Under the direction of Jim Farly, Group VP at Ford and Connie Fontaine, manager of brand content there, Undercurrent decided to depart from the viral marketing rule book. Bud told me they were not interested in the classic early adopters, the people who act as influencers for the rest of us. Undercurrent wanted to make contact with a very specific group of people, a passionate group of culture creators.

… I think the Fiesta Movement gives us new clarity. It’s a three-step process.

• Engage culturally creative consumers to create content.
• Encourage them to distribute this content on social networks and digital markets in the form of a digital currency.
• Craft this [as] a way that it rebounds to the credit of the brand, turning digital currency (and narrative meaning) into a value for the brand.

Ford’s success comes because it didn’t forget that the “social” in “social media” refers to people, not the electronic pipes that connect them, and that people – online or off – are still people, who still act in normal, human ways.

Dirt is Good: Unilever Marketing Campaign

Knowledge@Wharton takes a look at the future of advertising in the age of social media:

It hasn’t caught on yet in the U.S., but a global ad campaign for Unilever’s army of laundry detergents — sold in Asia as Omo, in France as Skip, and by other names around the planet — hailing that “Dirt is Good,” is considered by experts to be a perfect example of a new path for marketing in the 21^st century.

The marketing push merges memorable images of children splashing in mud with a customer-engaging social message — “every child has a right to play and explore.” Some claim the ad helped push Singapore to increase recess time at its academics-heavy, stress-inducing schools.

The early success of Unilever’s advertising strategy is exactly the type of information that company marketing executives and ad agencies need to discuss as they struggle to develop new ideas to handle the cataclysmic changes in technology and communications — from Tivo to Twitter — that have altered the ways companies interact with customers.

Interesting comment in the story from from Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton, on the subject of what change the Internet brings to the relationship between brands and consumers: “The Internet is becoming more ubiquitous, more social and also more immediate, and that is upsetting all sorts of business models.”

Common Sense: Anonymous Blogging is a Permalink to America's Past

The Federal Trade Commission has released new regulations will add a layer of difficulty for companies hoping to promote their products, services or point-of-view via blogs and other social media. As the New York Times reports, the FTC…

…said it would revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980. The new regulations are aimed at the rapidly shifting new-media world and how advertisers are using bloggers and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to pitch their wares. The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.

The regulations deserve to face a court challenge on First Amendment grounds, but until they do and are struck down, companies and organizations that want to pitch their products or services via the social media should implement procedures to help bloggers and other social media users to comply with the FTC regs.

It is unclear how the FTC’s new regulations will affect political bloggers, who often accept “free” access to candidates and political events that they are writing about, or companies which are using the social media to promote a point of view or message rather than a commercial product or service, though Mesh Media Strategies is fairly confident that relevant case law would protect such communications from FTC meddling.

Transparency – the apparent intent of the FTC regulations – is a generally good principle for businesses and bloggers to follow, but there are times when it is legitimate for a company to prefer a measure of anonymity in its communications – especially when politics and government are involved. These days, for example, some health care-related businesses might fear the consequences of coming out publicly in opposition to the current administration’s push for centralizing control of health care in the hands of the federal government, yet still wish to try to influence the debate by working through third-party communicators such as independent bloggers. Or conservative Christian home-schoolers afraid of heavy-handed judges and public-school bureaucrats might prefer to write their blog posts regarding home-schooling, politics and such under a pseudonym.

That is – and should remain – their First Amendment right to do so, and such anonymous writing is a tradition older than the United States of America. In January of 1776, the ppolitical pamphlet Common Sense, urging for revolution and independence, was published anonymously. Only later was the identity of the author – Thomas Paine – revealed.

There’s lots of talk about the Twitter Effect and how it can make or break a movie. When it came to Bruno & GI Joe – thumbs down! In the case of Inglorious Basterds and District 9 – thumbs up! If Twitter has this effect on improving movie ticket sales, do we even need critics anymore?

The Twitter effect is the latest example of online viral marketing, and just as real as the old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing, but enhanced and magnified by technology. Where in the past a person might have told a few friends and co-workers their positive or negative opinion of a new movie, influencing their friends’ or co-workers’ decision about whether or not to see it, today that same person can tell hundreds, or even thousands, of people instantaneously, via Twitter and other social media tools like blogs, Facebook and MySpace. And they can use other interactive media, such as YouTube, to post videos praising or mocking a new movie – or your new product or service or campaign.

