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While I'm not entirely sure if "Brian" is real, it's a very funny reminder that not everyone wants to participate in this crowdsourcing thing. (Hat tip to Johnnie Moore.)
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What do you do when your product is a massive fail, and consumers openly say it is horrid? If you are Domino’s Pizza, you boldly embrace the criticism. And, you create a microsite (PizzaTurnaround.com) as a platform to document the change.
On the cusp of its 50th birthday, Domino’s Pizza has put out a new campaign owning up to a product that many people really didn’t like. (In a survey, Domino’s Pizza tied for last place for taste …with Chuck E Cheese. Ouch!) The new “Pizza Turnaround” video was created by powerhouse agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
In the four-minute video focus group members said repeatedly that the crust is like cardboard. Other pizza flavour insights include “totally void of flovour” and “the worst excuse for pizza I’ve ever had”.
As comedian Stephen Colbert pointed out while lampooning the ads, “It takes alpha meat balls to stand up and say ‘America we suck’.”
Exactly. You have to give Domino’s kudos for their humility and transparent approach. The company is taking wonderful, brutally honest step forward, trying to reclaim its image.
But back to the microsite. How does it fare as a content channel?
It’s got the usual social network links to Facebook and Twitter (which are both great examples of social media use and interaction). However, the microsite lacks an RSS feed and a link to their YouTube channel. And, while they have a small members-only Flickr group for employees, there is no group for us, the hoi polloi.
You have to give Domino’s high credit for bringing in a feed from Twitter, and not filtering the results. Many of the comments weren’t exactly shining examples of brand love when I was there. But, bravo for showing the comments – warts and all. It boosts credibility and authenticity.
In addition to driving traffic to the site from Twitter or the Domino's homepage, traffic from natural search queries should never be overlooked. From a search point of view, it would have been nice to see the microsite appear in more niche searches like “Domino’s Pizza taste” or “Domino’s Pizza crust”. (It does currently rank #9 for “new Domino’s Pizza”.) And, I’d love to see the banner text rendered as readable type to search engines rather than a graphic.
So why not extend the campaign as part of the Domino’s Pizza website, much like Blendtec does for the Will It Blend campaign? I’m not sure.
I don’t know if the microsite creates any extra value. Users need to click through to the Domino’s pizza site to order, find a nearby location or get a coupon. While comments are allowed, there is little other way to interact or create content on the site. For example, have Domino's customers create a new tagline for the pizza, or upload their own experiences which could be shared.
Will the commitment to a better product continue on with the microsite, or will it have a limited shelf-life and eventually fade away? If there is a long-term commitment to better taste and a better product, why not incorporate it into the main Domino’s Pizza website?
The site is no doubt a work in progress and it will be interesting to watch how it evolves.
The other day I was having a series of conversations with some friends about Montreal restaurants – the good, the bad and the downright pretentious. As a lark, I googled “pretentious restaurant Montreal” expecting to get blog rants, various foodie forum discussions and the like. (I did.) But, imagine my surprise when Google Local Business listing served up some pretentious restaurants for my viewing pleasure.
I understood the location-based aspect of the Local Business result, but surely, the restaurants weren’t entering “pretentious” in as some of their keywords for the business listing description? I suspected it was tied to the reviews that were being pulled in. But best to try this again just to make sure. How about “worst restaurant in Montreal”? Why, yes, once again Google Local Business pulls through.
How about "worst customer service Toronto”? Bingo!
To confirm my suspicion that these results were triggered by a mix of location (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal) listing keywords (restaurant) and keywords from consumer reviews I double-checked with some colleagues, Martin and Xurxo at Bloom Search Marketing (the experts in paid search) and Dev Basu, a leader in SEO, SEM and local search marketing. They agreed.
Companies take warning: This is the power of consumer-generated reviews. Right now it’s a high concentration of hotels, restaurants and travel. But as user-generated content continues to grow, it will influence your ranking - not only for the keywords you used, but for other unintended keyword queries. More than ever, companies need to monitor what is being said about them so they can address service issues and correct the problem at the source.
Resources:
Google Business Listing Quality Guidelines
Zoonini Web Services and I put together a public service announcement to answer the age-old question “Do I need a Flash intro?”
Don’t get us wrong – we love Flash, when it’s used correctly to inspire, inform and engage your site visitors. It can create a slick, professional look. But a Flash intro is the equivalent of trying to bulldoze your visitor with a commercial about you, you, you. (Usually with bad techno music - the horror!) And, to boot, a Flash intro can be counterproductive to any web site optimization.
Your website isn’t about imposing YOUR experience. It’s about building a compelling, informative experience. If you are thinking about a Flash intro ask yourself this:
Does the Flash intro interfere with my visitor’s ability to access the information they are looking for?
Flash intros create a block between your great content and your potential customer’s to access it. Why would you want to do that?
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Sara Falconer from the Hour.ca and we had a great discussion about promoting your business on the Information Super Highway! We talked about why the Internet is different from any other marketing channel and how to avoid some common mistakes.
