I read an article on Politico.com the other day which stated that there are nearly 2 million deceased people still listed on voter registration databases across the United States. Dead people voting? Come on now! We all remember the scene from “The Sixth Sense” where little Haley Joel Osment says “I see dead people”. That’s a movie, and just for our entertainment, but what if one of these people who say they can “talk to the dead” gets the word out to more of these zombies? All it’s gonna take is for James Van Praagh to start spreading the news that the dead have voting rights and we will have an epic horror show come election day!!!

Here’s an example of how this can happen: You live in Michigan where you’ve been a registered voter all of your adult life. At some point you get tired of the cold and snow, and up and move to Florida to warm your bones and eat soft, bland foods with all the other retired gray & blue hairs. You don’t vote anymore because you have a hard enough time keeping your prescriptions straight. But your long term memory is solid, and you haven’t forgotten the Florida debacle of 2000. Missing the Early Bird Special only to have your ballot thrown out due to a pregnant Chad hardly seems worth it. Eventually the day comes when you pass into the next life, or great beyond or whatever you believe happens next. BUT, since the state of Michigan hasn’t updated its database in many years, you’re still registered to vote there! (possibly along with your great-great grandfather and crazy Aunt Millie)

Thankfully, you’re still alive and kicking and not one of the “Walking Dead” from that new cult flavored television show. You have a right to vote, you pay your taxes, you probably work for a living! Dead people don’t pay taxes, and they surely should not have voting rights. Still, 953 ballots were cast in a recent election in S. Carolina by deceased voters. Apparently this was partly due to clerical error and the need to update their database. Perhaps someone submitted absentee ballots on behalf of the departed. Or did the election officials just not want to admit to seeing the zombies???

The technology to cleanse the zombies from your database is right at your fingertips. Keeping them won’t create the potential for fraud in most cases, but removing them could save you money in the long term, both in saved postage, and in saved relationships with those who were left behind. If you repeatedly mail to someone who is deceased, on some level (conscious or not), it’s likely a negative emotion may be tied to your business in the mind of the recipient of that mail.

For example, Klout proposes that I am influential not only on topics such as humor and beer (no surprise there), but also tea, parties, and cats – which may actually categorize me as someone thirty years my junior, and a girl. While technology is helping us to slice and dice larger and larger volumes of data at an ever increasing rate, without the human impact of analysis, there will always be shortcomings to any system that purports to provide strong analysis of social media interactions. There should be excitement for marketers with services like Klout, but that energy needs to be tempered with an understanding that any information from “Big Data” is likely to be flawed because of the sheer volume of information processed and the inherent challenges of understanding it.

Klout’s premise is that social media has “democratized influence” and that applications like theirs can help you to isolate the appropriate influencers who can help drive a valuable return on marketing dollars. In other words, instead of wandering around in the dark sending messages to every potential customer, you can find key people on various social media platforms and let them do the heavy lifting for you.

Here’s one example of this mindset. I was recently offered a free fleece dog blanket from Subaru as a Perk from Klout. While I don’t own a dog, or a Subaru in which to comfortably place a dog on a fleece blanket, the intent was probably to get me talking about Subaru to the people I communicate with on social networks. So even though I didn’t get a blanket, here I am using this example, so I suppose it actually worked. Now can I retroactively have my blanket please? I know it isn’t a lucrative as the payout a vapid reality star gets to attend a party, but free stuff is free stuff.

So on one level, their marketing ploy worked even if I didn’t get a blanket. I had Subaru at the top of mind and told the story of how they wanted to give me a free doggie blanket to talk about them. Interestingly enough, there’s a lot of interaction on the Subaru twitter page and even a few conversations about the blanket. So for their organization, it makes sense to extend their marketing to reach out to influencers that aren’t engaged with their brand. However, for many businesses (especially smaller ones) this might not make sense. There’s significantly more value in reaching out to your own followers and creating positive shared experiences than in trying to reach out to people who aren’t already willing advocates of your brand. When planning a marketing campaign, it’s easy to get distracted by the new, bright and shiny toy and ignore what has already made your organization successful.

It's unbelievable that EMF still exists.

