This week I had the honor of spending a couple days with Chris Barger and his team, along with several brand team members at General Motors. I was really taken with the passion and excitement many of the folks there had for what they were doing and want to do with social media marketing. From the refreshing resurgence that has the Buick team chomping at the bit to carry their momentum forward to the I-cannot-wait-to-get-people-in-this-car frenzy of the Chevy Volt team, you could just sense an energy at GM that probably hasn’t been there in a while.

In the midst of witnessing that, someone asked me what fuels my passion for social media. Odd, but I’d never really thought about it much until then. Here’s what I landed on:

I grew up in a small town in Eastern Kentucky. Pikeville has about 6,050 people in the city limits and probably about 65,000 or so in the county. It’s at least a two-hour drive from any city that would really qualify as a city (i.e., one with a commercial airport). In Pikeville, Ky., when I was growing up, we didn’t keep our money in a bank. We didn’t buy insurance from AllState or Nationwide. We didn’t buy cars from Ford or Dodge or even Chevy. We didn’t buy clothes from J.C. Penney or Sears or even Kentucky-based Dawahares department stores.

In my small town, we kept our money with David and Danny. We bought our insurance from Shirley. We bought cars from Terry. And when we needed new clothes, we went to see Jerry.

In a small town, you do business with people you know and trust. Social media brings that nugget of down home goodness to a global scale. No, you won’t actually purchase a Chevy Volt from Chris Barger himself. But the fact that you can reach out to him on Twitter and get a response makes that purchase a more trusted one.

There are a lot of disadvantages to living in a rural community, tucked away from the world. But there’s a whole lot of value there, too. I’m just hoping to share that one with everyone else.

What fuels your passion?

One minute, you’re calmly writing a blog post about a topic of interest to your target audience.

The next, you’re anxiously answering phone calls from TV reporters wanting quick comment on for a breaking-news story – a matter that will require you to hunt down several busy people to research accurate answers.

I found myself in that situation recently while filling in for my boss, who was on his honeymoon. Although most of my PR career has involved strategic campaigns and project work, I occasionally have tacked crisis communication.

Thankfully, lessons learned from earlier crisis work and helpful training through the Public Relations Society of America kicked in as my adrenaline started pumping.

Immediately, I focused my attention on finding out as precisely as possible what information the reporters wanted – and what angle they might be taking. I asked about their deadlines, which I’m finding out is “now” in the Internet era. I knew some of them; others were new. I learned that they liked and respected by boss, who obviously had built good working relationships with them.

Following our organization’s crisis communications procedures, I gathered information from knowledgeable sources, discussed strategy with executives, crafted messages… It was determined that I would do on-camera interviews.

Meantime, reporters were leaving messages on my voice mail and with our administrative assistance. One even called to say he was a block away from our building.

I tried to use all off-camera time to build a rapport with the reporters and their cameramen. I asked where they went to college, how busy they were, if they had kids… It helped to relieve any tension.

Once the cameras were rolling, I remembered to look at the reporter and keep my comments concise. I wish I had been better at this, but my nerves made some sound bites a bit longer than I’d have liked.

Afterward, I watched the coverage that my wife had recorded on our DVR, and we critiqued my efforts.

By the way, my wife appeared on live TV news two days later – in a friendly 3-minute interview to promote her book, From Incurable to Incredible: Cancer Survivors Who Beat the Odds. We found it very helpful to conduct practice sessions in which I played the part of the reporter. I used a stopwatch to help her keep the answers concise – and ensure key points would flow smoothly during her brief time on the air.

Like anything, appearing on TV — whether in a crisis communication role or a promotional one — takes practice.

(Note: This blog post written while flying from Dayton to Denver!)

Hands down one of my favorite TV commercials in recent memory has to be the Old Spice “Smell Like a Man, Man” campaign starring @IsaiahMustafa.  You probably know it better as the “I’m on a Horse” ad.  Not only did the campaign take home multiple awards at Cannes this year, but it truly crossed over to pop culture (my favorite is “I’m on a cake”).

Now the Old Spice team has dialed it up through a stellar social media campaign that takes engagement to a whole new level.  Lots of brands have used Twitter as a way to have a dialogue with consumers.  But in what I think is a first, Old Spice is actually doing a YouTube video response to people who mention the Old Spice campaign on Twitter.  Even better, the video responses actually have Isaiah Mustafa responding in character in the video.  So far celebs like @TheEllenShow, @ApoloOhno and @KevinRose have been lucky enough to receive responses.    My personal favorite has to be the response to @TheEllenShow [embedded video below]

Old Spice Responds to @TheEllenShow

Disclaimer – I work at P&G, which owns the Old Spice brand.  But it is still a really cool digital marketing campaign.

Got a hot tip yesterday that this was coming. Kmart announced today during #gamerchat an interesting new (and likely industry and retail first) social media effort to bridge their online gaming community at MyKmart.com with off-line retail activity. Starting today, qualified reviews of games posted at MyKmart.com may start appearing along with the reviewed game on store shelves.

