Posts Video, Photos Direct From Email on Posterous

Check out Posterous. It is a site that allows you to post video and photos to a unique page that they create for you just by sending an email. You can set password controls or leave it open to the public. And its free.

According to Techcrunch, they apparently just got a new round of funding. It will be interesting to see how they monetize this.

They announced today a new group blogging feature that allows groups to send in posts directly to the blog. Seems ideal for groups of friends, families, reunions, etc. I started using Posterous today and it is wickedly simple to use.

Very cool service. Seems like the kind of app facebook or google will want for Christmas.

Saab Proves GM Doesn't Get Consumers

So my theory about Detroit is that they have struggled because they are not consumer focused companies. And probably haven't been in decades. Saab is a perfect example.

GM went looking for growth in the late 1990's like all the other car makers. With Saab they saw an opportunity. Unfortunately, what they saw was an opportunity for themselves. Here is what I mean.


Saab has been a quirky, little brand for years with lots of loyal Saab owners. (Disclosure: I owned three Saabs in the 90's.) The Saab loyalists loved the outsider personality of the brand. They loved the unusual, even odd, designs. They loved that their cars were quirky and considered it personality, part of the charm.

The big publicly known problem with Saabs was that they were mechanically challenged. To own a Saab was to know a mechanic on a first name basis. GM looked at Saab and said, hey we can solve their biggest problem. We can put in GM engines and share the chassis across different brands such as Subaru. It will create efficiency and reliability. We can also make the designs a little more mainstream and attract a broader consumer base once the mechanical reliability is improved. With Saab, they saw the opportunity to solve their own problem, excess manufacturing capacity.

But there was a problem with this approach. It isn't what the Saab owners wanted. The Saab consumers would not take mechanical perfection if it meant giving up the personality of their Saabs. And this is exactly what GM did.

GM put in GM engines and "redesigned" the 9-3, their base model to try and attract new, young buyers who have never purchased a Saab before. They were successful at first, but here is what has happened since then. Saab is now selling less than half the units they did in the first year of GM ownership. Saab loyalists have all but abandoned the brand and those new 9-3 buyers don't seem to be buying a second Saab.

So by creating an efficient (read as less costly to produce) product that appeals to a broader market, they managed to completely change the brand and misread the loyal customers that they inherited. Ford, in a rare example of consumer focus, understood that Volvo = safety and practicality. They have not changed the core brand values. (It still may not save them from being sold, but at least the brand is intact.) Saab used to equal interesting design and fun driving. Not so much any more.

GM made its initial investment in Saab in 1990 and took full control in 2000. US sales climbed to a record 47,914 in 2003. In 2008, they were down 31% through October. Last year, GM sold 9.55 million vehicles globally, making Saab a small, distracting brand with 125k units sold. Now it seems that Saab is on the block. Too bad. It didn't have to be like this. If Detroit understood brands and consumers, this might have been avoided.

Where Detroit Went Wrong

Here is my theory. The Big Three stopped being customer focused businesses decades ago.

Every company has a personality, which most of us call the "culture" of that company. And in every company there is one business function that really controls the company. For example, finance, manufacturing, marketing could all be the function that calls the final shots. At P&G it is marketing, at Fed Ex it is operations, at Citi it is finance. Most times this is unwritten, but understood by all.

So much of a company's culture is determined by the dominant function within the company. At the automakers, finance and manufacturing long ago became the dominant functions and ultimately drove the products that the company made. How else do you explain the Pontiac Aztec?

With perhaps the exception of their pick up trucks, the Big Three have not built cars that people really want in many, many years. Their quality is apparently equal to the other car makers now. So why don't we want to buy American cars? Because they weren't designed and built based on what we want. They were designed and built based on what the company wanted to build, the need to feed their large manufacturing operation busy, the need to pay their long term obligations. And to be clear, the dealers are not end consumers and depending upon their opinions is better than nothing, but no substitute for meeting consumers needs.

To be fair, I think Ford is now taking much more of a consumer focus and their CMO Jim Farley is their best chance at bringing the consumer's voice into the design and engineering studios.

If the U.S. automakers were consumer focused and not internally focused, their brand strategy would have made a whole lot more sense. What role does Buick play in their product portfolio? Why do they make the exact same model under the GM label and Chevy label? We all know it is exactly the same car/truck. So what is the point?

In recent years, realizing their products weren't meeting broad swaths of the market, Detroit began buying foreign automakers like Volvo, Saab and Hummer. But look what GM did to Saab. They tried to standardize their engines and platforms. The designs became more vanilla and units sold have dropped by almost half since GM purchased them.

Jim Farley and his comrades are the key to the Big Three's survival, with or without a large bailout package.

Managing Your Personal Brand Online

With the proliferation of news sites, social networking profiles and video and photo sharing, you (your name or your photo) can probably be found all around the Internet. Increasingly, people are trying to manage their online brands. But before you "manage" your mentions, you need to know what mentions are out there. There are a couple of easy, interesting ways to do this:

Google:
If you are like most of us, occasionally you type your name into google to see what you will get. To get automatic updates you can set up google news alerts with your name as the key words and you will get an email any time a news story or blog mentions you.