I speak from experience when I say I’ve reached out to companies on Twitter, said positive things and they haven’t felt the need to respond. While on the other hand, I had a one-hit wonder band comment to me humorously after I made a dumb joke about them (EMF for those of you old enough to remember them). So the question is: how many times can you ignore your “arbitrarily calculated” influential customers on a social media platform while spending money encouraging new influencers to promote your brand? I think the example from Subaru, being heavily invested in responding to their customers, seems to be the exception to the way many organizations treat Twitter and Facebook. Am I more likely to keep saying nice things about companies or organizations that make me feel good in return, or will I just give up? If you are serious about growing your business outside of traditional or historical marketing channels, you need to evaluate your customer acquisition strategies beyond the latest and greatest product a social media company is trying to sell you, and look at people who already appreciate your organization enough to want to engage you on one of the many social media platforms.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get a Corgi and a Forrester so I’ll have a place to keep my new fleece blanket.

Those are not cell towers in disguise.

I wasn’t technically shut off from the electronic world. While there was no cellular service in our location in Superior National Forest, we did sort of have internet. The lodge had a satellite connection that was on such a tight bandwidth restriction that half of one “cat playing a piano video” would max out the connection for the day. Seeing as I didn’t want to be the cause of a digital Tragedy of the Commons, I turned the Wi-Fi off on my phone and didn’t turn it on again until the drive home on Sunday.

Instead, I talked with people. I laughed and drank a few beers. I hiked and played broomball and did the sorts of things I did before social media became such a large part of my life. To be honest I had an easier time staying unplugged from Twitter for forty-eight hours than some folks had going thirty minutes without asking me if I could survive forty-eight hours without Twitter. It was a relaxing weekend, and a nice reminder of the value of getting away from the non-stop, always on, post-modern world of being connected to everyone all the time. It was nice to escape the Pavlovian response of checking my Blackberry every time that little red notification light starts flashing like someone just tucked a hockey puck into the back of the net.

While I didn’t actually have a life altering epiphany while I was away in the woods, it was really nice to get away from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Gmail for a weekend and it really did allow me to recharge my batteries—of course that could just be the wicked bump on the back of my head from a particularly vicious fall during Saturday night’s broomball game. Either way, there’s something to be said for shutting it down for a few hours here and there to regain perspective on what is really important. It isn’t always about personal branding development while measuring the ROI based on cross-platform, value-added, thinking outside the box, content creation. Sometimes, it’s about getting a really bad night’s sleep on a tiny bed and spending some time talking to people without a computer screen as an intermediary.

Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” I realized the value of this ethos as I trudged alone through the snowy woods on Saturday. It wasn’t the thick wool socks and gloves, nor the Thinsulate boots and coat, or even the fleece lined hat keeping me warm. It was the burning embers of desire to have a loved one suffering with me out on the trails protecting me from the cold. In other words, one man’s harrowing tale of being in a world without electronic communications is another man’s story of growing a lumberjack beard, reading Walden and coming to the realization of what is really important—having your loved one be just as miserable as you. Honestly, based on how lost I was using the lodge map, a GPS unit would have been nice as well.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go post a bunch of photos of my trip to Facebook because sometimes even new habits die hard.

In social media, “like” has replaced “love” within the context of emotional validation. Like my Facebook update. Star my Tweet. Heart my Tumblr post. +1 my Google+ +thingy. Review my restaurant on Yelp. Check into my store on FourSquare. Enjoy my bamboo on Pandabook. Despise my minions on EvilGenuisSpace. It’s enough to give anyone validation exhaustion. It’s especially tiring when businesses expect it from us rather than friends or family and they are simply looking for the unrequited type of love.

“I’m the top garbage disposal distributor in the Northern Midwest Southeastern Region; follow me on Facebook to learn more.”

“We’ll cut your cat’s bangs just the way you want ‘em. We are the Twin Cities top hair salon for pets. Learn more on Twitter!”