And, today, the article is out. Here's an excerpt:
With Oprah and Ashton Kutcher introducing micro-blogging site Twitter to millions of people, there's no excuse for you not to be using online tools to promote yourself or your business... that is, if you can get it right. Too often, social media campaigns and websites are bogged down by lack of clarity and self-indulgence, say web designer Kathryn Presner and content strategist Charlotte Riley.
Read the complete article at the Hour.ca.
After an all-too-brief stint in Toronto where I attended Mesh and met up with colleagues and friends, my head is swimming with some of outstanding moments and great lines, some of which I’ve jotted down here...
"Companies go to great lengths to protect their existing business models, even if it goes against their best interests. And, in a lot of cases, I believe it does. A lot of these innovations will increase the size of a market, not decrease it. But innovation also creates fear." Mike Masnick discussing how litigious copyright laws inhibit new sustainable business models."I think that I could retire on happiness." Jessica Jackley discussing how she feels about her work at Kiva.org
"Digital has to be at the strategy table from conceptualism. If digital only exists to support traditional, it’s a fail." Pepsico’s Bonin Bough on the integration of digital media.
"Search is huge. It’s the new digital newsstand. It's a whole new space to evolve into, and create relevant content.... You have to start thinking like a newsroom. Think about going from sound bite to sound blast." Bonin Bough on message distribution.
"Today it’s all about filtering – how do you find what’s important?" Andrew Cherwenka on finding the signal through the noise."Blogging is dinner. Twitter is dessert." Mark Evans on the difference between substance and yummy tidbits.
- Remember that early April Fools’ prank – that Twitter was going to charge for “premium” services? The premium services included an expanded character limit, among other perks. Well, shortly there after, it looks like Twitter is indeed considering paid accounts. And, this week, Danny Sullivan noted that there is a way to extend your character limit, through SuperTweet. So, the prank is starting to look far less prankish!
- With the backlash against the phrase “social media expert”, Traci Armstrong at Three Minds at Organic delves into how to sift the wheat from the chaff in Is Social Media Today’s Snake Oil?
- So, did you turn your lights out last night for Earth Hour? To help promote awareness, SBS in Sydney installed eco-vinyl clad recycled cardboard tree-hugger figures in various city parks. And, Leo Burnett Sydney, one of three organizations, along with WWF and Fairfax Media, that conceived of Earth Hour, came up with the brilliantly simple tagline “Vote Earth”
- Frank Watson put together a thoughtful piece entitled Does Twitter Reflect a Change in How We Search? that looks at the need for social (or real-time) search and Twitter’s one big problem – the only option of sorting by latest comment.
- Complex site architecture can impede search engines from crawling a site. But, if you have a lot of information on your site, what’s the best way to organize it? SEOmoz has some excellent suggestions on how to flatten site architecture.
- Over at Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog, Jason Baer wonders if social media is creating a customer chasm, and says, “if the way you treat your customers within the social media sphere is inherently different than how you treat them elsewhere, you're playing with fire.”
- How I love this post by Mike Yanke: SEO Copywriting: Lure The ‘Bots - Don’t Become One. Read it.
- BL Ochman has put together some great tools to monitor your brand in social media. Don’t miss out on what people are saying about you or your company!
- Got a question about analytics? The go-to guy is Avinash Kaushik. Last week he turned to Twitter and asked people to submit their web analytic questions. Oh, how they did!!
- Étienne Garbugli of Kotsego notes some very simple, but often overlooked, ways of improving customer experience.
Social media has changed the music industry. Bands now actively promote themselves on MySpace, interact with fans through dynamic websites and blogs, and use the power of the collective to sell out gigs.
Sweet Billy Pilgrim is a three-piece band from the UK that is one of those bands that is plugged into new media. Tim Elsenburg, the band’s frontman, very kindly took some time to speak with me via email to answer some questions about how Sweet Billy Pilgrim is navigating the waters. We discuss the mythology of the MySpace page, finding your audience and the business model of the new music economy.
You’ve got a new album, Twice Born Men, coming out on March 16th. First of all, tell me a little bit about this project.
We recently signed to David Sylvian's Samadhisound label, and we tend to find ourselves hunching under the umbrella of 'folktronica' alongside UK artists like Adem, Tunng and Psapp. I think we'd need a slightly bigger umbrella (one of those golfing ones?) to account for the influence of atmospheric, progressive pop bands like The Blue Nile and Elbow, but essentially we take acoustic noises and atmospheric electronic ones, and try to mix them all up in as emotive and honest a way as we can.
Twice Born Men is our second record, and it's a sort of concept album, in the loosest sense. It starts at the end of the heart's little journey and then works its way back to the beginning, which is actually the end anyway, so it's kind of like that Elton John song in the Lion King... only longer, and with less lions. There are some tigers though, oddly enough.
Sweet Billy Pilgrim as well as the individual members have MySpace pages. Tell me about the strengths of MySpace from a music marketing perspective.
I'm in two minds about MySpace these days. It seems to me that many of the musicians there have swallowed those (possibly) mythical stories of record companies signing bands on the strength of them having hundreds of thousands of friends, and so they just spend an hour every evening adding people in an effort to look popular. That has the knock-on effect of rendering everyone's Friend Request pages completely ungovernable, so that no one actually has the time or inclination to listen to any of the music anymore.
