The San Francisco Giants fans were yelling like crazy, slapping high fives and jumping up and down. Two things in particular were amazing about this scene. The first was that they were sitting in the rain as they did this. The second is that they were not watching any game. They were sitting in the seats of AT&T park a couple of months before the first game of the season would be played there.

I had the chance to spend a day last week as an extra in a series of San Francisco Giants television commercials. Using twitter and facebook the Giants rounded up 300 fans with nothing more than the promise of getting in a commercial. There was no promise of payment, tickets or even lunch (although about 5 hours in at 2pm they did pass out hot dogs and sodas). It is at times like this that I am reminded that we get our word “fan” from the root word “fanatic”. The day was cold and dreary and quite often being in the commercial meant sitting in center field yelling while the camera was at home plate. They would move us from section to section sometimes for the same commercial we would be sitting in 3 or 4 different places that the digital effects wizards would merge to create a larger crowd in post production.

I don’t know if you have had a chance to watch a commercial, a television show or a motion picture being filmed, but let’s just say that somethings can try the patience of even baseball fans. Eventually the skies opened and it began to rain. The crowd of extras diminished to around 100 by then, but isn’t it amazing to think of a business that can find 100 people willing to sit in the rain to help it out? Does your business have fans like that? I have a volunteer who is a listener of the Amateur Traveler podcast who has been transcribing various episodes. Now I might sit in the rain for a brand I like but I can’t imagine doing transcription. Another podcaster I know, C.C. Chapman of Accident Hash, was surprised when his listeners put together a 5th anniversary episode for him to celebrate the long running show.

At one point Giants pitcher Sergio Romo came and sat in the stands with the fans in the rain. He was not in that particular commercial, just another face in the background with a Giants cap on. It was a class act from a classy guy and when he comes into the game this year you can bet I will be cheering him on. I want him to succeed. I want his team to succeed. After all, I am a fan… and you know what that means.

If you don’t read AdWeek you, like me, may have missed the controversy around an ad that was produced for the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) that tried to get people to understand the loss of life for the 2004 Tsunami by comparing it to the loss of life in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. The video shows two planes hitting the towers and then shows a sky full of planes heading towards New York City. The ad may have appeared briefly in Brazil before the defecation hit the rotary oscillator.

Is this ad just too soon? Would we ever be able to look at an ad like this and not cringe? It seems to me I have seen ads that show a nuclear explosion and certainly that is more shocking. What do you think?

via WWF: 9/11 ad ’should never have been made’

When I read Seth Godin’s book Tribes about discovering the group of people who want/need you to lead them I understood it and appreciated it. But I think I didn’t get it in quite the same way as I did this week.

the problem

As many of you know my podcast the Amateur Traveler was in the running for a Lonely Planet Blog Award. This competition had two phases. The first phase was a popularity vote and the second phase was a vote of the judges. I was confident I would do well with the judges but I have always hated the popularity vote. In high school I was neither a social pariah nor was I class president. As a shy person by nature I hate shilling for votes. But this was a contest I wanted to win. When the contest started I was about 500 votes down before I even knew I was in the running. I sent emails to my small email list, twittered, got my friends to twitter for me, brought it up at work, mentioned the contest on my podcast and I closed the gap some but I was still way behind.

the power of mailing lists

But then my friend Craig Martin of the Indie Travel Podcast sent an email to his mailing list and rocketed into first place. So I went to my email box and found the emails for people who had written me about the show and ask them to vote for the show. A funny thing happened. They voted and in great numbers. When I send a twitter message my typical response rate is around one click for every 50 people who follow me. This was more like one response for every 3 emails. That was amazing enough but the next part is what really surprised me.

my tribe

No one wrote me and said to stop bothering them. Instead many people wrote emails like these:

I voted for you. I love your show, although I don’t get a chance to listen to it quite as often since my daughter Chloe was born in August. The first time I did listen to Amateur Traveler after she was born the topic was Acadia National Park. That was a great surprise because we live in Maine (about 4 hours south of the park), and although I’ve done a lot of traveling around the country and in Europe, I haven’t been to Acadia since I was 8 years old.

It was a nice reminder that even though our travel experiences will be different now, there are some great places to explore right in our own state. I also purchased a state park pass recently, and can’t wait for summer! Now if only this snow would go away…

Thanks for taking the time to put out the show. It is appreciated.

Nicole

I voted for you and I really enjoy the show. Best of luck.

Thelma in Missouri

Done. It´s a pleasure to help you and give something in return for your great podcast

Jose

Good luck Chris! Thanks for all the great shows and all the time and effort you devote to them.

Lottie

Thanks for the email. Already voted for you – both from home and at work, so the site won’t accept another email from me.

Good luck, and thanks for your continued dedication to the podcast. I thoroughly enjoy it. You continue to open up small pieces of the world to those of us who have an interest in travel but limited opportunity. It truly is appreciated.

