I went trawling in the De Pasquale library, looking for some inspiring weekend reading. I found a complete back collection of the American Marketing Association’s Journal dating back over 60 years. Wow.

I’ve been commuting between Brisbane and the Gold Coast a lot lately for work and as a result, I often end up sleeping somewhere I wasn’t expecting too (nothing suss, I just end up working late and can’t be arsed driving home). The upside is that I’ve been getting more and more intimate with various friends and their couches, the downside is that I’m often left without a toothbrush, toothpaste, or clean underwear. Toothbrushes and toothpaste are easy enough to pick up, but I realised that my underwear supply needed re-plenishing (it wasn’t an emergency, but it was getting close).

My initial reaction was to drive across town on my lunch break to the nearest David Jones or Myer to pick up something from Mr H.Boss or Mr C.Klein. The round trip would have taken me an hour, but I figured it was worth it to get some quality dacks, because after all, you get what you pay for. There’s a factory-outlet-style underwear shop just across the road, but I knew what they had would be no match for the real official merchandise. It was a no-brainer for me: Go the expensive version because they’ll last and they’re, well, more fashionable.

As I found myself reasoning along such lines I suddenly realised I had succumbed, almost completely, to marketing. Me. A savvy, industry professional, with insight, brains and a need to save money in a time of global financial crisis, genuinely thought that it was worth a trip across town to buy a brand-name item which would be worn, invisibly, underneath my clothes and seen only on a select few occasions to a select few people.

One of my favourite movies is Fight Club, and one of my favourite scenes in it is when the hero gets on the bus and looks at Calvin Klein ad and sniggers - “is that what a real man is supposed to look like?” before spitting on the floor.

I hate my industry sometimes…

I play in a band and last week we were lucky enough to have our latest single reviewed newspapers from Melbourne and Perth. The Melbourne reviewer said our song was edgy and brilliant, the Perth reviewer said it was commercial crap. It got me thinking just how poorly critical opinion usually correlates with history, and wondering why in an age of social media, we need to pay attention to professional critics at all.

Mozart, Van Gough, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Gustav Eiffel, Picasso, and virtually any other creative pioneer you can name was unanimously panned by the critics until they eventually gained some traction and became trendy. The unlucky geniuses, like Mozart and Van Gough, only became popular after they died.

Look back at old reviews from the bible of American music criticism, Rolling Stone Magazine, and you’ll see that many albums now considered to be among the greatest of all time were given average ratings by the original reviewers. When the Eiffel Tower was first built, the Parisienne establishment thought it was an abomination on their skyline and wanted it pulled down immediately. Abraham Lincoln was rejected by Republicans as a vice-presidential candidate four years before he became the greatest leader America has ever seen. We clearly can’t trust the critics to know greatness when they first see it. Now that every book, song, album, film, bottle of wine and chocolate cake recipe is accessible to everyone online as soon as the creator wants it to be, and rated by members of the public soon after, we don’t need to rely on critics for their guidance either.

You could argue that when we give the public too much say we end up with American Idols in the charts and George W. Bush in the White House, but you’d be forgetting the long tail of brilliance that follows those two blights on history. For every Idol single there’s an epic Bruce Springsteen album waiting in the record library; George W. Bush, had to govern in the shadow of the Lincoln memorial.

No-one has ever erected a statue in honour of a critic, and thanks to social media, they probably never will.

Imagine if you knew exactly what your customers were thinking. Imagine if you knew EXACTLY what they wanted. Imagine if you could switch your TV to a channel which showed non-stop, live coverage of your customers thoughts about your brand, their concerns and their ideas on how you could do things better. Imagine if it was free and, as a company, you were encouraged to participate in the conversation. Sound satisfying?

Get Satisfaction is a community that helps companies engage their customers in dialogue. The concept is that members of the public with an idea can share their thoughts and then employees can jump online and show that your company is listening – it could be a rep from your corporate affairs department, or a guy from the mail room – it doesn’t matter. 6,873 organisations have joined the site, including some big names like Adobe, Apple, BBC and Dell. It’s early days yet, but the theory goes that rather than calling a customer support line and getting an average answer, customers can leave a comment on this website and get exactly the answer they want from the right department in a day or so. It’s a completely new approach to customer service, but it appears to be working.