Without the music element, there is no advantage to MySpace; there are other networking sites with infinitely more elegant interfaces, so basically it's just there as a quick, crude, easily reached reference for people like me who read a review and want to navigate quickly to somewhere they can hear what they've been reading about before they buy it. You can hear a song or two, a quick scan of the biog, and then you're gone.
It surprises me, with the current state of things in the music 'industry', that the musicians are still often the conservative ones when it comes to their aspirations. So many young bands still gaze down in awe at the imagined dotted line that'll lead to the O2 Arena and loads of girls / boys with alcopop-breath. It's not really going to happen anymore, with a few exceptions here and there, and it won't matter how many MySpace chums you have. What we have instead is the chance to put music out there, not as a means to an end, but actually as the end.
How's anyone going to make money out of that? We haven't quite got to that question yet, because first we have to find and connect to our audience. I still think it's a very exciting time to be making music, because for the first time we can make that connection. We can provide real context from which people can listen to what we do; background, influences, even personality perhaps, and all via SN.
In addition to MySpace, Sweet Billy Pilgrim is very connected; you’re on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. How did you decide which social networks you would use to connect to fans?
Just wandered about like lost children until we saw people congregating, and then - like the sheep we are - joined in ! There was no plan. We looked at what other people use, and really the only thing we had to bear vaguely in mind was that we're over 30, and therefore a 'heritage' act in the eyes of the industry (that's a real term, apparently). No point in us hanging around on Bebo or CafeMom, because it'd be inappropriate and a waste of time.
How have social networks changed the relationship between a band and its fans?
Well, there is a relationship now, apart from the one a band and an audience establish at a show, which obviously differs in being a more shared experience. When I discover new music, I'm very keen to absorb as much information as possible about an artist. I like finding out about the records they like, and what guitars they use (I don't get out much). Following a band via social networks is a chance to learn all that, and have the chance to interact with the artist too. I can never understand it when an artist opens a Twitter or MySpace profile and then leaves it to a PR person or manager to update when there's new product or a show to hawk.
I understand that some artists like to be a bit mysterious and intriguing, but we're kind of the opposite of that. We've done some fairly serious electronica festivals, all involving bearded men staring intensely at laptops, and when we amble on and chat to the audience inbetween songs there's almost a collective sigh of relief: We've invited them in.
I think that the social networking side of things should really just be an extension of that. They've invited us into their lives by coming to a show, or buying our record, so it would be a shame not to return the compliment. I get lots of good records recommended to me too, so I'd miss out on all that.
Has the online interaction with fans helped to shape any musical direction/the creative process?
No. Not really. I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to the songs. On one occasion though, it has directly influenced my choice of shirt onstage. Apparently someone has also created a dance especially for one of our songs, which makes me a bit nervous.
NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker recently lamented that the entertainment industry has exchanged “analog dollars for digital dimes”. The traditional concept of the album-as-artifact is quickly changing in today’s market of (often) free digital media downloads. Can you talk to me a bit about Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s business model in the new music economy?
I guess we're kind of lucky, in that our appeal - demographically speaking - would probably be to the last group of people perhaps interested in buying physical CD product. Samadhisound pride themselves on beautiful artwork, which certainly helps us to be noticed by the collectors. We do give away quite a bit of music though. I'm not precious about it. The last album went into stores with little or no PR, except for the support of the mp3 blogging community.
I'm not under any illusions that there's a living to be made from my songs, which - in a way - is quite freeing. If people don't want to pay for music, then they won't. All you can hope - naively perhaps - is that they might come to a show or buy a T-shirt, or even buy the next record if they love what they hear.
The important thing becomes getting the songs out there. Onto people's iPods... their Last.fm profiles... their phones... Then there's hope at least! The democratizing effect of the internet and affordable recording equipment means that there's load of great music out there - probably more than ever - but also that there's even more rubbish, so it becomes a matter of trying to stand out a bit.
Word of mouth seems to be the key there, so answering messages, passing on information, sharing free music with the bloggers; just joining in as creative and non-cynical a way as possible does seem to inspire a bit of brand loyalty, to use a horrible phrase. People might talk about us because they like the music, but it's never just been about music, so the details start to matter a whole lot more. Plus, almost everyone I've encountered is really lovely.
What will 2009 hold for Sweet Billy Pilgrim?
I'm going to restart my mp3 blog. I've discovered so many great new bands in the last few years, and I need somewhere to yarn about them. I've just finished a collaboration with Adem for a BBC Radio 3 commission, so that'll be aired in March or April. Then there are a couple of remixes to do and various shows and festivals coming up in the UK.
Related Resources
Official Sweet Billy Pilgrim Website
Sweet Billy Pilgrim on MySpace
Tim Elsenburg on MySpace
Twitter - Sweet Billy Pilgrim
Flickr - Sweet Billy Pilgrim
Facebook - Sweet Billy Pilgrim
Last.fm - Sweet Billy Pilgrim
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