Shout-Outs

Nate Tannenbaum, whether it was getting my blog off the ground, teaching me SEO from the ground up, great project work, or showing off some impressive Photoshop skills, you made my summer undeniably better.

Mark Fries and Stephen Kozik, I wish you two every happiness. You have a beautiful bromance—whether its taking the MAX home watching Stark Trek together on one iPod or competing in the bnj.com site redesign, you two exemplify brotherly love. Mark, your readiness to explain anything we do here with clarity and insight made life here easy from day one, and you’re funny. Stephen, you are home runs and 808s.

Brent Wynn, you made anything I wrote sound better than it was. Your design sense pushes the language to a higher level.

RD Symms, your one-liners make Leno look dense. Thank you for consistently pushing my copy to a professional level and then, more tellingly, explaining why.

Carmen Hill, you have elite tweet skills. Keep living life in the nanosecond. And you’re a master grammatician. No one else could have caused me to rethink the serial comma.

Erik Wittlake, you’re smart. I don’t think I’ve ever received such a dense wave of information as at our lunch. Hands-down, you know our audience.

Julie Wisdom, your grace under pressure and clear eyes for creative allow us to produce the best work. You articulate our agency. Clearly your dumpster-diving days in journalism served you well.

Shannon Fraser, we truly are intern heroes. Thai food was always a highlight of the week.

To the rest of the team, thank you for such an enjoyable internship. A quick list of my favorite things: Ben’s handwriting, Josh’s motorcycle flow, Lauren’s warmth with clients, nerf guns, Stephen’s Helvetica obsession and love of Firefox text anti-aliasing, Jake’s surfer calm, Colin’s accent, Stephanie’s pug and cool hats, Denise’s confidence, Tom Russo’s furious intensity, Go-2-Meeting working, and the constant thought-provoking work.

Thank you all. I learned so much.

To anyone outside of the company, thank you for reading my work this summer. If you are considering Babcock & Jenkins as your agency or your employer, I recommend it. If you want to follow me you can find me on Twitter or on my new blog Numenary.

Best,

Blake Hinckley

Then we have social media: the polo-wearer’s Facebook page; the Harley-driver’s Twitter account; the world is violently joining, connecting, commenting, tweeting… Social media is becoming increasingly important in how we define and talk about ourselves and how others view us. A profile must communicate no less than our style, depth, and interests, and touch at what makes us individuals. In light of the power of fashion and the importance of social media, why haven’t Chanel, Ralph Lauren, Nike and all the rest created tasteful, branded profile layouts for Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and other social media outlets. You buy a new suit for an interview to stand out from the crowd and look professional—why not a new LinkedIn template?

We are in the midst of a revolution in individualization—custom ringtones and cellphone backgrounds, customized shoes from NikeID, personalized t-shirts from CustomInk. Our collective focus on individualization even explains the explosive growth of tattoos. But I digress.

Truth be told, there are a host of reasons why big brands haven’t rushed out into the social media space, but the reasons why they have not are as interesting as the reasons why they should.

No Precedent: No one else has done it. There might be unseen risks. There isn’t an established path to success—what if Facebook, in an egalitarian stroke, refuses to give up control over profile layouts? What if users find some way of pirating the layout? And as Chris Anderson would quickly point out, how do you compete with Free? There is no free option for real-world clothing but Facebook provides an elegant layout for Free—and economics does kooky things when Free is a competitor, but I am sure there will be tiered pricing.  Burger King will give its layouts away in exchange for the impressions and Prada will cost exorbitant amounts of money.  We should also remember that brands and fashion are innovative, and there is a precedent of a big internet brand allowing a company to smash their site for money and increased user value, just watch Wario wreck YouTube.

The unknown should not prove an obstacle. One way of establishing the meme is to give away layouts with other items: A facebook profile packaged with a purse; a twitter layout with a pair of running shoes. If the layouts are well-designed, I predict the meme would spread quickly. And you know, like the Wario phenonemon, whoever does it first is going to reap a rich harvest of free press.