• Books are souvenirs that hold ideas
• If it’s so dangerous to have your ipod on during takeoff and landing, how come you’re allowed to have it with you on the plane at all? Does all the scolding actually increase safety? How?
• Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much.
• Permission is like dating. You don’t start by asking for the sale at first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit.
• Given the choice between amazing, guaranteed service with a one day wait or interminable waits on hold with people who can’t really help you right now… well, the choice is pretty easy.
• Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love
• Attract people in trouble–>Help solve their problems–>Build your reputation–>Sales happen.

I’ll bet I can find survey data to support any arguement I want to make. Is McCain going to be the next President of the United States of America? Yep. Does eating chocolate during pregnancy reduce the chance of complications? The Mirror says yes. Has Peanut Butter been shown to satisfy hunger up to five times longer than some high-carbohydrate snacks like rice cakes? Kraft seems to think so. Do Australian men feel more happy surfing the Internet than having sex? According to the Courier Mail they do.

It’s a shame that marketers have to rely on surveys to justify what they do. Everyone knows that by the time survey respondents get to question 20 they don’t give a toss. Google wasn’t started because of a survey. Columbus didn’t discover the new world because nine out of ten respondents strongly agreed.

Never trust a survey.

“Star Café Wash is designed to make washing your car an affordable leisure experience that can be enjoyed by the whole family.”

For fuck’s sake.

I’d love to start my own car wash chain and do things a little bit differently. Australia is screaming out for it. Star Cafe Wash look like they’re doing a good job, but they’ve been hijacked by corporate mumbo-jumboness. You can take your affordabe leisure experiences and your range of car sprucing solutions and shove them up your vacuum hose. There are plenty of ways to clean a car cheaply (ie. doing it yourself), but looking at the clientele of my local establishment, I’m guessing that people are prepared to pay a premium to keep their hands dry; the cheapest car wash does not neccessarily win. Nationwide water usage restrictions make the marketplace even more attractive.

My car wash shall have the following marketing strategy:

• The price of a wash shall be determined by the chance of rain
• The price of a wash shall go up on Saturday mornings and down on Monday afternoons
• Loyalty rewards shall be handsome
• Local schools/charities/sporting groups shall be given a washing booth every Saturday morning to raise money for their cause. My chain shall help with promotion and take a cut.
• The process shall be friendly to the environment and broadcast loudly as such.
• Food shall be interesting and good.
• Coffee shall be amazing.
• Wireless Internet will be fast and free.
• Staff shall be well-paid and their flamboyance awarded by customer poll.
• Announcements shall be made over a PA system when cars are ready and they shall be be made with exceptional wit.
• Every 10th customer shall receive a free wash right then and there.
• Attractive females shall wash cars late on Friday nights.
• Those who refer friends shall be rewarded.
• Children shall be amused.
• Customers phones shall receive SMS messages only when their car is ready. Never with promotions, unless customers really REALLY want to hear about them.
• Promotions that customers really want to hear about shall be developed and implemented.
• Cars shall be loved.

We’re putting together a marketing plan and digital strategies outline for a children’s television series which is in development for an Australian network. It has been sold around the world and the producers are pretty excited about the social networking opportunities. Forums, blogs, ‘Second Life’ Islands and behind-the-scenes access areas are nothing new, but this series comes at a time when 90% of nine-year-olds have used the Internet and 34% of twelve year-olds have a profile on a social networking site. Never before have young teenagers engaged so enthusiastically with online content or been more inclined to join online communities.

I can’t reveal too much about the series, given that it’s in production and all a bit hush-hush, but it’s along the same lines as something like The Saddle Club or Bluewater High — a bunch of kids who are elite proponents of a particularly popular activity who are growing up together and attending the same school. The websites for those shows are pretty good, I particularly like Bluewater High’s, but the strategy we’re putting together is going to be on a whole new level.

The online strategy for the show is divided into four basic parts:

• A website which invites fans into a virtual world, allowing them to interact with the characters and their unique environment and chat with other fans.
• A behind-the-scenes website which acts like an online (extended) version of the special features on a DVD that shows interviews, allows fans to ask questions and even allows people to audition for the show.
• An online store which sells related merchandise.
• Discussion forums where fans can post messages and respond to related topics about the show and the popular activity the show deals with.