Thanks, again, and keep up the good work. Blessings,

Gerry

Thanks for the email? People were thanking me for asking them to do me a favor. People were actually glad to help. Oh, that’s what Seth Godin meant!

It starts with permission, the understanding that the real asset most organizations can build isn’t an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

Building a tribe is about providing value. When people appreciate what you have been doing for them they are glad to return the favor.

postscript

Ironically, I won the vote handily and then lost the judging. The judges were not in my tribe. I can live with that.

David, the LiveWorld CFO, told me a story recently of calling tech support for a company. The tech support specialist introduced himself as “Tim” and politely asked how he could help. Of course, Tim had a very noticeable Indian accent so during a part of the conversation while they were waiting for the machine to reboot David asked, “so… your name is not really Tim is it?”. As suspected Tim’s actual name was a very respectable multi-syllabic Indian name but the company told him to pick a more common U.S. name for when he answered calls from the U.S. When he answered calls from England he was “Collin”.

Seriously, are we fooling anyone? I wonder if the call would go any worse even if the support answered with “my name is Nandakumar but you can call me Tim”.

As we come out of a presidential election season the topic of authenticity is near and dear to me. The classic joke is “how can you tell when a politician is lying… his lips are moving”. In many ways the election became referendum against an unpopular president, a war and a financial meltdown. But I also wonder if authenticity played a part. Sometimes when I listen to a candidate I am not even convinced that he or she believes what they are saying. My young college age kids are particularly cynical to what they see and hear. They heard in Obama someone who they could believe. In part, because they believed he at least believed what he was saying.

Authenticity is unfortunately and unnecessarily rare both in politics and corporate messages. Who do you believe?

I am still surprised and flattered when someone asks my opinion so that is probably why I said yes when I was offered the chance to evaluate a cell phone handset for a major cell phone manufacturer. As the blogger/podcaster I did not really do my homework. I assumed that the company was asking me because I do a travel podcast. So I assumed the handset was one of their new video enabled phones which I was anxious to try out. That was not the case. The phone was a music player phone aimed at a young audience. This is not the sort of product that I blog about. I am not the sort of blogger/podcaster that writes for their target audience so it was obvious that they did not do their homework either.

When I finally got around to trying out the phone I was also surprised that the music library contained some surprising choices. Am I a prude? Yes, probably I am. I was not expecting that their list of music genres would include a very Anglo-Saxon word for the sex act. I was expecting to see words like rock, pop, or blues. When you are sending a phone to someone to review who also happens to produce a bible study podcast I also wonder about the wisdom of songs with artist labels like “Anti-Christ”.

I don’t feel the need to slam the phone or the phone’s maker because I think this mismatch was partly my fault for not asking more questions. I also feel no need to endorse the phone as I think this is a product that might be a bit “off-brand” for me. A little more homework on my part or theirs might have prevented what was a waste of time and what could have been a PR disaster.

I visited my daughter at her college this weekend and one of the activities we attended was a recital of her voice teacher Dr Margaret Hanegraaf. Her teacher and accompanist were performing a series of short operatic pieces predominantly written in Spanish. Dr Hanegraaf has a beautiful full operatic Soprano voice and the songs were very well performed. Now I personally am not an opera fan and I had been up to between 2-3 AM trying to stay up with a college sophomore so I was very tired. In my effort to stay focused I pulled out the translation of the very dramatic piece I was hearing. The translation went something like:

This was a beautiful piece of cloth but now it has a spot on it.

Are you kidding? I was listening to a song about laundry. I set aside the translation sheet because I decided that giggling might be considered rude. Of course when one of the later songs was very sad I could only think “wow, she really liked that cloth”. When another song became fierce I was convinced “she is really mad that someone sold her cloth with a spot”.

I was reminded by this experience that perhaps we sometimes put more effort into promoting a message than the message deserves. Perhaps when you get a spot on your clothes a short note to your dry cleaner would be a more appropriate mechanism for communicating your displeasure than an opera. I wonder what sort of an opus would have been created if the waiter forgot to serve the salad dressing on the side.

I think as companies or individuals we should evaluate the message we have before we determine the means of communication. Sometimes when people are not responding it is not the communication mechanism that is the problem.

As a footnote i thought is somehow cruel that one of only three pieces in English was a lullaby. Now that’s just mean.

Hampton Inn has published a clever video to YouTube that shows that they are one company that has some understanding of this business of new media. It is a “Ballad of a Traveler” who stayed at a lesser and more suspect establishment. It is not clear from the video that it is an ad until about half way in and frankly by then I was entertained so that fact did not bother me. The entire video is a dramatic poetry reading that at 3 minutes in length would not fit as a TV commercial.