Real-world versus Digital :: Despite the similarities between one’s clothing and social media profile, clothing has two distinct advantages:

• Sensory Shopping :: Social media is disconnected from the senses—it is flat, two-dimensional, and purely visual. If Lindstrom’s “Buyology” and Underhill’s “Why We Buy” have taught us anything it is that we shop with our senses: we test the heavy weave of a sweater, in many cases now we even smell our clothing (think Abercrombie & Fitch). Without that intimate bodily connection, something is lost.
• Gratification :: The gratification of social media is less immediate than fashion—additional friends and followers likely don’t compare with turning heads as you walk through the street or watching your significant other’s eyeballs do jumping-jacks. You aren’t there to observe someone observing your profile. That said, MySpace is an amazing, if horrifyingly grotesque, example of the time and energy people will spend to personalize their profile.

Social Utility :: Besides the pleasure of buying and wearing clothes and brands, there is also the social utility of looking good and appearing sucessful. Fashion has a social utility and the question is whether or not a social media profile shares it. In a word: yes. Potential soul-mates view you through your facebook, blog, match.com, and twitter pages. Potential employers search your facebook and linkedin profiles. A profile has a clear social value.

The question then becomes whether a unique branded layout would function like clothing as far as individualizing yourself and , and whether people would pay for it. On one hand, your photos, job title, and personal information do a good job of communicating you (and hopefully your wearing clothes in your pictures which could be communicating your status all on their own). That said, a unique, tasteful template could allow people to further differentiate themselves—just look at how much Facebook users spent on digital “Gifts” (hint: $75 million).

Summing Up :: it’s only a matter of time until big brands begin penetrating social media in a deeper, more engaging way. At some level, a facebook fan page just doesn’t cut it. And whoever leads the charge is going to benefit enormously. Democratizing design does not have to result in MySpace abominations.

The profiling series continues (read post 1 and post 2)! Stephanie Tilton challenged me to apply my thinking on “imaginative active profiling” more directly to B2B. I’m going to take her up on it. First we need to do a little terminology housekeeping so we are all on the same page.

1. Passive Profiling :: the process of tracking user engagement with content in an effort to determine their position in the sales cycle.
2. Active Profiling :: using questions, often functioning as gateways to content, in an effort to determine a user’s position in the sales cycle.
3. Interactive Profiling :: an interactive experience where users supply honest data in exchange for a valuable, relevant response. Profiling that functions as content instead of a gate to content.

By adding the prefix inter to active, we change the entire orientation of the word and process. The driver of interactive is interact, “to act reciprocally, to act on each other” (OED.com). In Interactive Profiling, we give the user a reason to act and then reciprocate. What’s missing in traditional B2B is the reciprocation—we let the user through the questionnaire gates (where they lied anyway) and then shoot webinars and white papers at them, and hope one sticks. That is not reciprocating. Reciprocating is listening to the answers and responding.  It is shaping the rest of the sales experience around the information the user provides us—we create a conversation that requires honesty to be of any value, and then we return value. Let’s dive in.

What are the goals of Interactive Profiling?

• To determine a prospect’s interest in a product.
• To discover what the prospects needs—size, scale, and perhaps price.
• To increase a prospects interest in a product and even upsell them on certain features.

Interactive Profiling determines interest far more accurately than Active Profiling because users have an incentive to tell the truth, but it is the third point that makes Interactive Profiling unique. Done right, an interactive tool can explain the benefits of a solution while collecting important information about a prospect’s interest. You can explain why a prospect would want faster processors or wheels on their desks or ergonomic chairs within the experience.

You will no doubt notice some of the things that did not make this list. In my opinion, the epoch of BANT questions (budget, authority, need, and time) has largely passed. A prospect encountering batch processing for the first time likely does not know what their budget is. Asking for a title is another invitation to lie, as many users might believe they will get additional content if they claim a higher-level position. Timelines are also a large question mark. Asking for a timeline is the equivalent of telling someone about a new band and asking when they want to buy front-stage seats to their concert before they hear the music. We must focus on Need. Discover the Need and the rest of BANT will follow.

What is Interactive Profiling for B2B?

Create an interactive experience, preferably with an eye-popping design, that returns information your audience would actually find useful. I am thinking here mainly about a product or solution design tool, but I’m sure games could work as well.

To give a firm example, we at Babcock & Jenkins are going to put Interactive Profiling to use for Epicor with an Implementation Timeline tool. It will give examples of three different implementations of an Epicor solution and then build out those three different scenarios. All steps in each implementation will be clickable with additional content popping in. By learning about the chosen implementation, we have an idea about timeline, budget, and need. Since we have directed the campaign to a specific list, we know they have the authority. We have solved BANT for this campaign without ever requiring the tedium and lies of useless survey questions.

