I can't believe I'm saying this, but I've signed up to do my first Triathlon! It's the Danskin Triathlon in Seattle this August.  I'm excited and a bit scared at the same time, which is great. What's been most interesting is the response I get from people when I tell them I'm doing this. When I tell women they say "great job! How exciting!" They never ask how far? But with men it's completely different. When I tell men 9 times out of 10 the first thing they say is "how long is it?" It's a sprint triathlon, so I always say that, which breaks down to 5k run, 12 mile bike and 1/2 mile swim. Then they say, "well sure, I can do that." Uh huh. Okay. Great. I never know what to say to that. You can't say "well, have you?" Or, "how do you know?" So I just nod and smile.

Anyway, it's an adventure.

I have to say I am completely blown away by the advanced level of marketing skills being displayed by the presidential campaigns in the market right now. I am seeing some pretty clever word of mouth, viral, grass roots efforts. I'm also blown away by the level of website functionality most campaigns are offering. Site like HillaryClinton.com and BarackObama.com are incredibly dynamic. They offer functionality websites on 3rd and 4th releases don't have. What makes me laugh about this is these websites will easily take 6 months minimum to build. Probably more like 10 months which means if you do that math all those statements the candidates made about not being sure they are in the race is complete bunk. These campaigns have been in the planning stages for a year minimum.

Can one candidate outdo the other? Will viral campaigns really draw voters?  Only time will tell. But it's going to be fun to watch. Today I'll look at the Clinton campaign...

Case in point;

Hillary Clinton has an initiative called I Can be President directed at teaching children anyone can be president. The site has a mashup of Google Maps to locate people in your area involved in the campaign. This campaign completely leverages her differentiator, being a woman. It also says, if you are a woman or minority you too can be president.  What's more adorable that children drawing posters. My opinion A+. She also has her own podcast series called HillCast (don't love the name). I'm less impressed with this effort because if you watch the podcasts they are like watching the evening news. This takes the spirit out of what a podcast should be. She is very rehearsed sounding with lots of makeup and fancy suits. Podcasts should be real and insightful, even a bit vulnerable. This podcast series is her way of saying what she wants to say on the news but doesn't get the air time. My opinion D. Of course there is the obligatory MySpace site. This site is very posed as well. It's written in 3rd person which is kind of creepy. Someone cut and pasted the standard bio into the MySpace template and it doesn't fit. She would do better to get someone a bit more savvy about these things to perk up her info. Again, D. As of now she has 2,346 friends. John Edwards has 14,519 friends on his MySpace. Will I vote for Edwards because he's more popular than Clinton? Is anyone else feeling that gawky this is high school pit in your stomach yet?

If you are a Messenger user or you are thinking about becoming a Messenger user this is a great time to update your version to 8.1 and get in on the campaign. Here is a great blog with all the details.

I have been involved with Page Ahead for 7 years now and this year I am happy to serve as the organizations President. Page Ahead is a non-profit organization that provides books and reading activities to at-risk children in Washington state. The power of this organizations mission is simple and profound, children that are read to do better in life. Children who own books and are encouraged to read lower their risk of poverty, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy and abuse. Hard to believe that books can do all that, but they can. No mystery, no medicine. Just the imagination of a child and a warm lap to read in. So this is a big shot out to our friends at PACCAR and The Seattle Mariners! Over the next three years PACCAR has committed to donate $100 for every RBI hit by the Mariners in a program called RBI's for Literacy. In addition they will sponsor book drives at 4 home games each season. We are super excited to be involved with this two distinguished Pacific Northwest organizations. So I say "PLAY BALL!"

I continue to be reminded of how rare GOOD customer service is. I read an excerpt from Good to Great last night in the current book I'm reading Made To Stick that once again was a slap in the face to companies who don't value customer service. But first, HP. 

