Web Ink Now

Attention Delta Airlines -- Do you really have to rub it in?

Nearly a year ago (February 4, 2007 to be exact), I planned, booked, and paid for a vacation for my family this holiday season to Belize. My daughter, a freshman in high school, has very limited availability due to the school calendar and her competitive swim schedule (she trains every day for 10 months a year), so we have severely limited windows of opportunity for vacations. The only time this trip would work was from December 20 through December 31 and we always book early and suck up the high prices to travel in peak season. We found an amazing place to stay and booked air travel on Delta Airlines.

Then disaster struck.

We got a message from Delta Airlines on October 21 telling us "your itinerary has changed" and we were now on a flight departing on December 24 (four days later). Since that meant the holiday was reduced by four days, it wouldn't work for us. Yikes! I called Delta and we were told they canceled our flights and the others were all full until four days later. Delta essentially said "sorry you lose."

We were disappointed but had no choice but to cancel completely. Because Delta (who took our money for six months) didn't tell us until a few months prior to departure, we couldn't find another flight schedule that worked based on our limited window of opportunity.

OK, so far, it's just bad luck. Then the situation deteriorated to the ridiculous:

Today we got a message from "Delta Messenger" with the subject line Make your trip easier.

Looking for ways to make your holiday travel easier? Here are a few time-saving holiday travel tips to get you from home base to dinner plate as quickly as possible:

> Arrive three hours prior to your scheduled departure time. Remember, parking and getting through security may take longer than expected.
> Know the airport security guidelines and remember to pack your 3-ounce containers of liquids in a single quart-size, clear plastic, zip-top bag before arriving at the airport.
> Review useful resources for finding out what you need to know, new passport requirements and which forms you need to get and where to get them.

Happy Travels (and Holidays)!

Want to know what the weather is like in Belize City, Belize?

Thanks for choosing Delta; we're looking forward to seeing you.

Attention Delta – you screwed up my family vacation and now you want to wish me happy travels and tell what the weather is like in Belize? This is absurd! I'm sitting in a snow bound place wishing I could go where you promised and then you say I can't go and now you want to wish me "Happy Travels" and remind me about the warm weather that I can’t experience?

Do you really have to rub it in?

This is a great illustration of a stupid email system. When a reservation is canceled, it should also remove the automatic email reminders. Otherwise you piss off people like me.

We ended up booking a new vacation during a school holiday week later in the year. But this time it is on JetBlue, not Delta...

For best results, stick it in the fridge

Have you noticed that most product packaging falls into two categories. It's either dreadfully boring (as if it were written by someone who has never has any fun). Or it is chock full of inane corporate gobbledygook "this flexible, cutting-edge product will improve your business process."

I always think this crap is just written to fill up white space on product packages and I've often thought there is a better way.

This weekend, coutesy of my 14-year-old daughter, I found a cool example of how to do it better -- Glaceau vitaminwater. My daughter is a competitive swimmer and takes a bottle of vitaminwater to most meets. The other day, she casually mentioned to me that she and her friends like to read the labels on vitaminwater bottles.

Hold on! This I gotta check out—teenagers reading product packaging!

All the bottles have this helpful information:
"for best results, stick it in the fridge."
"the inside is natural. The outside is plastic."

And each of the dozen or so flavors has a fun essay on the label. Check this great writing out:

Revive
fruit punch
If you woke up tired, you probably need more sleep. If you woke up drooling at your desk, you probably need a new job. If you woke up with a headache, on a Ferris wheel at the Idaho state fair, wearing a toga, you probably need answers, not to mention this product. Its got potassium and B vitamins to help you recover and feel refreshed—kinda like in those old Irish Spring soap commercials. And if you’re like our boss, Mike, and woke up married to an Elvis impersonator, you probably need a lawyer.

XXX
acai-blueberry-pomegranate
C’mon, get your mind out of the gutter. We only named this drink XXX because it has the power of triple antioxidants to help keep you healthy and fight free radicals. So in case you’re wondering, this does not cost $1.99/minute or contain explicit adult content or anything considered ‘uncensored’. It has not 'gone wild!!!' during spring break nor will clips of it be passed around the internet like a certain hotel heiress, and it has never been seen live or nude, but it is definitely au naturale.

Power-C
Dragonfruit
Legally we are prohibited from making exaggerated claims about the potency or the nutrients in this bottle. Therefore, legally we wouldn’t tell you that after drinking this, Eugene from Kansas started using horseshoes as a thighmaster or that this drink gave Agnes from Delaware enough strength to bench press llamas, Heck, we can’t even tell you this drink gives you the power to do a thousands pinkie pushups… just ask Mike in Queens. Legally, we can’s say stuff like that—cause that would be wrong, you know?

Yeah, it is cool. Great writing can exist on product packaging as vitaminwater has proven. What about your product?

By the way, while the product packaging is great, the vitaminwater Web site absolutely sucks. It is an inane flash-driven site that looks pretty but doesn’t deliver any real information. Ugh.

Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae – buy a copy for your boss*

When I deliver keynote speeches and run seminars at companies, I am often asked for advice on how to convince the bosses that the new rules of marketing really work. Frequently people say something like: "My bosses make me prove ROI before I can do this online thought leadership and viral marketing stuff."

My cynical answer is: "What’s the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?"

But then I suggest that people to ask their boss if in the past few months, they've made a product or service decision based on a direct mail piece they received or a based on a TV advertisement. (Almost no bosses have). Then they should ask their boss if in the past few months they've used Google or another search engine to make a product or service decision. (Virtually all bosses have).

Well now I have something else to suggest. Buy a copy of Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? for your bosses.* Tell them it is an important book. Meatball Sundae will be your tool to help others in your organization to understand what you already get and what you are eager to implement. It will help you to get the buy-in to do the new rules of marketing that you know makes sense.

But first your bosses may need to transform your company.

Seth kindly sent me an advance copy of the book (it is expected to ship on December 27, 2007). He has put the "new marketing" stuff that I talk about into great perspective for the skeptics in the big companies and also for the bosses who demand to know "what the ROI of this new fangled stuff."

Meatball Sundae lays out in a convincing manner the transformations that are taking place in business today. These transformations mean that everything needs to be looked at carefully, including marketing. But to just toss new marketing onto the top of obsolete business models is like putting whipped cream and a cherry onto meatballs to make a sundae. (Yuk).

Godin tells a story I really like. Josiah Wedgewood, a potter in England in the 1800's at the start of the Industrial Revolution, was the first to create a factory with a production line and job specialization. He built a showroom and shipped product around the world. And he sold bespoke pieces to royalty but first displayed those fantastic and expensive creations for several months so all could see. (Wedgewood was a marketing genius AND a business pioneer.)

Josiah Wedgewood took advantage of changes in society and technology and changed the way business is done, made millions, and founded a company still famous today. But his brother Thomas Wedgewood stuck to the ways that all potters have worked in the past, barely made a living, and is forgotten today.

Godin says fourteen trends are completely remaking what it means to be a marketer. And while these trends are transforming organizations that have the right approaches, they are crippling the organizations that are stuck with nothing but meatballs. Once again, marketing is transforming what we make and how we make it.

For more information on the book, check out Meatball Sundae on Squidoo.

On Monday December 17 you can learn more about Meatball Sundae as Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now interviews Seth Godin on WebmasterRadio.FM. The show is called Meeting of the Marketing Titans. Bryan is a co-author of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? I’ve spoken with Bryan several times and he is a great choice to lead the discussion on Seth’s new book.

* > If you are the boss, you should buy copies for your board members and investors...

An open letter to Warner Music Group: Lighten up! Your fans are promoting Led Zeppelin for you… for free

Dear Warner Music Group Executives:

The BBC reports that twenty million people wanted to purchase tickets to the historic Led Zeppelin show held at the O2 Arena on December 10, 2007. With only 20,000 tickets available, needless to say there were many disappointed fans who couldn't be there when the band took the stage for the first time in 19 years.

Immediately after the show, grainy, low fidelity clips appeared on YouTube and were eagerly watched by fans. I wanted to see how different the band looked since the time I saw them at Madison Square Garden in June 1977. Alas, you had already started to pull down the clips, claiming copyright infringement.

Your actions completely underestimate the power of a rabid fan base to help sell legal recordings, which is, after all, what you want. I am absolutely confident that the buzz generated by the concerts is selling millions of dollars of Led Zeppelin recordings.

The availability of YouTube clips enhances your sales and you shouldn't worry about these low quality fan tributes. I, for one, am replacing my vinyl recordings with Led Zeppelin CDs and I'm sure many other people are as well. All because we’ve been exposed, briefly, to the power of this band (which many of us may have ignored for several decades) via fleeting images of a concert we would have traveled halfway around the world to see if tickets had been available.

Yes, I understand the paid content world. My book publisher, Wiley, was supportive when I made parts of my book available for free on my blog and on many other blogs and in magazines. We know that it sells books (nearly 30,000 as of this writing) when people have a taste of what they will be buying. The free publicity that's generated by viral, word-of-mouse marketing can be worth millions of dollars and you’re missing a tremendous opportunity to harness that power.

I encourage you to re-think your knee-jerk legal-eagle impulse to clamp down on fans with draconian measures and consider the power that the Web has to sell your artists music.

Sincerely,

David Meerman Scott
Author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR

This Year in Marketing Blogs: GrokDotCom's list of Definitive Posts of 2007

GrokDotCom has created a list of the definitive marketing posts of 2007.

They say: “Blogs have taken over, creating a feedback loop between journalists and readers, businesses and customers, you name it — conversation has officially changed the game.”

This is an absolutely terrific list. I've read about a dozen of the 39 posts and all are stellar. Good thing there is some holiday downtime coming up so I can read the rest.