Where Interactive Profiling is heading: a deep dive ::

We could potentially push Interactive Marketing one step further, towards the interactivity of the Turbo Gene Test or NIKEiD. Just because we are in B2B doesn’t mean our work has to be flat or sterile. The same flash and jazz that speak to us as consumers speak to us as businesspeople.

Let’s take a hypothetical example. Pretend that we are a company named SecureFiber, selling a networking solution to a highly variable audience—everything from small businesses to giant financial institutions. A key message and differentiator for SecureFiber is data security. So if we want to engage in Interactive Profiling, our survey might include a data security question, where the prospect rates the value of their data. Assume SecureFiber has a tiered data-security pricing structure, so as part of the interactive experience the user could also select a protection value for their data. The question might open with an open doorway and a gold chest representing your valuable data. Without SecureFiber, a 15 year-old hacker sneaks in and steals it—hope you weren’t too fond of your identity. Now clicking on the first level of data security could cause a gate to clank to the floor. If the user rated their data relatively invaluable, the hacker is stumped. If the data is of high value, perhaps level one security isn’t high enough and the bandit dynamites his way through the door. For level two security, red motion detectors sweep across the floor, which the hacker can pass only if the data is of extreme value. For the highest level of data security, biometric scanners drop down, another safe door clanks shut, and our prepubescent data-thief is stumped by SecureFiber. It’s didactic, engaging and it tells SecureFiber’s story. Now everyone believes their data is of high value, so the tool automatically begins to upsell clients. It also speaks to their fear and pain point about data theft. But that is not where the utility of the tool ends.If the prospect selected a high level for their data we could link to a white paper within the experience about the security strength of SecureFiber and the danger of data theft. Then, since we are also using Passive Profiling, we can store this fact and later serve up security content in an email to re-engage users.

Other questions in the interactive experience could include size of company (preferably asked in an unexpected way like how large a room would it take to fit all your employees, or how many company birthdays do you celebrate a year), or “what simulates your loading experience?” with videos of slowly loading computer screens, with the message that SecureFiber is better, faster. If the user indicates a lot of frustration with network speed, instead of serving up an email about data security, we can serve one up about the performance advantages of SecureFiber. Again, the keyword is interact, to reciprocate.

After the user completes the survey, the tool could supply a pricing estimate if the business is willing to provide it or, if not, something more abstract like expected ROI of the solution. It could also
give statistics like percentage increase in data security, expected decrease in downtime, or another relevant statistic. It needs to promise enough to justify the prospect’s time—though great design and eye-candy can motivate involvement just as well as an ROI data point. As already indicated, the end of the survey should provide another jumping off point for area in which the customer was most interested, providing white papers on performance or security.

The users answers throughout the survey are now used not only to deliver the right content throughout the rest of the campaign, they are also used to gauge the user’s interest. If they express frustration with current loading times, and indicate the high value of their data, we can grade them as a warmer lead.

Wrapping Up ::

In the coming years, Interactive profiling is going to replace Active Profiling. It provides more meaningful, truthful results, and it engages people like nothing else. I am pretty convinced but I am interested to hear what you think. I anticipate the largest objection will be cost as a fill in the blank Active Profiling survey is about the cheapest solution imaginable, however, if we think of Interactive Profiling as content, lead grading, and the means of orienting and personalizing an entire campaign, and we consider how valuable a single relationship can be in B2B, I think you will agree that Interactive Profiling is the future, Active Profiling the past.

Questions ::

There are a few questions that I haven’t addressed because I don’t have the answers. Should Interactive Profiling be mandatory (particularly if it is going to shape the rest of the sales experience)? Are there industries that it makes more or less sense for? What data do we absolutely need? (See great articles by John Bottom and Chris Koch). Thanks for your time.

