Brian Feener

If you think that you can conduct business in secret, you’re wrong.

Everything you do as a company is fair game for everyone else to criticize, blog about, praise, or just use as link-bait.

So when you sue another company because their pink is too much like your pink, that is going to get out to the public.

As a organization, you can love and accept the fact that your PR department isn’t the sole proprietor of information, or you can fight it, spend a lot of money, and always worry about what the “un-qualified”  are going to say about your brand.

Not only is the latter strategy not guaranteed, but your press release will probably get less Diggs than BrandFan.blogspot.com will get.

What ever happened to really great nicknames for our sports heroes?

• Earl The Pearl Monroe
• Sparky Anderson
• Cool Papa Bell
• Dizzy Dean
• The Dunking Dutchman

A-Rod? KG? I-Rod? Q-Rich??

When you care about your brand and how you’re perceived by the public, think about the biggest star in professional wrestling Hulk Hogan becoming Hollywood Hogan. It’s never too late to tell a story. People like stories. Stories make things interesting. Stories make your brand matter.

I’ll take the Black Mamba over Bron Bron any day.

No thanks.

Hey all -

The American Marketing Society hasn’t spoken to me in a while (not that I know exactly what they do) and I got a little fed up with it. I thought that for a marketing society, they’d be able to find me. (A little ironic if you ask me.)

So, I’m not one to wait around - I’ve started a group on Facebook called the Society of Progressive Marketers. (For the record - no, I’m not anchored to that name; yes - I am being serious.)

This is and will always be a membership that costs $0.00 to join and who’s sole purpose is to make you a better marketer. That’s it. Nothing fancy, just some quality PBS-style broadcasting.

You’re all welcome to join. The more people involved, the better it’ll be. I’ll make sure of it.

Update: A Google group for those who don’t register for Facebook.  This will be for the newsletter ONLY.  All discussions will take place on the Facebook page (unless, of course I get critical mass).

(For anyone who is trying to get to this site through the main Brian Feener.com link - you can’t read this anyways. But my lucky Wordpress people can! We’ll talk to them… help is apparently on the way.)

Yesterday, I had registered a hosting plan to go with my domain name at GoDaddy. Stupid me - I ended up setting up a second account, so things weren’t getting linked together. So I called up customer service, and in less than 10 minutes, I had the issue resolved. Great!

Cut to 24 hours later when I’m trying to load my files into the site. It didn’t work and after 12 hours of waiting for things to load up, I decided to call customer service again.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the representative Destry and I went through about 10 possible solutions before he said “I have no idea what’s happening here.” I then mentioned that I had merged the account less than 24 hours ago. “Oh!” he said. “Then let’s check the IP address!” Sure enough, things weren’t pointing in the right direction. In less than 5 minutes, the problem is (apparently) solved.

Destry and I wasted 40 minutes of talk time because GoDaddy had not taken the steps to log my activity. A simple log would have shown that I had called up yesterday and made a change to my account. A simple log would have shown that I had talked to Sergio yesterday. A simple log would have made my day easier, Destry’s day easier, and GoDaddy’s pockets full of the $4.00 it took to handle my call.

$4.00 not a big deal, except that it is about a full month of my hosting plan, and times 1,000 customers, it becomes a big deal.

This proves that the more you work on the back-end of a problem, the more you think a step ahead of your customer, the more you anticipate possible scenarios, the better you are prepared to be remarkable. It’s harder this way, but it’s worth it. Business is chess, not checkers.

Having the right answer is great, but having the right question is better.

For the people in the back row….

Having the right answer is great, but having the right question is better.

If I have a e-newsletter, what am I trying to achieve with it?  Is that goal even worth achieving?

How many of my customers am I reaching with my television advertisement?

Is it worthwhile to take resources away from our core competency in order to do this side project?

Why am I bothering with a full page ad in this magazine?

What value does this extra feature ad?  What’s the point of adding an extra button if it takes away from the overall look of the machine?

What aspect of this product speaks to its success?

What questions do you ask of your projects/campaigns?  Do they help you get measurable answers?  (Don’t play if you can’t keep score.)

Viral marketing isn’t something that you can control. You can’t just say something is “viral.” Sure, your video may be clever, and your video may have an element of “shock” to it, and it may be pretty cool to the people inside your office - but it isn’t a viral video until it’s passed around by a lot of people who have no stake in what you’re doing.

For example, here is Time Magazine’s completely arbitrary list of Top 10 Viral videos.

1. Chris Crocker - Leave Britney Alone  17mil+ views
2. Will Farrell and Pearl - The Landlord  54mil+ views
3. Miss Teen USA South Carolina 23mil+ views
4. Hillary/1984 4mil+ Views
5. Phillipine Prison - Thriller 12mil+ views
6. SNL - Iran So Far (data: n/a)
7. Don’t Tase Me Bro/ MC Hammer 1mil+ views
8. Dan Rather: To Coat or Not to Coat 400k+ views
9. Clark and Michael 100k+ views
10. Daft Hands 15mil+ views

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cYWfq--Nw]

Now, what are the common traits?

1. All of the videos are either embarrassing, interesting, or funny.  There’s no corporate shill in any of them.
2. Only one of the videos promote anything.  No ads for McDonalds, Coke, or Taco Bell in the bunch.  Only the Clark and Michael trailer is promoting something (themselves) and it is enough off-the-cuff humor to remain interesting.
3. They’re worth talking about- each video makes you want to talk about the content.
4. Only one professionally-shot video (SNL) - and even that has its roots in the amateur filmmaking.
5. Mostly unintentional.  Dan Rather, Don’t Tase Me Bro, and Miss Teen USA SC weren’t expecting to end up on YouTube.

If you WANT it to become viral, then it probably won’t.

I think that the lesson here is that if you’re the kid at the lunch table doing something to be popular, everyone is going to see your true intentions.