book would be unwieldy- e.g. standing on line in a store.
• It's one less thing to have to carry around
• I can read at night without having to keep a lamp on and waking up my wife.
• The app always opens up to the exact page I was at - no forgetting the bookmark and trying to remember what page I was on.
• The only negative - frequent page turning - is not so negative when you read in small chunks of time - I actually feel like I'm making progress, even if all I've read are four iPhone sized pages. And even when I do read for an hour or two, it's not really bothersome and most times I'm not aware of it.
• Finding my place again if I skip forward or backward is a bit tricky, but mostly involves remembering what # on the slider bar I was at. More cumbersome than sticking my finger on the page in an actual book, but a minor hassle nonetheless.
• Kindle samples. Amazon often gives you the first chapter or so to read as a "sample." At which point you can decide if you want to continue and buy the book or just move on.

But of all the above, I'd have to say that the two key pluses were "one less thing to carry around" and "it's always with me." 

PS: Whispersync is one of the sillier tech names out there - it's not like syncing is particularly noisy or anything.

If you're blogger or podcaster, you can enter the Hive Awards for just $29!!

Final deadline has been extended to February 15th and the show will be at SXSWi in Austin!  ENTER HERE

The Obligatory iPad Post

I’ll keep this short and sweet.

Yeah, it’s cool and it’d be fun to have one.

Sort of the way it’d be fun to have a Lamborghini or some other essentially useless Italian sportscar.

For most of the trumpeted uses of the iPad, it all comes down to one basic question: why would I want to do that on a really great small(ish) screen (that doesn't fit into my pocket the way my iPhone can) when I can do it on a really great big screen?

Seriously.

Keynote is trying enough on my 13-inch MacBook screen (compared to the usual 24 inch monitor I use) why would I want to work with it on a smaller screen?

Video? Have you ever tried to watch anything longer than a YouTube clip on a hand-held device? Can you say “neck pain” or “hand cramp”?

Photos. If I’m serious about them, I’ll want a big screen to do graphics. And if I’m showing someone my vacation photos, the iPhone is just fine.

Newspapers and magazines will look better on the iPad, but I’m not sure that usage alone will convince most of us to part with $500-800.

Ditto iBooks. I have been reading books on my iPhone for the past 6 months and I’m very happy with the experience (though I didn’t initially think I would be.) What’s more, I actually find I’m reading a whole lot more. Mostly because the iPhone is always with me. Whereas the iPad is just one more device to schlep around.

There’s nothing wrong with the iPad - I’m sure each and every experience on there is well-designed and delightful to use. It’s just that it doesn’t fulfill a need the way the iPod and iPhone did. Both those devices did things that were instantly recognizable as “Yes! I’ve been wishing I could do that for the longest time!” moments.

The iPad is cool, but Jobs did not offer up that “ah-hah” moment today, the one that lets people say “of course I need this.”

Maybe they will in time, but not yet. Which is not to say I won’t be keeping my eye on how iPad usage develops as people actually begin to play with it, but for right now, I’m choosing to be a not-so-early adopter.

PS: Am I the only one who thought it was weird that Jobs' spreadsheet example involved someone obsessively keeping stats on an 8 year old soccer team? I coach youth sports teams enough to know that's sort of creepy.

PPS: Don't forget to enter the Hive Awards for the Unsung Heroes of the Internet