 Update ::

Another interesting profiling idea is courtesy of Anne Holland, a pop-up overlay that asks a quick question, in this example, “Are you a designer?,” and then features two large yes and no buttons. It then lead to a registration page.  It received 24.7% higher registration than a typical Active Profiling registration process. I wonder if we might take this a step further and create a widget that repeats this process over multiple visits and at relevant moments in the campaign where content could branch off.  For example, returning to the SecureFiber example, when supplying a white-paper produce an overlay with, “Are you in Healthcare?”  Store the information, change the experience to better target the user, and reiterate throughout the campaign.  If the user sees that the experience has been catered to their answer they will be more likely to respond truthfully in the future.  The caveat of course is that this technique should be used sparingly or it will really annoy your audience and possibly increase bounce rate.  Check out Anne Holland’s write-up here.

B&J has done some of this already. Tools like ROI calculators can require information like what alternative solution the company is using, how many employees would use the product, how much they would use it, and more granular inputs depending on the campaign. They require truthful answers in order to be relevant, and those answers can give us an idea of how much a prospect stands to gain and thus how receptive they might be to a pitch. The disadvantage of ROI calculators is that they are not the most imaginative solution. It is the utilitarian solution to the Active Profiling problem.

The best blend of active and passive profiling that I have seen so far is Saab’s “Turbo Gene Test”. Sure Saab is short for “Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget,” but the “Born from Jets” campaign could not have been much worse. The Turbo Gene Test, however, is brilliant. In essence, it is a survey that aims to discover budget/occupation, family size, driving conditions, ecological concerns, and something of your personality, and then suggest a relevant Saab, but it does it in a soft, conversational way.

It begins by immediately massaging your ego, asking what person you have the most in common with: John Lennon? Mother Teresa? Roald Amundsen? Da Vinci? I’ve always said you look “brilliant, curious, and without boundaries” so why not Da Vinci? The marble bust pivots upward and the dull marble cast is soaked in a metallic finish.  Cool, we’re having fun. The second question is the most fiendishly clever. “Select the glove that fits your lifestyle,” it asks. Are you a yellow Washing Glove? The underlying algorithm will probably lean towards the station wagon. Ski Glove? So much for the convertible. Black tie glove? A woman who wants to appear high-society, so there goes the station wagon. Each glove has personality, each is colorfully animated, and each segments the test-takers. With eight gloves representing all walks of life, Saab suggests that it has a car for every customer, molded to you as an individual. Of course that isn’t the case and the whole test is going to pigeonhole you into one of five cars. Yet the test allows for 839,808 permutations. It won’t always pick the right car, but with a series of rules, it can get close, and its goal is not to choose your car for you, it is to motivate you to take a test drive. The tool ushers the user to the car lot, where the dealer can find the perfect car. Smart stuff.

Before I finish with the Turbo Gene Test, I want to quickly touch on question four, a clear attempt to discover your family size.  A typical survey question would be, “How large is your family,” which I hear and think, “that’s private, I’m out of here,” but the here the question is phrased in a soft way: “How many are you at breakfast?”  It gets sneaks past our filters.  To make it even less threatening, it is also nicely animated with toast and high chairs. Imagine if the US census was like this, how much more engaged people would be. Like a good magazine questionnaire, it ends by telling you what you told it “You are a daredevil…”, but then there is the kicker, the car is unveiled and it looks good. It stares down at you—and if it worked, you book a test-drive.  Smart campaign.  Now if only Saab would ditch those awful cgi jet commercials.

So what are our take-aways?

• Users will respond honestly if you give them a reason to, not because you expect them to. They are not that desperate to watch your webinar, especially given the growing ecosystem of content on the web.
• Create experiences, talk to your clients like real people in a new, attractive, soft way and they will talk back.

Update: Refined these thoughts and determined that the answer lies in Interactive Profiling.  Read about it here.

Company: Aslsal;fkjds Inc.

Title: Cryptozoologist / Whiskey Ambassador

Address: Splash Mountain, Disney Land

Budget: $25 billion

How Would You Rate Your Interest: Lavender

Are You Lying: Yes

According to MarketingSherpa, 71 percent of people who fill out a form give false answers. I am one of them—if you give me an online survey I will lie on principle. It’s a pity—all those carefully chosen questions, and you are left with a truckload of fake data clogging up your spreadsheet. How can you grade leads if seventy percent of your data is riddled with errors? Next consider the people who you turned away because you stuck a giant time-barbed gate in front of your content.  Considered in this light, Active Profiling, in which you ask a prospect for information about themselves, become a true loss proposition. Thankfully, there is a better way.