I bought a new HP Media Center PC in December, my 3rd HP. It cost approximately $1800 because we decided to get the upgraded video card, etc which was worth it because we are using the computer as a TV as well and record our shows with it. Plus we are streaming our videos to the LCD flat panel in the family room. So it made scene to get the upgraded PC. Everything was great up until last Saturday morning. After my daughter watched the American Idol recordings from that week the PC froze. So I did what anyone would do in that case, I rebooted. But when I rebooted the machine kept spinning in cycles around and around from the HP blue screen to the going to start Windows in safe mode page but every time the computer tried to start Windows it would cycle to the HP blue screen again. I tried F8 but no luck. So I called HP. You can see where this is going now. It's Saturday morning so I sit on hold for approximately 15 minutes. I talk to one person and she pulls up my registration record to make sure I'm within the warranty timeline, which I was because the computer is only 3 months old. But I ask myself, what if I wasn't within whatever window of time they determine to be the warranty??? Luckily I was so she let's me continue to hold. Then the next lady comes on and I have to repeat the whole scenario over again. She can't find the tracking number so she's pulling up all new info to get my records. Completely clumsy experience up to this point. No indication at all that talking to person 1 had any value when talking to person 2. So why did I even speak to person 1? Lame.

Person 2 is taking down the details of what my problem his. She is clearly reading from a script which doesn't bother me yet, but soon will. The connection is terrible. She sounds 10,000 miles away which I'm pretty sure she is. I can't understand her at all mainly due to the horrible connection. To her credit she is very patient with me, I assume this is part of their training. But since I can't understand her my frustration level is skyrocketing. She takes long pauses between telling me what to do next which is due to her reading the script in front of her. She puts me on hold a few times and comes back with the same solutions that weren't working before but for some reason she recommends them again. The breaking point in the conversation comes when she tells me to take off the side panel and begin disconnecting the flat, red cable BUT not the multi colored round cable. Are you kidding me! I am completely out of my element here. In the 10 years I have owned computers I've never taken off the side panel and certainly not for a computer 3 months old. So I say "no, I don't think I'm going to be doing that." She tells me the only way to get the computer restarted is to take the PC to a computer store, get them to take my data off and then once the hard drive is clear of the data hit F10 which will start the hard drive all over again.

After I get off the phone I think to myself "how could they have done that better." I told her more than once I just want HP to fix it. And really that is what I wanted. I wanted the Nordstrom customer service for my PC. I wanted the woman on the phone to say I'll have someone get back to you today. Or I'll have someone come get your computer, fix it, and bring it back to you. It's 3 months old! Why am I responsible for fixing it! I could take it back to the store and return it because it's still under the stores return policy. But I don't have the box so I'd have to figure out how I get it back to the store. blah, blah, blah. Why can't I buy PC's, cars, toothpaste, and bicycles at Nordstrom. That's what I want. And shame on HP for lousy customer experience.

Starbucks formed a record label this week. What's notable about this is a few things. First of all, I thought they already had one? The record label is called HEAR (which I think is  a great name). But they have been selling HEAR CD's in their store for over a year now. What was that if it wasn't a record label?  I guess this means they are actually going to start recording music as opposed to re-publishing it like they have been doing.

I'm one of those people who does spend $4 for a mocha and have bought several CD's at Starbucks before. But what I noticed last week when I was in my local Starbucks was the two music machines where people could burn their own CD's was gone. I wouldn't have noticed except my daughter loved to listen to the music while we drank our coffee (okay. she's a cocoa girl). So I asked my barista what happened to the music machines. He said they got taken out a few days ago because it wasn't making any money. In fact, it was losing money and taking up room from tables. We chatted a bit and he felt the reason it didn't work was because the music selection on the machines was for an older crowd but the type of people that would burn a CD was a younger crowd so it was a mismatch between product and audience. Clearly the barista has thought about this a bit and I think he's on to something. He also added he was glad the music machines were gone because he didn't like the music selection it offered and the store was forced to play what was in the selection. Now that the music machines are gone they can go back to playing what's particular to their taste.

Lovely chatting with my barista!

Great article about the latest additions to Spaces. I'm a big fan of bots myself. I think they are a really strong way to make your site more sticky! Check out the Muse bot here.