While I know gamers are a passionate and active online community, I don’t get a sense they’re overly active in retail store forums. The MyKmart.com site has a handful of reviews, but nothing in the volume you would see from a passionate community. Kmart is trying to build an environment for the gamers to connect in, which I admire. They spearheaded today’s first gamer chat on Twitter as well that saw some interest. Regardless of whether or not they’ll embrace Kmart’s effort to drive community around their passion, gamers take a lot of pride in their online connections and sharing reviews, tricks and tips and more around the games they play.

Now take that pride and let these guys and gals know their qualified review (there are some prerequisites, but nothing out of the ordinary) could help not only gamers, but mainstream non-gamers in knowing how good, bad or indifferent the games are? That’s a neat idea. They’ve used this to date by putting the customer reviews on the product page on Kmart’s website (not new). But putting customer reviews out in the open on the retail floor? First I’ve heard of it. Very cool.

Kmart is taking social capital produced online and bringing to to bear in a useful way off-line. But to take that notion one more step, they are providing useful information to their retail shoppers, generated by independent, third-party, but qualified sources that doesn’t necessarily affect sales of one game or another. (I’ve been told negative reviews will make the cut, too. We’ll see.)

This effort will be interesting to follow. Will negative reviews move through to the shelves? How will people react to it? Will it help sell more games? How will activity on MyKmart.com change?

Never know ’til you try. Good on ya, Kmart.

How many times have you been in a meeting where the sole purpose is for someone to deliver a presentation or pitch?  It could be your agency presenting a new creative idea.  Or perhaps its a start-up that is presenting why you should do business with them.

Or maybe you have even been the one giving the presentation?

The common fact with all of these is that in most cases, a presentation is a Hail Mary pass.  If you are just simply giving a one-way pitch, you are giving the audience two choices at the end….to say yes or to say no.  And the worst part about most presentations is that you have no idea which of those two choices the decision maker is going to make.

Some people love the thrill of the presentation, of trying to close the sale.  But business should not be a sport for thrill seekers.  Its not good business to have hold your breath and hope a decision goes your way.

To continue with the sports analogies, you should try to make your presentations a lay-up, instead of a Hail Mary pass.  Make the  presentation a formality where you know that the deal is closed before you even flip through your first slide.  Work with the decision makers in advance so they feel bought into the work.  Enroll your client in the process so they feel the same sense of ownership as you have.  Devote as much time to making the decision an easy one as you spend making the presentation look / sound good.

Delivering a great presentation is an important skill in business (Steve Jobs has shown us that).  But an even more important skill is being able to make the sale before the presentation even begins.

Everyone lives in a bubble to a certain degree. Maybe you call it a comfort zone. Perhaps you don’t call it anything but stay locked in, blinders on, to your industry, company or job.

The social media world is very much a bubble. And too much of one in my opinion. Consultants, practitioners, bloggers and enthusiastic agency types sit around in a big circle jerk telling each other how much they love each other’s blogs and hash-tagging the crap out of useless drivel on Twitter all day.

For every one practitioner who actually offers up useful insight that shows they live in reality, not righteousness, there are 25 more who expose their inexperience like a streaker in church. I feel bad for them, though I don’t condemn them. Good ideas have been known to come from people not wearing pants.

(For the record, there are still others who don’t have the interest or the capacity to work with clients and carry on a hyperactive social media front, so they choose to be good professionals rather than show offs. Then there are a couple of us who are expedient and efficient enough to do both.)

Two encounters last week continued to solidify my opinion that the social media echo chamber is so far detached from the real world that it may very well be headed for a bubble-busting. At last week’s Louisville Free Public Library Author Series event with Facebook Effect author David Kirkpatrick, the question-answer period featured these (paraphrased) ditties:

• “Isn’t social search a violation of your privacy?”
• “Can’t someone provide some sort of protection for age-appropriate material on Facebook?”
• “You say Facebook is a conduit for all this good. Isn’t it also a conduit for baseless hatred?”

After the presentation, an older gentleman (library author event crowds typically bring out a demographic more advanced in years) approached me and said he didn’t want to be on Facebook because he didn’t care what the guy down the street was doing. When I explained to him that A) He didn’t have to be that guy’s friend on Facebook and wouldn’t see he was doing or that B) He could friend him but filter out his activity to ignore what he was doing, the man almost declared he’d go sign up for an account right then.

The other encounter was one that really floored me. I had my aunt, an admitted computer and Internet novice, review a new website I’ve launched for people just like her. She spent several hours on the site and called me with feedback. She then spent 40 minutes giving me all the things that confused or bothered her, not about the site, but about the home page.

It is my belief that there’s the social media and even Internet marketing echo chamber and then there’s the other 95 percent of the world (or more). And unfortunately, ne’er the two shall meet these days. Social media enthusiasts are too busy polishing each other’s knobs to teach anymore. Try to find some good, 101-level social media content on the web these days — fresh content — and let me know how long it takes you to get frustrated.