Addict-o-matic:
This is a site that searches major websites and services for mentions key words. It searches Twitter, Google Blog search, Yahoo News, Flickr among others. It is a great way to search a large number of important sites and services.

Technorati:
Technorati is a well know blog search engine service. They seek to make the blogosphere accessible. You can search for blogs by topic. You can see which blogs have the most traffic. You can also search your name if you so choose to see if you are coming up in any blog discussions. Unlikely for most of us, but you half-famous people may need this.

Social Media Projections for 2009

Most marketers I talk to are stunned at the speed and breadth of change in the social media space. A few years ago, no one had heard of Facebook and now 40 year old moms are sending party invites to their friends and writing on walls in Facebook.

Check out a new report published today that includes some of the leading thinkers in this space. Social Media Projections for 2009 is a straight forward title for a report that is chock full of insight about where things might be heading. You can view it inline below compliments of Scribd.
Social Media 2009

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Management Business social media 2009

Be sure to read in Rhohit Bhargava's piece "What Marketers Did...(2008) / What Marketers Will Do (2009)" He says in essence, we will begin to adapt to the power of these networks vs. trying to force our constructs into a new world. Example, conduct "focus groups" on social media usage by customers to determine "authoritative" results to inform your strategy. In this new world, we can and should use these networks to gather the same information that expensive, formal research would produce.

How To Sell A Commodity...Like Chewing Gum

A brand that caught my attention is Stride Gum. Chewing gum is a boring, undifferentiated category. So how do you create a distinct brand? Create a personality that targets a clearly defined audience and let them know what problem your product solves for them. And their marketing mix is creative for a chewing gum, and not dependent on coupons, inserts and tv spots.

The Target: Stride's audience is 18-30, for sure, and based on their ads and web marketing, it is focused on young men. I am not exactly in the demo myself, but they got my attention.

The Personality: They have a new ad campaign that is very funny. "Office Park" is my favorite spot of this year. These ads will get them noticed.

They also have a clever viral campaign that on the face of it seems only tangentially related to the brand, but is actually central to their brand strategy. Stride is on to it...get others to spread the word about your product and you immediately get more from your ad spend. They sponsored the travels of Matt, an ordinary guy who travelled the world filming himself dancing with average people in dozens and dozens of countries.

It sounds dumb, until you watch it. Then it becomes a bit addicting and you start asking all sorts of questions. He is featured on their website under Matt's Place. He also has a website that tells his story, no college, doesn't like to work, wants to travel, dances like a goof and found someone to pay him for it. Not inspiring, but funny to the right demo.....high school and college aged guys, perhaps?

The Problem To Solve: Television brand advertising can be a colossal waste of money, but it can also be very effective if you have a strong creative brief that clearly outlines your audience, your business objective and the consumer's problem to be solved. The folks at Stride seem to be trying to solve three issues at once with their new spots: 1) attract new customers and encourage trial with strong creative that breaks through the clutter and gets Stride noticed, 2) the promise of a gum that is exciting and has long lasting flavor and 3) encourage existing customers to chew more gum.

Keep your eye on these guys. They are creative marketers.

Facebook's Scary New Service...Is Brilliant

Facebook has a brilliant new strategy. But if you are over 30, when you first hear it, you might be scratching your head. Some may even be a little freaked.

They want to launch a service that allow you to share your web activities with your facebook friends. The service is called Facebook Connect and allows users to log on to web sites and see their friends behavior on those sites. The NYTs has an interesting article about it today.

What is genius is that it allows sites that currently are not "social" sites, to be pulled quickly and easily into the facebook world. This is really the next evolution of the Share This button. Scary and wildly interesting.....

Segmenting Your Web Audience -- Google Just Made It Easy

The challenge with third party segmentations is that they are expensive and never seem to be "exactly" right for your needs. And how do leap from household address to web behavior? Google Analytics, which is quickly becoming the de facto web tracking tool, has released an "on the fly" segmentation tool.

Google Analytics Blog: More Enterprise-Class Features Added To Google Analytics

You are only as good as what you can track. It looks like a promising tool that will allow marketers and others to unlock the data that they are capturing.

A good quick explanation is available on Online Sales blog

Want to Figure Out Your Social Media ROI? Consider a Plan. | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog

With social media all the rage, how does it fit into a fixed marketing budget based on ROI and measurement? What are a whole bunch of tweets worth? Beth Harte has an interesting post on MarketingProfs.

Want to Figure Out Your Social Media ROI? Consider a Plan.

"It’s all the buzz these days, what is the ROI of social media? What’s the return? How much money can I make off this social media stuff? What’s the investment? How much time and money is this going to take? You’ve heard it all, right? We know conversation with our customers is the right thing to do. But how can we justify utilizing social media even on the most basic of levels?"

Remember when dotcoms were new and investors and entrepreneurs tried to convince the world that the old metrics didn't apply any more? Well, turns out that the metrics hadn't really changed that much. If you don't have sales, you can't have profits. And without profits, you can't stay in business indefinitely."

So even though social media is new (and many of the companies haven't figured out how to make money for themselves) I am guessing the old metrics still apply and we need to figure out how to track the success of social media within our larger marketing mix.