I was watching a UFC show called “All Access” the other day - it’s a behind the scenes show that covers how UFC fighters train - and I noticed that the show had “Blue Chip” branding all over it.  I didn’t know what Blue Chip was, but later in the show they showed an URL for Blue Chip, evidently a sports collectible company.

Now here’s the funny part: www.bluechip.com loads a empty Web page related to something called the “Telamon Project Tracking System”. There’s no mention of Blue Chip anywhere. A first I thought I had made a typo in the URL, but that wasn’t the case. Next I thought “Ok, maybe it’s .net or something else” but a Google search for Blue Chip Sports failed to turn up any likely candidate that would have sponsored this UFC TV show. Was this some sort of typo in the domain? Or did BlueChip.com at one point have a sports collectible store, but they went out of business before the UFC show aired? Did they also have zero Google juice? That’s a bit hard to believe unless they started up this company last month.

At any rate, the lesson here is clear: if you’re going to sponsor a TV show, make sure they get your domain right, and that your company will last long enough to see some benefits from it.

Jeremy has put together a list of 10 tips for PR people that are working with bloggers, and it’s a great read. Here’s one of his tips:

“Do your homework.  Most blogs have an ‘about’ page, in which you’ll discover the blogger’s full-time job (assuming it isn’t blogging), region of the country/world where they live, topics they prefer to cover, how they’d like to be contacted (bonus tip: IM or email is almost always the answer, not the phone), etc.  Read this and understand it.  Furthermore, doing a little background research will quickly tell you whether or not the blogger is good at keeping secrets/embargos (some do, some don’t - learn the difference).”

I’ve received probably 100+ press releases from PR firms in the past 30 days leading up to CTIA, and it’s stunning how completely random and un-targeted they are. I can tell that 99.9% of the people sending them to me have never visited any of my sites, and know absolutely nothing about me or what kinds of things I cover. It’s no surprise then that I delete 99.9% of them without wasting my time reading them.

Jeremy also has a great post covering 10 tips for bloggers working with PR people, and it’s also a good read. Having a background in PR myself, I tend to know what the PR people want and don’t want - but if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that #10 (Setting Expectations) is my biggest problem. I have a real struggle finding the discipline to write reviews in a timely, consistent manner - and more often than not I find myself apologizing to PR people for taking so damn long to write my reviews. It’s something I really wanted to improve upon in 2007, but I have to admit it’s proving to be harder than I thought. I’ll keep at it though!

I’ve been a VistaPrint customer for a few years now, mostly because they offer prices that can’t matched by anyone local - and the print quality is excellent. But I’m amazed at how often they send me “specials”. Just for fun I kept track of all of the messages I recieved from them over a nine day period:

Six messages over a nine day period? That’s an average of one message every 36 hours. They all pretty much contain the same deals as well - every one offers 99 cent business cards, so after a while (a short while) as a customer I don’t percieve their “specials” as being special at all. It’s like that store in the mall that has had a “90% Going Out of Business Sale” banner hung over their storefront for the past two years. The value of the marketing effort is diminished, if not destroyed, by over-use. And in some ways, it can even backfire: I’m starting to resent VistaPrint for their insanely high volume of email. I could unsubscribe from their mailing list - yes - but since I do order products from them every couple of months I’d have to sign up again and again. So instead I delete their messages as soon as I see them, without even looking, pausing only when I need their products. Hardly an ideal situation to put a long-term customer in, is it?

Ideally as a customer I’d like to control the frequency that I’m marketed to: if the company decides that sending out a promotion every 36 hours is good business for them, I’d like to recieve their best deals once ever two weeks. Give control to your customer and he’ll be more receptive to your marketing efforts.

Microsoft released some documentation for software developers recently, and their document on branding was an interesting read. Here’s a short quote:

“Branding is the emotional positioning of a product as perceived by its customers. Product branding is achieved through a combination of factors, including the product name and logo, use of color, text, graphics, and sound, the style of various other design elements, marketing, and most importantly, the attributes of the product experience itself. Successful branding requires skillful crafting of a product image, and is not achieved simply by plastering a product logo on every surface and using the product’s color scheme at every opportunity. Rather, meaningful and high quality branding that enhances users’ experience will be much more successful.”

Much of it is specific to Windows Vista and applications that will install into Windows Vista, but I’d say anyone creating a product should give this a read to help them think about what branding is, does, and why it’s so important. I wish more companies in the world understood the need to create great customer experiences from end to end. Companies often bemoan Apple’s success in many markets, and wonder why they can’t achieve the same thing - they could, if they paid attention to the customer experience and stopped letting engineers and software developers make all the decisions.

That’s a photo (nasty Treo 750 cameraphone!)  from the Switchfoot concert that Ashley and I went to on February the 21st. Switchfoot is a “crossover” band in that they’re started out in the CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) scene and later made a splash in the mainstream music scene. So while they undoubtedly have a large fan base in the secular market now, a good chunk of their long-term fans are of the Christian variety. I first heard of Switchfoot a few years ago when someone I knew was doing a video project and used the song “Dare You To Move“. It’s a fantastic song with great lyrics and a killer hook. When I heard Switchfoot was coming to Calgary, I definitely wanted to go see them, so I bought some tickets (remember the Ticketmaster rant?).

A couple of weeks after I bought the Switchfoot tickets, I heard that one of my favourite bands of all time, Jars of Clay, was also coming to town - and that they were playing at MacEwan Hall at the University of Calgary, the same location as Switchfoot. My first thought was that they were playing the same show, because it made sense: two CCM bands, albet one more mainstream than the other. The curious part was that the show time was 30 minutes apart, and each band was selling separate tickets. I called Ticketmaster to try and get some details, and they couldn’t figure it out either how two bands could be listed at the same location at nearly the same time, but have two separately ticketed events.

