The Kbuzz

Yesterday

In today's Inside Facebook, Justin Smith reported on Facebook's seismic indexing shift over the weekend for its Facebook Pages program, for businesses, brands, organizations, artists, and celebrities. Essentially, hundreds of millions of new internal links from individual profiles to the Pages they are fans of have been indexed.

Now I'm no techie, but the reporter and I believe this will have vast implications on Google search results and any other search engine who uses inbound links to drive page rankings. In other words, brands and companies that are on Facebook should make sure they have more "fans" than their competition, and those brands and companies that are not on Facebook Pages yet, well, get yourself together quickly and get on board.

Google will be watching.

November 16

Oh, man. What a miss this is.

You can just see the creatives sitting in a room. A bunch of men, or maybe 20-something women. All those stupid trendy slings those moms wear. They must hurt! These moms need Motrin!

In fact, Motrin, baby slings offer relief from back pain. They are often the first item new moms want on their registry. The fact that they are stylish is BECAUSE the need for the sling is so great-- not because they are trying to make something stylish in order to get people to buy it!

I would not have been aware of this ad, of course, unless I saw it on Twitter. I've been playing around on Twitter a lot lately, trying to decide if I want to be the corporate voice of theKbuzz, or if I want to really develop my own personal twitter which I just started recently. My mommy friends on my personal twitter all linked to blogs they wrote, like this one and this one, my particular favorite.

Here on buzzmarketingdaily, we often ask the question...how can brands FIX marketing missteps. And so, today, my twosse, my friends, I ask you. How can Motrin fix this? I have my answer, but I'll reply in comments. Let's start a conversation.

November 14

Move over John McCain - we WOMMA members rocked the "town hall" debate today at the WOMMA Summit 08 in Las Vegas. The hot topic of conversation? A review of the WOMMA Ethics Code.

The foundation of WOMMA's code of ethics is what the organization calls the "Honesty of ROI," i.e. honesty of relationships, honesty of opinion, and honesty of identity. In other words, in abiding with this code, WOMMA members pledge never to disguise their relationships with clients, misrepresent their opinions (or those of others), or operate under a false identity.

The real debate erupted over the idea of awarding cash payment for bloggers, consumers, etc. to promote your product. While everyone in the room more or less agreed that any paid promoter would absolutely HAVE to disclose their identity as such, the line beyond that was uncertain. What qualifies as a legitimate disclosure? Can anybody paid in cash to promote a product be considered "legitimate" to begin with, regardless of the disclosure? What's the deal for employees who genuinely love a product produced by their employer? How young is too young to employ (paid or not) to take part in your WOMM? Is WOMM for controlled or harmful substances (pharma, alcohol, cigarettes) unethical by default because it promotes a potentially harmful product?

And more importantly, when does all this mess get to be just too much? How can you even market anymore when you're so caught up in the semantics of our ethics code?

I offer no solutions to this debate at the moment because frankly, I think the questions are more interesting! For more recaps about this year's summit, check out www.womma.org - but right now I'm off to enjoy the rest of our few precious remaining hours in LAS VEGAS!

November 13

I'll make this short and sweet-- Times are tough, there's no doubt about it. The last time I checked, small businesses were not receiving large lump sums from the government to save their butts...at least, not yet.

And so, when most small businesses are trying to figure out how to make payroll, let alone worry about advertising (although I HAVE received at least 5 emails from advertising agencies giving me the whole "advertising during a recession is a NECESSITY shpiel) their business, I wanted to remind you of two things that you can do TODAY to help your business.

ESTABLISH A STRONG CORPORATE CULTURE.

STOP ADVERTISING. START HAVING CONVERSATIONS.

We are at the Womma Summit today, and keynote Tony Hseih from Zappos spoke about how their #1 priority is developing a strong corporate culture. He was amazing and inspiring, and reminded us what we are in this business for.


Hire the right people. Fire the wrong people. When you have the right people, with the right culture, the business will grow. Get online, get feedback from your customers. LISTEN. During this time, it's too risky to shout your message out amidst a massive influx of ad messages...especially when there are people who are already in interactive conversations with brands.

November 11

Zappos! CEO Tony Hsieh re-posted his letter explaining the company's layoffs on the Zappos! CEO and COO blog last week before cross-posting the blog link on his twitter:



Tony doesn't mince words in his posts or the letter - he refers to the layoffs as "layoffs," explains the financial justification, and discusses severance offerings for (now) ex-employees. There isn't much more for me to say about this move except to echo the voices of many WOMM enthusiasts by saying that this is transparency and authenticity at its finest. I realize it's last week's news now but I felt it was worth posting for anyone that may have missed it. Tons of credit to Tony at Zappos - can't wait to see his keynote speech at the WOMMA Summit!

November 10

You know that Facebook is really huge when clicking a link to a non-Facebook website prompts this warning message:



Am I sure I'm comfortable leaving Facebook? Is it safe? Can't I find something just as good as the link I clicked right here in the safety and security of new.facebook.com? My favorite part of it is the exclamation point, usually used on Facebook to denote an error occurring on the site - clearly there must have been some sort of mistake when I considered navigating away from Facebook!

This message is yet another sign that Facebook is making its way towards world domination. If my generation is too lazy to physically go to the bank or to the mall to take care of Christmas shopping then I guess the new generation is too insecure to navigate away from their Facebook chat/notifications bar.

Whether or not that explanation is too harsh, the point remains that Facebook and its users have come to expect that everything you could possibly need should be available on Facebook's server. So if none of the other hundreds of blog posts out there discussing the importance of a Facebook presence for your company, I hope this revelation about Facebook's own methods of keeping users within site limits helps to convince you.

November 12

We're reporting to you live from the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. For the next three days, from November 12-14, we'll be hosting the official Word of Mouth Marketing Summit & Research Symposium.

On November 13 and 14 you can track all of the Word of Mouth Marketing Summit happenings live at our liveblog: http://womma.org/liveblog. Bloggers Jake McKee and Shannon Stairhime will be contributing.

On November 13 and 14 you can watch all of the Word of Mouth Marketing Summit general session presentations live on video via webcast. Simply navigate to http://womma.org/livevideo, and press play.

From November 12 - 14 you can download many of the accompanying presentations from the Marketing Summit and Research Symposium. The documents can be found at http://womma.org/livedocs, so get readin'!

The WOMMA Word will return in full on Monday, November 17, following the conclusion of the Word of Mouth Marketing Summit & Research Symposium. See you then!