Enter Passive Profiling, a solution that does not require uninviting survey questions. Instead passive profiling is built around content and tracking engagement with that content. We all know the value of content on the new Web.  In order to track content, we do require a quick registration, but we only really need name and e-mail.  In a perfect world, registration will be pre-populated, removing even that obstacle to content, so prospects only have to enter a personalized URL.  Then the gates swing soundlessly open and content, beautiful content floods in.  Content like white papers, vbooks, ebooks, and youtube videos is going to gradually sell the prospective client, but passive profiling’s genius is its recognition that content engagement not only increases a prospect’s willingness to buy, it also measures it. By tracking a customer’s engagement with content, we actually have a very good idea of their position in the sales cycle.

For example, in our campaign with Level 3, a leading fiber-based communications company, we tracked whether prospects downloaded a vbook. Since the vbook explains the need for reliable connectivity (Level 3’s product), if the user browsed through several sections, we could reliably consider them a warm lead. The vbook also contained a Level 3 Network Map embedded as a PDF. If prospects downloaded it, we can assume they were checking if their building or business is within Level 3’s fiber network. PDF-checkers were hot leads, interested in Level 3’s solution, so we quickly passed these leads off to Level 3’s sales team to make the call in time.

The Level 3 Network Map is an example of a clear indicator, purposefully built into the content to determine interest. Other examples of clear indicator’s include business case builders, like we have used for Sun Microsystems, or ROI estimators, like we have recently used for Epicor Software and Progress Software. But passive profiling can be more complicated than that—consider the prospects with short attention spans who will rarely make it to a PDF.  To capture these users, we create more complex measuring grading systems that aggregate and compute interest based on engagement across multiple pieces of content. Let’s bring it back to Earth by returning to our Level 3 example. Image a prospect who never opened the PDF, but read a technical section of the vbook. They responded to a follow-up e-mail by logging into the microsite a second time, downloaded nothing, then logged in a third time with a third e-mail and downloaded a whitepaper. Examining their record of engagement we know they are probably educated about fiber and the issues from their engagement with the vbook and interested enough to return several times engaging with a second piece of content that interests them. We can reliably assume the prospect is a hot lead, and we never had to ask her any questions. The content cannot lie.  Exciting stuff!

What do you think? Are there limitations to passive profiling? Is there a way to meld active and passive profiling? I will be back with more thoughts tomorrow. And now I leave you with what the founding fathers of the internet clearly had in mind when they created it: funny cats.

Update: Just posted extended thoughts on how to redeem Active Profiling.

Updated Update: Refined thoughts on the perfect complement to Passive Profiling: Interactive Profiling.

Ghost blogging companies like IZEA, formerly Pay Per Post, are recruiting bloggers and Twitter users to spread “buzz,” with sponsored posts. IZEA claims that sponsorship is transparent with a #spon hash-tag on twitter and other disclosure on a blog post. Transparency is critical unless the blogger wants to lose his audience but the message loses credibility with the disclosure—it becomes traditional advertising, a company blasting its message at you, instead of an honest recommendation from a friend.

A quick visit to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association member page will reveal just how quickly word of mouth marketing is spreading with giant corporations and numerous ad agencies. When visiting the agencies sites, the details are typically vague, but the client list includes big names: Ford, EA, Microsoft, AT&T, even the hallowed Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Putting on my consumer hat, I am uncomfortable with biased content infiltrating social media and it reinforces my notion that I must be skeptical of anything I read on the internet. With my marketing hat on, it is an exciting opportunity, if accomplished ethically, to encourage a trendsetter to vouch for a product and motivate their network to try it. Again, disclosure is everything.

Lessons from social media have been largely drawn from the serious and public failures (for an obvious #fail see Motrin Moms, Wallmart’s Jim and Laura, or RyanAir), yet more valuable lessons might be drawn from the silent successes. Times when potential pr disasters were swallowed in green noise, when a mediocre product received five stars from paid or nudged reviewers. The difficulty is in finding the stories that didn’t take place.