Here’s some of the cool things we’re doing on the social networking side:

A ‘Virtual World’ Website with Characters Integrating with Facebook and MySpace

Using Flash™ technology a detailed virtual world will be created where fans can walk through the sets and see where the characters have been. Bandwidth issues in Australia prevent video-intensive features like real-time character interaction (like you might find in a video game), but it’s certainly possible to create a static virtual world. Powderfinger’s Hotel Existence website is along the lines of what we’re talking about.

Fans will be able to sneak into character’s bedrooms and read their diaries, see what they’re listening to on their iPODs, see what they ate for lunch and gather clues from the virtual set to use in online games and competitions.

The coolest feature of this virtual world though, is how the character’s profiles will integrate with actual Facebook and MySpace profiles. The producers were keen to create a new stand-alone social networking platform especially for the show, using something like Ning, but we explained to them that if we used existing platforms, fans will already be familiar with the user-interface, they won’t have to sign-up for anything new and most importantly, every single aspect of their interaction with the show’s characters will be automatically broadcast to all their other friends who share the same social networking platform. The average Facebook user has more than 150 friends, so by allowing fans to interact with characters on Facebook you are increasing the show’s marketing reach by a factor of 150 for every single fan.

The social networking profiles will be updated weekly by production staff, in sync with the onscreen events. So, for example, when two characters start dating, their Facebook profiles will change to show that they are ‘In a Relationship’. When they break up, their profile will be updated accordingly. These changes will obvioiusly also appear in their real-life ‘friends’ news feeds as if the events were happening to real people. When characters post on other characters’ walls, fans will be able to track the conversations between them.

The characters will also post event invitations. For example, in the lead-up to an episode where one character throws herself a sixteenth birthday party, all her real Facebook friends will be invited to attend. Candid photographs of the party will later appear and fans will be able to comment on the photographs.

YouTube Integration

Several instructional videos will be created by real-life, professional proponents of the activity the show centres around (imagine if Kelly Slater had put together a series of instructional surfing videos for Bluewater High and then they were posted all over YouTube). A section of the website will be devoted to showcasing these videos and via step-by-step tutorials, fans will be able to learn what the characters are doing. Fans will then be able to film themselves and their friends and upload them to the site and to YouTube. This will ensure the website gains significant exposure in YouTube (and Google) when people from around the world are searching for videos of this activity – increasing the reach of the online campaign far beyond the core Australian audience.

Montages of popular television shows created by fans who put their favourite scenes together in a YouTube re-mix are another recent video Phenomenon (one fan film clip from Australian children’s series H20: Just Add Water has had more than 650,000 YouTube views). It’s a labour of love that can take countless hours, but tools like Flektor are making it easier to do and by providing fans with a library of useful clips, helpfully sorted under appropriate categories, we’ll make the process super-easy and encourage fans to plaster as many clips as they like on YouTube.

Fans will also be able to download songs from the website soundtrack and edit them into the clips, resulting in huge exposure for the artists (a bargaining chip when licensing the songs). The website will then run competitions and the fans can vote on their favourite montages, bringing new filmmakers to the fore and increasing exposure on YouTube to a worldwide audience.

Fan Fiction

Creative, dedicated fans love writing fictional stories about their characters. Sites like Fan Fiction.net have millions of stories uploaded about virtually every popular television series ever created. Buffy the Vampire Slayer alone has more than 30,000 stories uploaded by fans.

A section of the website will actively encourage fan fiction competitions where people write stories about the characters and upload them for others to read. Producers will actively use this as a research tool to figure out what fans want to happen in the next series.

Those are just some of the strategies I can talk about publicly. We’re pretty excited about it all and I’d love to hear any feedback you had on what we’re doing. If anyone has any brilliant ideas of their own I’m all ears…

I’m off to Vanuatu for a week to talk strategy with a client. That’s what I’m telling the taxman anyway (ssh). We have just finished building their National Bank’s website, but in reality I’ll be climbing volcanos and snorkelling. I’ve thought about online marketing and not much else since Christmas so I’m looking forward to a break.

Given that one of the islands I’m staying on doesn’t even have electricity it’s going to be pretty easy to forget about the digital world. I can’t wait. In fact it will be the first time I’ve been somewhere without electricity for a good few years. Roughing it is always a good way to get new perspective on your business goals. That’s definitely what I’m telling the tax man.

Don’t think outside the square.

Think outside the circle.

…you’ll make more money.