It isn’t so much the volume of companies that want you to like them, it’s the volume of companies that want you to like them but fail to provide any value in return. Generally it’s repetitive status updates sharing a website link or the exact same tweet every day. Maybe it works for your business or maybe the one-way street method of communication is being ignored by current customers, or worse being passed over by your potential customers. While the tenants of direct marketing still apply to social media, it isn’t as tangible or front of mind as mailing a coupon. While I always have Twitter in hand (thanks to my smartphone), I don’t remember marketing messages for long. If your tweet doesn’t have an immediate impact, I’ve already moved on to the next one. I’ve probably thought a hundred times that something is cool, but it doesn’t stick in my head for more than five minutes because I’m not really engaged.

Social media needs to be interactive. You need to “like” your customers as much as you want them to “like” you. We can’t all be selling Ding Dongs or sneakers or the world’s most amazing fish tacos that can drive an unrequited relationship without customer interaction. So if you want to be successful on social media, you need to give your customers a reason to like you, and more often than not, it’s by letting them know that you like them too. I may have grown up in a Sam and Diane Cheers world, but I know Sam would have moved on to someone else well before the surprise end of season four. It’s the same thing for businesses. If you don’t give your potential fans or followers a reason to like you, they’ll pass you right over for someone else. If social media is a part of your marketing efforts, make sure you are directing those efforts in the right place—meeting your customer’s needs.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to get my cat’s hair cut before her audition for Feline Wipeout.

Her results, much like my experiences as an end user, were mixed. She explains, “So, I think what we end up with is simply a project that isn’t an overwhelming success or failure.” That’s a pretty blah result and hardly a motivation to keep plugging away with the effort involved to manage information for the mobile market. So if her results were mediocre with a concerted effort to make them useful to the museum consumer, why are they being slapped on everything from rental cars to bald spots? Okay maybe not bald spots yet, but if Google Earth is looking to advertise, I’ve got a large available space. Call me.

I can just see the meeting right now.

“Hey Bob, what do you know about QR codes?”

“Not much, but I hear the kids love them as much as they love the Twitter.”

“Well, we don’t have a budget for it, but let’s slap a bunch of them on our marketing materials and have ‘em link back to the main page of our website. It’ll be great!”

Six months later they don’t understand why people aren’t scanning them.

A new article from BizReport explains how people are interacting with QR codes and they found the following scan rates. “Newspapers and magazines are where most QR Codes are being found and scanned (35%) followed by on packages (18%) and on websites (13%). Surprisingly few were scanned from billboards (11%) or a piece of direct mail (11%).”

This makes sense to me, but the one I don’t get at all is the 13% that scanned on websites. If you are sitting at a desktop, laptop or using a tablet, why in the world would you whip out your mobile device to scan a QR code on a website to see a smaller version of where you already are? It would be like printing a tiny map on a highway sign. I don’t quite understand the logic there. When I was in New York City, I struggled getting a good angle to scan a billboard QR code, and if they were implemented on roads Burma Shave style, I’d be concerned about people accidently mowing down cows that have liberated themselves from an idyllic Midwestern pasture. According to Ad Age, some of the other interesting places QR codes have appeared are in the subway (with no cell reception) and on in-flight magazines where even Alec Baldwin isn’t allowed to have internet service to play Words with Friends. Finally, and possibly my favorite, MillerCoors teamed with some Seattle bars to allow patrons to scan a QR code and get a cab. While well meaning and a great experiment, the manual dexterity required to operate a smart phone was a little too much after a few frosty brews—which probably also explains why Apple keeps forgetting iPhone prototypes in bars.

The Ad Age piece continues to explain, “Experts cite three reasons that QR codes haven’t caught on. First, people are confused about how to scan them. Two, there’s little uniformity among the apps required to read them. Last, some who have tried the technology were dissuaded by codes that offer little useful information or simply redirect the user to the company’s website.”

I think the third part of this argument is the most compelling because people will eventually figure out the first one, and the second will shake out as the technology advances. If you want a QR code campaign to be successful it really needs to consider three factors. It needs to be optimized for mobile platforms. My Museum of Modern Art experience illustrates this. It was nice to have the QR codes, but I couldn’t get information to load on a Blackberry or iPhone because the landing page was too complex to be managed by most smartphones. QR codes should be used sparingly. Marketers should not just slap them on everything because that’s what the cool kids are doing. If all your advertising, products and collateral have a QR code that leads back to the main page of your website, not much is accomplished except annoying your potential customer. Which leads into my final point, QR codes need to have a purpose. Lead users to product reviews, or give us a coupon (but just one because how are we supposed to manage them all on a phone), or provide something of value. Make the pause required to pull out the phone, select the app, and wait for the camera to scan worth something. If the code provides value, people will keep using it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to wash this black Sharpie QR code off my bald spot.