The Streisand Effect

Who would have thought the star of Yentl would have something to teach us about social media and marketing? Yet her $50 million lawsuit against photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com taught the world something about the internet community–besides the fact that we have too much time on our hands. Streisand sued in an effort to remove an aerial photo of her beach house from Adelman’s online collection of 12,000 coastline photos taken in participation with the California Coastal Records Project in an effort to document coastal erosion. Streisand’s ridiculous $50 million lawsuit created an internet sensation and generated interest–what sort of reptilian lair was she so desperate to hide–which resulted in 420,000 visitors to the site over the next month. Instead of going unvisited, unknown, lost in the morass of the internet, Streisand’s backlash prompted a tidal wave of traffic. So much for a private beach getaway. And the case was dismissed. For her trouble Streisand received the honour of having an internet phenomenon named after her: “The Streisand Effect,” where your efforts to withhold information exponentially increase the rate of its digital dissemination.

The Streisand Effect is also responsible for the most famous number on the internet. Two months after hackers broke the 32-digit code used for HD DVD copy protection, someone posted it on Digg.com, a use-generated news site, where it was promoted to the front page. Then the lawyers stepped in. Cease-and-desist letters besieged Digg headquarters and management decided to remove the number and explain the situation to its users, who saw it as a case of corporate bullying vs. free speech. After fighting a deluge of pages about the code added to its site by members for a day, Digg surrendered. Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, wrote a post with the forbidden number in the title: “You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company,” he wrote, “We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.” The threat of lawsuit failed, and by this point, instead of being one story on the front page, the code had consumed Digg and created a maelstrom of internet activity. In one example, Keith Burgon took up a guitar and a camera and recorded a music video where he belts out the numbers. It has logged over 525,000 views. So much for containing the number.

Yet companies continue to strong-arm bloggers and critics. I would never have heard of GoldmanSachs666, a website devoted to criticizing Goldman, if it wasn’t for the company’s efforts to bring down the site. Barclays, in a similar story, received for an emergency temporary injunction against The Guardian, a UK newspaper, to remove seven documents describing structured finance deals that move profits to low tax countries. Yet the documents were already available elsewhere online, including wikileaks, a website that exists solely to disseminate information. As of the injunction only 127 people had accessed the documents on Wikileaks, but Barclays reaction sparked peoples interest and caused a flood of traffic to Wikileaks and elsewhere. Bloggers picked up the story; traditional media carried it from there. The lesson: Information dissemination has never been easier and if you care enough to hide something, web users care enough to bring it out into the light. In the web world, the cease-and-desist letter has become a press release.

I will be back soon with a look at more ways in which companies are attempting to control information on the internet, particularly the use of what I’m calling “Green Noise”—paying posters to create positive spin for your products.

The question is as relevant as ever, especially in light of the internet and the #iranelection. After all, the tradition of control is old, but it has evolved. When the soapbox speech was invented, so was a club to the head. With the printing press came book burnings. With the phone, wiretapping. With attachment to a cultural identity came Eastern bloc ministries of culture. With the internet, we are witnessing deep packet inspection, government-mandated filtering software, and who knows what else. As information has evolved so have attempts to control it, but is the internet something different? Can countries successfully control, alter, and shape internet communication?

The world’s attention is currently focused on Iran. Green twitter icons (showing support for Iranian protestors) have spread faster than dumpy British people singing for Simon Cowell. CNN, the State Department, and Rainn Wilson are tracking tweets coming out of Iran. Yet whether the information is correct or complete is questionable given the extent of Iranian control.

Iran is at the forefront of authoritarian power over the internet (that we know about…). A recent article in the Wall Street Journal details the extent of the monitoring systems in place in Iran. All of the country’s internet traffic filters through a central hub, giving the government extensive control over the internet tap and the ability to block access. Even more troubling is the government’s use of deep-packet inspection, which is a process which deconstructs digital packets of information, checks them for keywords, and then reconstructs them in real-time. The monitoring software could account for the internet in Iran running at a tenth of its regular speed. The technology could allow the Iranian government to match posts with individuals and crackdown on those who oppose the state. The Times reports that in response to the election Iran has also taken down text messaging, a popular means of organizing demonstrations, while police have taken to harassing people with cameras at demonstrations. The government has also attacked or blocked websites that they deem not supportive enough of the administration. Of course the game of cat-and-mouse continues with services like Tor that provide citizens ways of masking digital identities and leaping over digital roadblocks and a whole network of international sympathizers lending their IP address (essentially their digital signature) to Iranians.