You can’t stop the Twitter Effect, or control it, but you can make it easy for your customers, clients, supporters and fans to use social media to your benefit.

Next time, though, they should tweet the company news via an official Telstra Twitter page, not on an employee’s personal Twitter page.

Speaking of official company Twitter pages, the recent hacker attack that bedeviled Twitter and made access to it rather spotty shouldn’t scare businesses away from using the service – but they should learn a lesson from it: Don’t rely on any one social networking medium as your online communications tool. Instead, spread out across several. Have a Twitter page, a Facebook presence and a YouTube channel. Be involved in the blogosphere. Make sure your key executives have LinkedIn profiles. Use text messaging. Each of those can be an outlet for company information and marketing messages and a two-way street for communicating with your customers, clients and supporters.

The goal isn’t to spread yourself thin but to reach your audience in all the ways they prefer to be reached or to access information.

Tomorrow morning, the entire lifestyles department of the Tennessean will be hitting the road to talk to the communty – in person. No using phone calls to get information. No calling people to come speak with us. We’re going to reach out to the community by using the power of human interaction. Instead of planning a story, we’re going out without a planned budget. The only thing planned is interaction.

We’re going to be taking photos, tweeting, Facebooking – finding the pulse of the community by being in it… As journalism used to be.

More years ago than I care to number, I was a general assignments reporter at the same newspaper. One day, I came to work with a story idea – not a huge story, just the impending opening of a new jazz club in a somewhat blighted section of downtown Nashville, about six blocks from the newspaper’s offices. There had been no press release.

I wrote the story, turned it in, and a colleague on the business desk – whose beat included covering new businesses, real estate development and the resurgence of downtown – saw it and asked how I’d found out about it. Who called me and gave me the exclusive? Who emailed me the tip? Where did I get the jump on the story – ahead of the business desk? When does it open?

“I walked past it while going to lunch,” I responded. “It opens next Monday.”

Like many, probably all metropolitan dailies, The Tennessean has a cafeteria in its building for employees. And, at least when I was working there, too many reporters and editors would eat there, instead of leaving the building for an hour or so and getting out into the community they are supposed to cover.

Before I worked for The Tennessean, I was a reporter for the Nashville Business Journal. The NBJ offices, on the other side of downtown Nashville, did not have a cafeteria. The reporters and editors sometimes brought lunch, but more often than not we exited our cubicles, took the elevator to the ground floor, and joined thousands of our fellow citizens of the Nashville business community on the sidewalks of the city, headed to lunch.

It’s amazing what kind of stories we could find just by interacting with the community we covered. It’s why the little, understaffed and under-funded NBJ routinely trounced our daily competitors – there were two back then – on business news.

The social media tools that The Tennessean’s Lifestyles section staff will be using in its grand experiment didn’t exist back in the early 1990s, but the lesson of the lunchroom still applies: Interaction with the community, over lunch or over the web, is a key to producing vibrant news media that’s relevant to the community it is supposed to be published for.

For others thinking about using social media communications tools, remember this: It isn’t about the technology. It isn’t about the Twitter and Facebook logos on your company’s or campaign’s website. It’s about interacting with people. It’s about having a conversation with your customers or clients, or your supporters and donors, and inviting new customers, clients and supporters to join that conversation.

If something gets in the way of that – whether it be an in-house cafeteria or a new technology or a fear of new tools – get rid of it or get over it. Or lose the game you’re trying to win.

(It’s a crazy notion – all those links and story snippets out there that so irk the AP actually drive traffic to AP stories on AP-member websites, thus increasing the value of the AP content to the publishers of those sites. Rather than try to stamp out the spread of AP stories via social networking, the AP ought to be trying to encourage it – so that they can charge AP members more to use AP content.)

The AP also seems to have forgotten the “fair use” doctrine well established in American copyright law – it won’t be difficult for Google or your average small-traffic blogger to show that their usage of an AP headline and a paragraph or two is protected by the fair use doctrine.