It is quite possible that the cashier actually meant it, but her demeanor seemed to say “my boss makes me say this to everyone”. Granted I was no longer a cheery person myself by that time. I had walked over to Stevens Creek Chrysler to pick up my car which was having a new part installed. They had called me to say my car was ready. Ready did not mean, apparently, that all the paperwork was done because I had to wait 10-15 minutes for someone to walk over my paperwork from the service group.

The curious thing to me is that I have purchased 3 of my last four cars from this dealership. So I have spent over $40,000 in this spot. Now perhaps to them that is not a lot of money (certainly less than one Viper) but to me it is the third largest purchase behind my house and my kids college tuition. Yet every time I come here I get the distinct impression that my time is not valuable. I pre-purchased a service plan for one of my cars so I always take it here. But even thought it would cost me more money I consider if it would be worth going down the street to Jiffy Lube where they seem to understand I am in a hurry.

I still get a Sunset magazine every month from the realtor we bought our house from 21 years ago. It arrives “complements of Enis Hall” as a gentle reminder of what a great jobs she did for us. It is probably not surprising that we have referred her to a number of friends. She is “our realtor” even though we have not bought a house in over two decades.

Last weekend my wife ran into a fellow starting a car hand washing business at a nearby service station. She learned he was an out of work construction worker who had moved here from Texas. She came home knowing his name and some of his history which she learned while she was pumping gas. As she went to wash her windshield he jumped in and did that for her. She came home and told me his story and I suspect has mentioned him to others as well. Here was someone that understands that his business was based on repeat business and repeat business would be helped by having a relationship. He wanted to be “our car wash guy”.

I think the car dealership could learn a bit from the car wash guy. When I get my car back it always still has the trash in it, plastic on the floor, the service numbers on the mirror. That always strikes me as “we could not be bothered to throw these out because you are not that important to us”. I don’t think of them as “my car dealership”. They won’t be the first place I go when I want to buy a new car.

Have a nice day.

Paul Colligan’s latest post “Would Somebody Please Let Me PAY For Service – Twitter, GrandCentral.Com, Ustream.Tv, Mogulus, Bueller, Anyone …” reminded me of an idea I had for Twitter. Twitter are you listening?

Like many people I love twitter but would love it even more if it worked on a consistent and predictable basis. My company runs large community sites and I understand how hard this can be but I also know we would be out of business… sorry, that’s a different post.

A popular business model that has been talked about for twitter is advertising mixed in with the feed. This leads many users to cringe. But it is clear that twitter has value so someone should be willing to pay for it. Who values twitter? Companies, bloggers, podcasters (like me), presidential candidates and Tv personalities all use twitter. They use twitter for:

• PR – getting or keeping their name in front of people
• Advertising – a twitter link to an audience who is interested in what you have to say is hundreds of times more efficient than an advertising campaign in my experience. A banner ad shown to thousands of strangers might get one click. A twitter post with a link to hundreds of followers can easily get a dozen click thrus because you are talking to people who already care about what you have to say.

The more followers I have the more valuable twitter is to my business or to my ego. So why not charge $1 per 100 followers per month or some similar charge. My monthly bill would be around $6 a month. Barack Obama’s would be between $400-500. If you don’t want to be charged, you could limit your followers.

Or what if it cost you something to put a link in a twitter post?

Alternatively, you could also have a charge for following more than a certain number of people per day or per week. Some people use following as a way to put their name in front of a group of people. They are not really following what all those people are saying, they are advertising. I think most people understand that advertising costs money. Maybe an interface that let companies at least be more honest about it. You would get an email that says “John Doe wants you to follow him”.

What are your ideas? What would you be willing to pay if it meant a more stable long term twitter?

This is not exactly new news but I stumbled across this report today. Earlier this year eMarketer had some positive news for podcasters as well as some advice for people who are spending their marketing budget.

• Podcasting downloading is growing

• People who listen to podcasts remember them and are influenced by them
• People who hear ads on podcasts are much much more likely to remember them than people who watch TV or streaming video

The bottom line here, in my opinion, is that for podcasts (like mine the Amateur Traveler) that are trying to monetize using sponsorship or advertising we are still in the early days. We are not seeing the beginning of the end for podcasting as some have predicted although we might soon be seeing the end of the beginning.

The companies [Podtrac and TNS] studied podcast advertising from February 2006 to March 2008 across multiple product categories and ad types. Unaided awareness for podcast ads was 68%, compared with 21% for streaming video and 10% for television.

“The data suggest audiences are paying close attention to show content and the embedded ads within them which greatly increased ad effectiveness in the studies,” said Doug Keith, president of Future Research Consulting. “The high unaided ad recall figures are no doubt the results of a less cluttered environment.”

“The studies showed a 73% increase in likelihood to use or buy an advertised product,” said Velvet Beard, vice president at Podtrac. “The studies showed that 69% of audience members have a more favorable view of in-show advertisers.”

Remember Podcasting? Listeners Do. – eMarketer

Tags: podcastingadvertising podtrac tns emarketer sponsorship new+media Amateur+Traveler