Despite the sophistication of the Iranian government’s tactics, they have not been entirely successful. An earlier effort by the Basij, a paramilitary force under government control, to create 10,000 pro-government blogs ultimately failed. More recently, the stream of tweets, photographs, and videos coming out of Iran is evidence of a control failure in itself. The video of Neda Agha-Soltan bleeding to death on the street in Tehran has mobilized support for the opposition movement worldwide. And despite attempts by the Iranian government, the only thing rendering the revolutionary-minded stream #iranelection useless was the overwhelming rush of support by Americans.

Of course Iran is not a singular case—the Berkman Center estimates that roughly three-dozen governments monitor and control their citizens’ use of the internet. From “the great firewall” of China, to computer attacks on critics of the Russian government, to U.S. “terrorist” monitoring, to firewalls at universities and work, internet control is a constant presence. Yet for the moment, free speech appears to be winning. In China, the “grass mud horse,” a mythical creature that is the Chinese equivalent of the brand fcuk–snuck past censors (nytimes story). And despite all the controversy, Iran’s leadership continues to refuse to shut down the Internet, presumably fearing the economic, social, and political repercussions. The internet is too large and too powerful; trying to corral it is like going at the ocean with a broom.

Yet, having definitively proved for all time that the internet is a source of free speech, or at least assuming it, I want to dig a little deeper and look at the implications. They are less heartening than you might think. We are inclined to believe that people want, no, crave democracy. Yet Putin is popular, the Chinese government enjoys tremendous support, and Ahmadinejad has many adherents. At the end of the day, the internet is not the spur of democracy in the side of authoritarian governments. Palfrey, Etling, and Faris, researchers at the Berkman Center, submitted an op-ed to the Washington Post in which they argue convincingly why the Iranian revolution, if it happens, will take place on the streets, not on the web. They argue that the “internal architecture” of tweets, blogs, and facebook limits political nuance and expression; that governments can censor and control parts of the internet; that the “freedom to scream” and vent online may actually serve as a psychological release and assist authoritarian regimes; and most convincingly, they cite their own research into the Iranian blogosphere which shows, rather unsurprisingly, that the Iranian blogosphere reflects the political reality on the ground, where the regime has a great deal of support :

While the Iranian blogosphere is indeed a place where women speak out for their rights, young people criticize the morality police, journalists fight censorship, reformists press for change, and dissidents call for revolution, it is also a place where the supreme leader is praised, the Holocaust denied, the Islamic Revolution defended and Hezbollah celebrated. It is also a place where Islamist student groups mobilize and pro-establishment leaders, including President Ahmadinejad, reach out to their constituents within the Iranian public.

Even in a world without repressive governments, the internet can only be as good, as wise, and as free as we are. The question beneath how we represent what we believe is still what we believe. Organization arises not from twitter and texts, but from a shared network of believers eager to do real work, willing to brave tear gas and police and severe consequences. The internet is changing everything, and nothing.

Cue: my English degree. When I think of the search for a voice, my mind leaps straight to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. (If you don’t remember it from English 101, you can watch it here on YouTube). Now I know half of you just stopped reading at the word Shaw, but the other half, you are the chosen, bear with me. The play follows Professor Henry Higgins, an expert linguist, and his attempt to transform a cockney flower girl into a young lady. In the process, he finds himself falling in love with her. This is the marketing dream.**

In this metaphor, the agency comes upon the young beautiful brand obscured by rags and a stilted dialect (just look at 1950’s BP ads) and the agency, like the professional Henry Higgins, has all the tools of the trade:

a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with bellows, a set of lamp chimneys for singeing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, shewing in section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the phonograph

Of course, the tools have changed. Now we are each equipped with a computer connected to a web of brilliant people, revolutionary ideas, and ads for natural male enhancement, Blackberries, iCyan-3G-Z-berries, walls of white boards, a Gaiam balance ball chair (with pump), any piece of software Adobe has every made, Helvetica, and an external hard-drive for your illegal mp3s and arguably not-safe-for-work Waikiki photos. Yet the mission and its consequences are still the same.

We still work to find a company’s voice and somehow, if my conversations with my coworkers are anything to go on, a relationship develops, and then deepens over time. I think the motivation of marketing is something akin to what Henry Higgins describes to his skeptical mother after being called a baby:

But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.

Maybe that is what we do when we are at our best. I would like to hope so.

