11/27/2008 – Thanksgiving Day and my baby girl’s first birthday.
The family woke up at 8:00AM highly anticipating: Jaye’s pumpkin muffins, turkey, cranberries, Nana’s gourmet mashed potatoes with squash (and cream!), Nana’s traditional yam casserole with oatmeal and cranberries and marshmallows, (which let’s face it is a richer version of apple crisp that we pass off as a side dish) string beans, creamed onions (which never got made this year), two kinds of cranberry sauce which the kids dubbed cranberry relish and cranberry jel-ish, pumpkin, pecan and apple pie, and birthday cake.
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
We attempt to watch the parade with the kids, but they are too wound up. The baby goes down for a nap and Jaye takes the other 2 for a walk in the double jogger. I work on belching monkey while the baby zomps. Wife gets back from the walk, the baby wakes up from her nap and we furiously get ready (at the last minute) for overnight at Nana’s which is 45 minutes away.
The Call
Just as we are about to leave, Jaye’s phone rings. Why do we even say that phones ring anymore? Almost nobody’s phone rings. They usually sing or play a song to let us know that someone is calling. My tone for Gregory Ng is a digital sound. Jaye’s is boing-boing-boing. Anyway, I’m still popping a squat on the couch geeking away when I hear from the kitchen: “THE TURKEY IS ROTTEN!”.
The Motrin product marketing team sat; focused and determined, around the boardroom and pondered new positions that would put them top-of-mind for every(wo)man’s pain relief. They wanted to let consumers know that their product is the most convenient way to consistently relieve any kind of physical pain for long periods of time.
The question was: “How could this young swat team of Hugo Boss wearing, martini drinking, Wii-playing, Mazerati driving, coed-chasing, millionaire playboys and playgirls get themselves into a state-of-mind that would allow them to truly feel the pain of the consumer?” More Martinis? No. They’ve already discovered Intoxidote. More Late Night Partying? No. They’d been getting by with 4-6 hours of sleep since university.
How would they get into character so that they truly understood the problem? And then it came to them. In order to have their own headaches, they needed to take their cushy, Madison Avenue lifestyles and flip-turn them into massive migraines. Since Pete had been working a lot with Flash of late and since they had been looking for a way to test that social media thing out, they came up with this (below) in an effort to get them into trouble with the top brass and threaten their very way of life:
With Twitter moms enraged and every Google search coming up with scorching disapproval (even it is largely from one small segment of the net), the Chiefs are sure to have their thinkers working round-the-clock thinking of a new spin. Genius! The young guns had done it again. Motrin anyone?
On November 4th, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States of America.
And at least one person wanted me to let my network know that they were unhappy about it.
Let’s back up. During the election, 1,745,754 people 
set 4,896,031 statuses that reminded people to vote for either Barack Obama or John McCain. Given that more than 90% of the people in my network had donated their statuses, I deemed this a good opportunity to buck the trend and set my own status to [STATUS FOR RENT]. the Michael Schneider is a charitable guy, but when it comes to my personal brand, I am a marketer and only willing to whore my status out to a candidate (or anyone else) if they are willing to trade goods, services or currency.
I set my rate to $200 for one hour or $1500 for 24 hours. Once it became clear that Obama would be elected, one of the McCain supporters in my network told me that they wanted to rent my status and that they wanted me to set it to OBAMA BITES IT.
Given the cut rate negotiated (I wanted to be a pioneer!), I set the rule that I would be able to indicate that I had, indeed, rented my status in the message.
Has anyone else done this? How about being paid to tweet/plurk a message?
In Field of Dreams, Ray Liotta says “If you build it, he will come.” He’s talking about Shoeless Joe Jackson. People often misquote it as “If you build it, they will come.” I’m one of those people and I’m here to use that analogy to make my point which is this: You can build the coolest, hottest, social-est community on the worldwideweb and it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than launching the damn thing to get people to congregate.
Three Must Haves When Building an Online Community
Promotion
People need to be able to find the thing. Organic search is your friend, but it is also a lot like a Miracle Gro. You will see the benefits, but that tomato you planted today is not going to bare fruit tomorrow. With a little bit of audience analysis, you can target the sites they prefer and put up some banner ads that will assist your paid search.
Seeding
Get some creative people to seed content for you. If you are Staples and you are putting together a new site, it’s a no-brainer to talk to the people who live your brand every day. I would love to see Staples partner with Lifehacker and have them show people their vision for the Speakeasy. I could see Lifehacker with a budget from Staples and a bunch of creative things to do with their products that make life easier. The Speakeasy needs video content, but I do not want to pick on Staples (in this post).
Training
Video is the ultimate new training tool. Throw together a montage of someone using the site. Show the features and be sure to use an inspirational example. Software tools are doing this really effectively right now. In fact, some of them are doing it in lieu of doing anything else.
TRiiPLES from Jeffrey Hau on Vimeo.