"Make my logo bigger!"

Is your tiny-logo-loving-designer always cramming your beautiful logo into an obscure corner of your ad? Well not anymore with Make Your Logo Bigger Cream!

Boring white space on your website? You can eliminate that white space and fill it with your marketing messages with White Space Eliminator!

You gotta check out this video. Anyone who has worked on a Web site project can relate to the bosses and the salespeople. They say something like "shouldn’t the company logo be a bit larger?"

But what they really mean is: "We want to make sure that our dumb prospects know who we are so make the damn logo bigger you silly pony-tailed geek!"

This incredibly clever Make My Logo Bigger video comes from Agency Fusion, a web development firm who says: "We understand that you are the trained designers and our expertise lies within the geek realms of programming. We are proud to be some of the best-qualified geeks around. We can't keep your client from asking you to make their logo bigger than Texas, but when it comes to websites we can help. Make My Logo Bigger Cream might be fake, but we are not."

Tip of the hat to Kelly for sending me this. Kelly is the publisher of a book that I enjoyed called Spinning Disney's World: Memories of a Magic Kingdom Press Agent. The book is a fascinating inside account of PR at Disney written by Charles Ridgway, the long-time head of public relations for Walt Disney.

A Brand Your World personal branding summit audio archives available

Last month, in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Tom Peters' thought provoking-article on Personal Branding "The Brand Called You" published in Fast Company, I participated in A Brand You World, one of the largest global events ever on the subject of personal branding.

If you didn't have a chance to listen in live, the audio archives are available for free download.

My session Promoting Brand You with Viral Marketing on the Web was a great conversation with Krishna De, Europe's leading personal branding and marketing strategist. Thanks Krishna for inviting me to participate.

Here are some other notable sessions that you might want to check out.

Evangelizing Evangelists to Build a Business and Build Your Brand, an entrepreneur panel moderated by Guy Kawasaki

How to Write a Great Business Blog with Debbie Weil

Express Your Personal Brand Through the Power of Podcasting with Neville Hobson

Identity You: Creating a Personal 5x5 Branding Strategy with Phil Gerbyshak

Millions and millions of books, twenty authors, and one funky room

"I choose Mug root beer from the big white fridge with the pull handle because that's what I would have grabbed in my own rec room. The mismatched furniture and leftover paint that colors the walls are just what we had at home. As a place to stimulate ideas and build new friendships it’s great to finally get out of those damn hotel conference rooms and instead meet in a place that reeks of Pink Floyd and making out with Nicole in the corner. As I first sip my Mug, I swear cheap incense burned thirty years earlier still lingers. A flashback, perhaps."

I've attended more than 50 conferences in 2007 where I was invited as a speaker and this week, I finally attended one for me. As an attendee! The terrific business book author Pow Wow, expertly sponsored by 1-800-CEO-READ (8CR), brought together 21 business book authors, and industry luminaries including publishers, publicists, designers, speaker’s agents, and more.

There were dozens of bestsellers represented and millions of books sold. It was so terrific to meet and share ideas about writing, marketing, and selling books. And with this group of extremely successful entrepreneurs we all picked each others' brains on the business of speaking and writing as a career. I learned a great deal (hey 8CR – sign me up for next year!)

The paragraph above was the result of a writing assignment – we had about ten minutes to write a few sentences that describe the funky Catalyst Ranch room we were hanging out in.

Here are the authors who attended:

Erika Andersen Growing Great Employees

Greg Alexander Sales Benchmarking

Jose Castillo

Kevin Eikenberry Remarkable Leadership

Phil Gerbyshak 10 Ways to Make it Great

Joanne Gordon Be Happy at Work

Jackie Huba Church of the Customer

Joe Heuer Business Daffynitions

Mike Kanazawa Big Ideas to Big Results

Alexander Kjerulf Happy Hour is 9 to 5

Steve Little The Milkshake Moment

Ben McConnell Citizen Marketers

Robert Mintz The World According To You

Jack Mitchell Hug Your Customers

Susan Quandt Sudden Impact on the Job

Michael Stallard Fired Up or Burned Out

Dan Roam The Back of the Napkin

John Rosen Stopwatch Marketing

Rajesh Setty Life Beyond Code

AnnaMaria Turano Stopwatch Marketing

Bill Welter The Prepared Mind of a Leader

Steve Yastrow We

Here are the people who work in the business book publishing world who shared ideas with us:

Ray Bard - Bard Press

Mark Bloomfield - Harvard Business School Press

Shelley Dolley - Leap7

Barbara Cave Henricks - Cave Henricks Communications

Mark Fortier - Fortier Public Relations

Nick Morgan - Public Words

Gerry Sindell - ThoughtLeaders Intl

Les Tuerk - BrightSight Group

Dennis Welch - Cave Henricks Communications

Susan Williams - Jossey-Bass

Thank you to Jack, Todd, Sally, Kate, Dylan, and Aaron from 8CR for putting on this great event.