* Quotes from George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, Dover Thrift Edition

** A cynic might argue that the dream client has money and not just great promise. We’ll ignore the cynics.

 A few colorful bricks in the middle of a street, big deal. Yes, but there is more to it. After a week here at B&J, I am seeing branding everywhere, and the city of Portland is no exception. So why when repaving Sw. 5th Ave did the city decide to spend taxpayer dollars on colorful bricks? The answer partly lies in the rails running through the upper left of the picture.  Sw. 5th is home to the Portland Streetcar (public transportation being another large part of Portland’s brand), so even though the street lacks many cars or pedestrians, this is still a bored-eyeball-high-traffic area.  All those tourists and 503-natives staring at their toes, the bricks brighten their view, making their time in Portland a little better.  The bricks tell them the story of a funky, Pacific-Northwest town where even the roads are individually crafted. To local retail, the bricks tell the story of a city committed to revitalizing its downtown area, a city with an urban growth boundary. The bricks are a stand against suburban sprawl.

Cities can teach us about branding and how to communicate. No marketer has it harder. Everything in a city coheres to tell its story, whether it is trees sprouting from skyrise rooftops (ooo, green!), delicious, affordable foodcarts bordering ground-level parking lots, or the constant, humbling presence of the homeless. A thousand elements must be optimized for function and feeling, but for a city, none is more urgent than the traffic light. This was made abundantly clear to me yesterday as I was almost t-boned by a driver going 45 to catch a yellow light. Today’s post is therefore dedicated to that most vital of messangers, the Hermes of signs: the traffic light.

First and foremost, a traffic light must be functional–a bad traffic light is the urban equivalent of bad cholesteral, clogging the city’s arteries and leading to cardiac arrest. Yet in addition to their purely utilitarian purpose, traffic lights, like playfully-patterned bricks, can tell a story. In Japan, many traffic lights sing a song “Toryanse,” as you cross the street, the lyrics of which are, “Going is easy / Coming back is fearful / Although I feel fearful, please let me pass / Please let me pass.” Cute and haunting, a mix only possible in Japan. In Bischwiller, Alsace, France, we can see a French style traffic light, which includes the typical larger signal overhead and then a smaller one at eye-level for the first car in line.

Photo by Mark McIvory

The lights are precisely cast in iPod white. The lower screens don’t force you to crain your neck up to see the light. The design is thoughtful. Bischwiller uses the light to tell a story about consideration and different thinking.

Far from the seven screens of the French traffic light, many intersections in China bear a single rectangular panel of multi-color LEDS. The box displays growing and shrinking boxes of color that communicates how much time is left before the light shifts:

The light combines design and functionality. Here the story is one of efficiency and innovation, and a willingness to buck Western tradition.

In Tuv Aimag, Mongolia, we see a traffic light telling a much different story, one of faded glory. It alludes to a period of former prosperity and Soviet support when not only was there traffic, there was so much it had to be regulated in some way:

Finally, there is this wonderful monstrosity at Canary Wharf in London, located in a real roundabout:

Thankfully it is only a sculpture, but it illustrates a real marketing issue. Even the traffic light, a masterpiece of design so simple we only notice it when it breaks, can be confusing and incoherent. You can plow money into your marketing budget, launch a hundred campaigns and features, buy every adword out there, but without a clear story and direction, the result is chaos and lost opportunity, a tree of traffic lights. The sculpture asks you to question your work: what story are you telling and how are you telling it? How could you make it more remarkable, more functional, more beautiful?

Another thought: What kind of light is your brand? A traditional three cylinder light, functional but unremarkable? A light full of song and dance, fun but hard to take seriously, like the Japanese light? A light expressing thoughtfulness and reaching out uniquely to each customer like the French light? An innovative light: new, strange, an alternative to the status quo, like the Chinese light? Or is it worse? Have you neglected your brand, leaving it out to rust and tarnish, the bulbs burnt out? Or even worse, are you paying for the works, but watching your message devolve into a forest of red lights?

All good questions to consider, but I would like to end by reiterating the most fundamental question. What is your story and how do you tell it?

Still searching for answers? Let us help.

Sources: Japanese light song; French light; Chinese light; Mongolian light; London light.

 PS.  Can we all pause and and appreciate the fact that I didn’t entitle this post: “Giving Your Brand the Green Light”.  All right, thanks.