While the film provides us with a somewhat happy non-apocalyptic ending, it does play on the Cold War tropes of the end of the world through nuclear war and genius child hackers using computer technology that looks like a Commodore 64 attached to a 8-track tape player. It was also my first experience with the idea of NORAD and the utilization of emerging technology. Fortunately for us today, our experiences with NORAD and computers are significantly more positive than the impending doom portrayed in that classic film.

Unless you are living under a rock, or maybe under an old Motorola Razr, you are probably aware of NORAD’s annual Santa Tracker which provides up-to-the-minute updates on Santa’s trek around the globe to deliver presents. I suspect there is a GPS unit inside Rudolph’s nose, but that’s probably a conspiracy best left undiscussed like Area 51. The Santa Tracker idea started in 1955 with a fortuitous accident. A local newspaper ran a Sears ad with a phone number to call Santa, except it was off by a digit leading children to dial up military personal expecting to hear about an attack on America and not an attack on holiday gift giving. For more information about this wonderful story, I highly recommend Daniel Terdiman’s CNET article, Behind the scenes: NORAD’s Santa tracker.

From phone calls in the 1950’s to the digital communication of today, the Santa tracking program has exploded to include www.noradsanta.org with video and Google Maps integration, a NORAD Facebook page which caused me to lose at least fifteen minutes of work productivity (sorry boss), a Smartphone app, and of course in my wheelhouse @NoradSanta on Twitter. All that’s missing is the API integration allowing Santa to check in to Foursquare all over the world, but only at “nice” locations.

My wife and I don’t have children, so our Christmas morning revolves around sipping coffee with Bailey’s, wrangling the cat into an elf costume, and pelting her with catnip filled mice until she gets worked up enough to attack the tree (my wife, not the cat). So pretty normal behavior for a couple of adults during the holiday season. While we won’t be glued to the computer getting updates on Santa’s location, this doesn’t mean that the tracker isn’t the coolest thing since sliced cheese. If you have little ones, I highly recommend you spend some time interacting with NORAD’s Santa tracker because at minimum it will help you get them nestled in their beds at a reasonable hour.

It’s interesting that in 1955 no one would have thought to call this a viral campaign. But in reality, no matter what your online interactions are, you never know how an accident can turn into something truly successful and positive, like bringing in nearly two thousand volunteers to work with the people who spend their days at one of the most important military installations in the United States.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go find a dial-up modem so I can play a game of chess.

A little background – the closest thing I have to a holiday sweater is a dark green wool one I bought back in 1998. I love this sweater. Despite the worn spots on the elbows and the random holes in it, I’ll probably wear it until my wife insists I burn it, or someone furtively sneaks into my closet and makes it “disappear” Godfather-style (think of waking up one morning with just a sleeve in the bed). Beyond that, my holiday-sweater experience is limited to what Hollywood believes flyover country people wear everyday in the winter, my mom’s appliqué holiday sweatshirts, and that freaky clown sweater Wil Wheaton was photographed wearing. An informal, yet scientific poll of the three people on Twitter who responded to my inquiry reports that 66% of people own ugly Christmas sweaters because they get invited to ugly sweater holiday parties. However, 33% of people do seem to enjoy the sweaters simply for their festive nature.

To get back to the point at hand, Google search activity for “Christmas Sweater” and “Ugly Christmas Sweater” has increased since 2008, which may be when American hipsters decided that you could wear festive sweaters ironically with skinny jeans. Because of that, different companies have come up with web advertising search strategies to take advantage of the annual spike in interest. In particular, the article discusses six companies using paid search to target those looking for such a sweater. Four of these companies then link to their Christmas sweaters. The other two don’t link to a googly-eyed Santa staring out into the holiday expanse; in fact they don’t even sell something in a wool or poly-cotton blend. The strategy of the latter companies not even selling Christmas sweaters is what interests me. For the person searching, it must be like going to the vending machine for a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and finding only off-brand bags of party mix. Or even worse, looking for a new and amazing brunch spot in the Twin Cities and getting ads for a gas station breakfast sandwich — a somewhat acceptable substitute, if you are willing to leave your pride at home. Is the short term benefit from purchasing unrelated search for non-existent products worth the long-term potential hit of turning off customers?