There’s a whole world of people out there that need our help, gang. Some of them want to embrace the tools and technology and get smarter. Others don’t even know there’s smarter to be had. And then there’s the cybernazi-fearing gentleman from the library event who wouldn’t piss on social media if it was on fire.

Get outside your comfort zone. Leave the bubble. Hold out a hand and say, “let me show you a trick that will make that easier,” to someone who could use it.

If we don’t bring more people into the fold, we’re all going to be out of work soon.

What are you going to do today to teach someone something? The comments are yours.

IMAGE: From Shutterstock by Hart Photography.

On July 2, I poked around Nielsen’s website trying to find a simple piece of information. Since I could not find it, I decided these Nielsen people were probably smart and had a website form for people to fill out when wanting to ask questions. They did have one. I filled it out. It contained the following information:

Six days later, I received the response:

Thank you for the response, Nielsen. And thank you for making sure to read and answer my question. I certainly understand with the influx of messages you must get and the holiday in between there may have been a lapse in response. It’s a good thing you don’t use auto-responder emails. Even if you would have responded right away, it would prove no one read the inquiry and wouldn’t help. So, I understand the lapse in response and am glad someone did, in fact, consider my inquiry and offer up the information requested.

Exactly 0.02 percent of me thinks Nielsen’s data is useful. But then again, that’s all the sample they need, right?

The main gist of Clay Shirky‘s latest book, Cognitive Surplus, is that amazing things are now possible since society is waking up from its television-induced stupor of the last 60 years. The industrial age and media shift of the 1950s gave us skads of free time — a cognitive surplus — but we weren’t ready and didn’t have the mechanisms, in general, to do anything good with it. So we became couch potatoes. Now, with the emergence of a social web, collaboration and connection as possibilities, the world awaits our good deeds.

Shirky doesn’t so much predict we’re all now going to help the poor and drive revolutions in government and technology because we’ll be challenged by intellectually stimulating free time rather than the sense-numbing kind. But he makes an academic argument that the opportunity is there for the taking.

He writes:

“Creating real public or civic value, though, requires more than posting funny pictures. Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead on some sophisticated task. … This work is not easy and it never goes smoothly.”

Clay Shirky

Cognitive Surplus is a fascinating look at the reasons behind the emergence of social change agents brought about by new technologies and opportunities created through collaborative mechanisms like social media. It points to historical references of parallel incidents of cognitive surplus and explains how those societies used them. If you want to understand societal shifts and how today’s population is changing both with and because of it’s use of available technologies, this book delivers.

But the two biggest notions I came away thinking about the world through Shirky’s eyes were these:

• As many people who will use their cognitive surplus for noble causes will use it for less so (like Farmville).
• True socially-infused movements cannot be forced.

Provided Shirky’s portrayal of the state of our society is right, and I believe it to be, these ideas are both good and bad news for marketers. First of all, people will continue to want junk. And who better to produce it that marketers? For every person who gravitates toward a Grobanites for Charity effort that emerges to raise money for a good cause, there will be 100 who want to be mesmerized by some silly online game or entertained by puking college students on YouTube.

I would propose that all those good and noble people spent the later half of the 20th Century watching PBS. The rest of us were watching “I Love Lucy,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Dallas” and (ashamedly), “Cops.” Guess which audience is bigger?

Shirky spends a good deal of prose proving the point that we as a species, without rules, restrictions or the encumbrances of fees, fines or market conditions, are inherently good. While social networks can provide some wireframe of that level of unfiltered world, human beings, their governments and even well-intended group administrators will more often than not let those pesky hurdles in. It’s not that we aren’t good, but that our environment seldom facilitates that goodness.

It’s not that I think Shirky is wrong. His points are validated through tales of Linux and Apache and even LOLcats. (Okay, it’s not a social change-agent, but it at least makes us laugh.) But, like many a social media purist, his possibility world of Kumbaya-building Utopia is a stretch.

This bodes well for marketers, though. Today’s reality crap and Bieber-craze sensations that fuel pop culture will be replaced by more collaborative exploits in a socially connected web. That means there will be ad space and that companies can fake being human well enough to lure in the target audience every now and again. Commercialism and capitalism has a place in this world.

The bad news for marketers is that Shirky’s examples quietly illustrate that we can’t force meaningful social activities. They happen organically, if not accidentally. So instead of trying to build branded communities and produce “viral” videos, our best bet is to just be hanging around when something cool happens and be there, not conducting the train.

Still, Shirky gives us hope. He tells us we’ve got a lot of free time on our hands now that we’re migrating away from (and our younger generations aren’t even starting on) TV addiction. We have a golden opportunity to be transformative as a people, not wait on transformative technology to do it for us.

The question remains: Will we take ourselves up on the task.

Cognitive Surplus is available on Amazon (affiliate link, as are the others here) or at your local bookstore. It’s good. Go get it.

NOTE: Thanks to TLC Book Tours for the free review copy of the book and the image above.