I went to the show that night honestly not sure if I was going to see one band or two. When we got there it became clear: Switchfoot was playing in the bigger ballroom at MacEwan Hall, and Jars of Clay was playing a smaller venue within the same building.  So here I was, a fan of both bands, unable to see both concerts because they were happening at the same time. I quite honestly would have paid another $71.90 (two tickets) to see Jars of Clay later that night. Instead I felt conflicted that I had two non-refundable tickets to see Switchfoot, and couldn’t go see Jars of Clay without tossing out the $71.90 I’d alreay paid for the tickets and paying that much again to see Jars of Clay. In retrospect I wish I would have seen Jars of Clay - it would have been worth eating the $71 cost to me.

Why would the event planners make a decision like that, pitting two similar bands, with similar fan bases, against each other? They sacrificed what could have been a golden opportunity to earn more money by creating a mini-festival and charging more for the tickets. Someone wasn’t thinking like a marketing person should.

There’s nothing worse than running a technology news site, seeing a bit of news about something important, going to the official company Web site to look for the press release in their media section, and not finding anything other than old press releases. What possible excuse is there for the press release section of a major corporation to not be updated immediately when a press release is sent out?

I’ve seen this happen time and time again, and even when I get a press release by email I’ll usually want to link to the full thing online. When I email the PR person back asking them where it is on their Web site, the response I usually get is “Oh, we’ll have it up in a few days”. Not acceptable in the world we live in today.

Every now and then I’ll see a commercial on TV that strikes me as being particularly catchy or effective. CTV, a local TV station in my area, has created one that I thought blended a great song with great visuals. Lots of recognizable faces means a strong branding pull for CTV.

UPDATE: I’ve deleted it from Soapbox because I got a DMCA copyright violation notice from when I posted it on YouTube, so I expect I would have gotten another one for the Soapbox posting. A post on this later.

The following is a quote from Sean O’Driscoll’s blog. Sean is the General Manager of Microsoft’s MVP program, of which I am a 10 year vetran (a third of my life…scary!). Since I run online communities for a living, community is something that’s always on my mind. Sometimes people have a hard time grasping what online communities are, how they come into being, and why for many companies they can create massive opportunities - but also many challenges. Sean’s take on community was particularly interesting as he used an example from his own life:

“One of my hobbies (obsessions according to my wife) is BBQing. I won’t get into the passions that surround debate on this subject here, but be assured they are as strong and deep as any topic I’ve ever seen. So, here’s the story – and yes, it is 100% true (these must be for it to work). A few years ago, my wife bought me a BBQ for Christmas, technically a smoker (www.cookshack.com). One of the first things I did was go online to register the product. I immediately discovered an online community hosted at the site. By the end of the day, I was reading post after post from a guy named “smokin’ okie.” I was lurking like crazy all the time (and slowly starting to post). As the months went by, I didn’t really give this a lot of thought relative to my day job on communities at Microsoft. But, one day it hit me. I was using this BBQ WAY more frequently than the average person uses a BBQ. I was buying accessories for it. I was recommending it to others (I can name 5 people I recommended it to who now own one). I was using it in non-standard ways – things you won’t read in the manual (by the way, this really builds loyalty as you’re not sure you could do it with a competitor.)

It also dawned on me that my motivations for being in that community were very diverse. I sought recipes, trouble shooting, tips and tricks, product recommendations, social connections, and on and on – I was really forming relationships. Since then, that cookshack has become a center piece of a full outdoor kitchen I had built to extend my addiction to bbqing. So, how did this relate to Microsoft for me? Well, let me tell you, software and computers are not a lot different than BBQing. What does every company want? They want you to use their products more. They want you to use a richer set of its features and capabilities. They want you to add onto it. They want you to recommend it and they want it to become a focal point in your life. It’s really the dream scenario – if communities could do that for me with BBQ, couldn’t we do the same with software – another topic with massive passions!! Now, don’t use BBQing (unless it’s true for you), but do figure out what your “bbq story” is. What you are trying to do is create a vivid story that helps others discover their own story – then you’ve got them.”

That’s what online communities are all about: people with a shared interest coming together to trade information about their passion.

It’s funny how marketing people think sometimes: they’ll focus on all sorts of minute details, but when it comes down to the most important one, they forget it. Windows Live Messenger alerted me today that there was an update out - version 8.1. I declined to do an auto-update, so I clicked on the “More Info” link to (I thought) get taken to a page where I could download the setup program for 8.1 and install it at my leisure. I was taken to this site, a promotional area for Windows Live Messenger. I was expecting to see a “Download Now” link somewhere on there…nothing. I thought maybe it was a Firefox thing, so I loaded up the page in IE. Same thing. I clicked around to various pages and not one had a download. Lots of promotional material telling me how great the product is? Check. A download link so I could see for myself? Nada. I saw a feedback link, so I thought I could at least submit some input that a download link would be helpful. Clicking the link simply took me to the top of the page. Lame. I ended up having to manually edit the URL to get to a page with a download link. Doesn’t anybody check these things before they put it out for the whole world to see?

The ‘Net has sure allowed for some very interesting ways of doing business. My primary designer/developer for Thoughts Media lives in Italy. I just hired a developer in India, through Elance, to develop a script to allow me to upload and manage wallpaper images over at Zune Thoughts. Offshore hiring might be a problem if you’re the one getting underbid by people doing devleopment for $10 an hour, but if you’ve got a small business like mine and you have a limited budget, but have big goals, hiring help from other spots in the world - where your dollar goes further - is your only option. And it’s not like this is new - before companies started going offshore, they’d use interns or students for less expensive workplace help. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out…