This leads me to the essential question the author, Tim Parry, asks: “Is this a good practice because it blocks retailers that sell Christmas sweaters from getting visibility, or is it a bad practice because the consumer clicks and doesn’t get a Christmas sweater?”
Most of my holiday shopping is done at the panicked last minute. I can just imagine my frustration if I were to use Google to search for that much needed holiday sweater shipped second-day air, but instead was led to one of these companies that had no holiday sweaters at all. I highly doubt that my heart would grow three sizes that day. Rather, I’d probably hurl a few choice words about these companies at my cat, who would just shrug and continue to groom herself. In other words, paying for ads with search terms not specifically related to what you are selling seems a bit disingenuous.
I don’t know that I’d call this paid search tactic deceptive, but it certainly isn’t the type of thing I’d want to experience as I make a mad dash from website to website trying to find the perfect mix of functional, festive, wooly and ugly. But if it actually works, I doubt you can blame companies for using the marketing tactic.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go find a bright red tie that plays Jingle Bells.

As I moved around in my twenties and early thirties, I lost track of that feeling. I had forgotten how nice it is to receive a simple reminder in the mail. Now, we send eCards for birthdays, and the Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn and “OH MY LORD I can’t ever get away from you people” nature of Social Media, the perception of the value from sending a piece of mail has been diminished. Instead of cards taped to an arch, we have fleeting “happy birthday” posts on a Facebook wall, or an online photo album of pictures we won’t ever remember to check. The reality is, while we are constantly warned that what you post to social media sites will be out there forever, well wishing messages on Social Media sites are fleeting.

Which is why I was surprised that an unlikely source, the Social Media blogging platform Tumblr, was what reminded me about the value of simply getting something in the mail. This time last year, I was gearing up for a trip to England with my wife for a wedding. As part of that, I dropped a quick note to some of my Twitter/Tumblr internet connections asking if they’d like a postcard. I was shocked at the overwhelmingly positive response. So I collected the addresses and carried with them me across the pond.

I spent a cold and snowy day in Cambridge reliving the semester I spent there in college and in the early afternoon, nipped into a warm pub next to a roaring fire to write my postcards over a pint of beer. Shortly after my messy scrawl filled the back of pictures of Cambridge, I dropped the cards off at a post office and promptly forgot about them.

Much to my surprise, shortly after returning from my trip, several of my internet friends had posted pictures of the postcards I sent them. Many had been stuck on the fridge with a magnet or taped to a mirror. It was a simple reminder that someone had made more of an effort to make a human connection with them than just some translated ones and zeros on a monitor. And there’s a lot of value in that.

I recently joked that if every man, woman and child sent something like eighty additional postcards a year that we’d have the USPS budget shortfall taken care of pretty quickly. While that’s never going to happen, I’m going to try and do my part. Not because of any intellectual reason, but rather because postal mail means something more to people. My wife and I have moved well past fifty on our holiday card list and hopefully some of those cards will end up taped to a white arch as a simple reminder that my wife and I care.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go fight with the mail merge function in Word to get my address labels printed.

That is probably the likely Hollywood perception most people have about how advertising mail gets to their door. The reality is much different. Most marketers aren’t interested in spending money to reach you if there isn’t any potential opportunity for you to buy. Even with a decline of twenty percent in mail volumes over the last five years, direct mail is still an effective method of reaching customers, and during the holiday season, most people do expect to see a spike in the amount of direct mail they receive.

However, sometimes there’s a real head scratcher of a campaign.

Since the first day of November, someone who hasn’t lived in our house for at least a decade, my wife, and I have all received the following mail from a single retail organization:

One Fall Sales Catalogue
Three $10 off In-Store Offers
Three Oversized Postcards
Two Black Friday Sneak Peek Offers

For those fans of Count Von Count it’s, “One! Two! Nine! Nine pieces of mail in fourteen days!” That’s a LOT of “pennies” if you get my meaning.