The AP’s announcement of its new policy demonstrates that the AP has become a pointless and unnecessary part of the media. Let’s consider first the three basic things the AP does, why they are no longer needed (and what has or can replace them), and then consider how this impacts business marketing and campaign communications.

First, the AP does the following three basic things for newspapers (and fills similar roles for broadcast media):

1. It moves stories from AP-member newspapers that published them to AP-member newspapers that want to publish them.

2. It takes content generated by newspapers, edits it, and distributes the AP version electronically to AP-member newspapers that want to use them.

3. It publishes original stories written and edited by AP staffers for use by AP-member newspapers.

The AP is a middleman in the first two roles, adding zero value in role #1 and minimal value in role #2. The Internet has put middlemen on the endangered species list.

The AP’s greatest real value, and the hardest to replace, is what the AP does in role #3. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The newspaper industry, if it chose to do so, could replace the AP in role #1 simply by creating a central web hub where newspapers would upload their content and download content from other papers that they want to use. Each paper would agree to pay other papers a flat standard fee for use of the other paper’s content. If the standard fee was $10 and Paper A used three stories from Paper B and Paper B used one story from Paper A, at the end of the month Paper A would send Paper B $20. Layer on a system of category and tag indexing and a simple system of processing compensation and the AP is no longer needed as a middleman.

As for role #2, the AP versions of stories are intended to be shorter and, I daresay, blander version of the original story published by the newspaper. Back when newspapers were limited to publishing with ink on paper, shorter stories from the AP allowed newspapers to carry more stories (and transmitting them over the wires was less expensive). In today’s web world, pixels are not so limited so stories can be whatever length they need to be. AP re-editing stories that were already produced by reporters and editors at AP-member papers is mostly redundant – and contributes to bland, boring journalism. If you’ve never been to journalism school I have a revelation for you: Learning to write stories the way the AP re-edits stories is not an upper level writing class. J-schools teach AP style and the basic AP story format – the dreaded inverted pyramid – as a basic skill set because the basic AP story structure is a good guideline for a rookie reporter to follow in reporting a basic news story.

But the inverted pyramid – the most important info in the lead, less important info in each successive paragraph – is a formula by which each sentence in a story is more boring and less important than the sentence which preceded it. You won’t find examples of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism or book-length journalistic works of non-fiction written following the AP’s style and structure.

So much for AP Role #2.

Now, let’s consider Role #3 – the AP producing original content.

Can the news media live without it? As a former newspaper reporter and magazine editor, I believe it can – and in fact would be improved by doing so. Too many newspapers have become lazy and stopped sending reporters to cover many important stories, trusting the AP would be there. For example: Nashville’s daily newspaper, The Tennessean, often doesn’t cover things that happen at the state capital, just a few blocks away, because the AP will have a reporter there. Many newspapers across Tennessee rely on the AP for coverage of the state legislature, with the result being that newspapers all across Tennessee all have the same bland, boring AP stories filling much of their pages.

But if the AP ceased doing original content tomorrow, what would replace it?

Well, for one, newspapers would have to cover more stories that happen in their town, city or region – and they’d have to rely on each other for stories from outside their region – which means sharing content and coordinating coverage planning with each other directly via that central web hub rather than continuing to pay the AP to perform middleman roles that no longer add much value to the media process.

So much for the media biz commentary – what does the AP’s new anti-social media policy mean for you and your effort to promote your business, organization, cause or campaign? Chances are, the AP won’t be able to enforce its policy. First, fair use doctrine virtually guarantees it will lose in court if it chooses to sue. But if it tries to enforce it, you’ll see a backlash against the AP on the part of bloggers and users of other social media. Fewer links to AP stories on AP-member sites will reduce the value of successfully pitching a story to the AP.

Ironically, the AP attack on social media will, we believe, only serve to increase the value of blogs and other social media as outlets for information. As the AP slides ever-more-rapidly into irrelevance, we will see the continued rise and flowering of a more decentralized and grassroots media in which stories spread virally from person to person via blogs and Facebook and Twitter based not on the reach of the outdated AP system but based on what people find interesting and share with others.

Newspapers print an AP story because it’s what is available and because they paid for it.

The social media spreads a story because it is what people find interesting.