I suspect that the individual who doesn’t live with us (unless we have a secret room that I don’t know about which would be super cool!), is either a store card holder or former good customer based on the offers she has been receiving, while my wife and I are coming from a consumer list rental.

If you are curious as to why we’d be getting all these pieces, it’s probably not coming from an underground lair, but rather a company not thinking through the data aspects of their direct mail process. In other words, having good data is as important to the return on investment of a marketing campaign as a good offer and festive creative design.

One way to save money is to make sure you aren’t sending multiple copies of the same offer to one house through a process called duplicate elimination. When removing duplicates from a data file or set of files you really have three options. You can eliminate duplicates per person (first name, last name and address), by household, (last name and address) or simply by address. As you might guess, those different levels of matching will provide different results. In this instance, if our mysterious retail organization is even doing duplicate elimination between files, they are likely using per person or household matching. Since my wife and I have different last names and our secretive stranger has a different surname too, those two match levels would not identify us as duplicate records ensuring that we get each piece of mail multiple times.

Any organization doing direct mail needs to consider if they really want to send multiple mail pieces with the same offer to the same address. Sometimes I’m sure it makes sense, but in this instance it’s just annoying. It’s also expensive. Even at an average of fifty cents a piece for printing and postage, the retailer spent seven dollars to send us these nine pieces when they should have sent us only three. If they made the same mistake with only 20,000 households nationally, that’s $110,000 spent to inundate us with extra mail. That’s enough to make any bean counter looking at the bottom line cringe. An organization can spend all the time in the world creating the perfect offer but if they don’t do their due diligence managing their data, they are wasting money and decreasing their return on investment.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get a couple of names at my address on some beer mailing lists.

Having come from a town in need of a serious rebranding (seriously people, do you really have to ask me about all of our sports heartbreak or a river fire from nearly fifty years ago the first time you meet me?), it was actually with great interest that I read Wendy Lee’s article Minnesota tourism seeks image makeover in the Star Tribune. Lee writes:

“The North Star State is boring. Unsophisticated. Downright old-fashioned. And that assessment comes from residents in neighboring Michigan, Illinois and Nebraska. In places farther away such as Dallas, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, the perception gets even worse.”

Nebraska finds us boring; if that isn’t a marketing wake-up call I don’t know what is. I think the words people might use to describe us are “quaint” when they don’t necessarily mean charming, or “antiquated” as if the entire state was an episode of Prairie Home Companion come alive. We have mullets and play hockey, and even if we aren’t originally from here, have an aunt and uncle named Ole and Lena who sit at the ready with a steaming plate of hotdish, lutefisk and some linguistic misadventures.

But just as the rivers in Wisconsin don’t run yellow with cheese, we know that is not really Minnesota. From great hiking and camping, to an excellent music scene, great neighborhood bars and restaurants, to the best event in the history of humankind—the Minnesota State Fair—the Twin Cities and the state of Minnesota have a lot to offer people.

The real challenge is to capture the essence of the state in a few words, or a website or a thirty second commercial and to promote that as a unified image. According to Lee, not only does the state have to deal with negative perceptions about the weather, but it also has a fragmented marketing message.

Living in-state, it would be challenging for me to discuss the impact of out-of-state marketing, but I can take a look at the Explore Minnesota website, Facebook page and Twitter account. While their website is an excellent front for the face for the state of Minnesota, I think their Facebook and Twitter accounts are more geared toward people who already live here. While that isn’t problematic on its face, if you are looking to bring people in from other states, you probably don’t want to tweet on Wednesday events that are taking place on Friday—no matter how cool they are. You just aren’t going to get those folks from Chicago or elsewhere to come on over for a Friday arts cruise in Bemidji. That being said, both accounts appear to do a very good job of interacting with individuals and have attracted a nice following with 21,519 followers on Facebook and another 3574 on Twitter. For a state, the cross-channel marketing of traditional advertising combined with the accessibility of social media may be the perfect fit to encourage tourism to the state.

I can see the campaign now, “Minnesota, we even have computers.”

Okay, maybe that’s a little extreme.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go be slightly above average with the rest of my fellow Minnesotans.