A friend of mine sent me an interesting article from Advertising Age reporting that the Red Campaign Bono and his partners kicked off a year ago has failed to deliver the big bucks it was expected to raise for AIDS awareness in Africa. To date it is estimated that $100 million dollars has been spent in marketing by the three big corporate sponsors; Apple, Gap and Motorola but only $18 million has been raised. This brings up a few questions for me and others I'm sure.

What was their expected ROI and by when? The article touches on the fact that this type of campaign is front loaded in cost. That's definitely true. But campaigns like this are short lived. The buzz that is generated from an Oprah appearance lasts about a day and a half. How long do they think the campaign can run before they see a depreciation in attention? The biggest sales and money should have been made in the beginning launch timeframe. They will now likely experience diminishing returns on their investments a year later. Front loading costs on a campaign implies there will be a long life to that campaign and it will earn the money back over time. Buzz campaigns are not built for longevity. You get it, make a splash, make your money and get out. Front loaded campaigns are designed for audiences that will build over time through repeated awareness, not buzz.

They do have a blog that is recent and this is a great way to keep the conversation going. But they certainly can't do another visit to the Oprah show or Times Square and expect the pay off to be the same as the first time. You only get one shot at the launch and that's where the excitement is made. Their marketing strategy a year later now needs to focus on loyalty and repeat business as opposed to new users. It will be much more difficult to attract new users now unless their offering changes.

I also have issue with the comment that this campaign has generated a huge amount of buzz. This is where I think the ability to correctly define buzz is lost. The statement that this campaign created buzz from this article means that a lot of money was spent. That's not what buzz means. Buzz is what happens after the money is spent and people that matter start talking about it. I question whether this campaign has generated any real buzz on it's own. Going on Oprah and then having someone tell someone else they saw it on Oprah is a kind of buzz, but not the viral kind I think the campaign was designed to attract. The products are sponsored by brands that are urban, hip and young. I'm sure this was designed to build buzz with that audience. But there is not evidence that this has happened. Gap has certainly lost a great deal of brand equity over the last year and I'm not sure young, hip, urban folks would think Gap is cool.

Social cause marketing is very interesting. Had this group wanted to raise the most money for Africa it seems they could have just given their marketing spend to the cause and that would have put the contribution at $100 million now instead of the $18 million it currently has. The companies could have obviously done some PR around the fact they gave away that money and generated awareness that way. Maybe they could have had employees give of their time and blog about their experiences for everyone to follow. That would have cost $0. I could go on and on but you get the point. This campaign was traditional marketing and it reaped the same benefits, not much.

Spaces has announced the official launch of the Sin City Seven Sweepstakes!  Entering the contest is easy: You just need to add 7 friends to your list of friends in your Space (who need to accept and add the same seven friends), select a team name, and  ensure your Space features a blog entry, list module and the Expedia gadget developed specifically for this campaign!

You can check out the campaign at the interactive landing page here. Get your friends and get spinning!

Looking for a good Monday morning giggle. USAToday.com posted an article describing all the wonderful new features they have added to their website to make it more engaging and community driven. A user can use tagging to navigate content, they can upload their own photos, ranks stories to show the community what's most interesting (think Digg), and of course the crown jewel of community engagement... you can now add comments. But the thing that gave me quite a chuckle this morning as I'm swigging down my Starbucks is the comments at the end of the story. I'm reading through this story hearing about all the cool new features the author wants me to know about then I get down to the comments section and the first ten comments I read are about how terrible the new site layout is. To quote the most recent comment of 16 minutes ago "Your revised website stinks!" Now that is just funny! One commenter from 1hr 30 min ago makes an incredibly valuable and insightful comment that unless someone from USAToday responds to the comments being made it really doesn't do any good to have comments. Which makes me go hhhmmm. That is a good point. How often to you see sites that take comments but don't offer an visibility into what happens when those comments are read? I'm much more likely to add comments and suggestions if I know someone is listening and I can have an influence. If there are comments just for the sake of looking good but no action behind them doesn't that make it even worse that if they left well enough alone in the first place.

I'm going to watch the USAToday page and see how long it takes someone to respond to the comments they are getting. Because as of now they are taking a beating...

There is a really excited campaign going on right now being run by the Live.com search team. It's called Click for the Cause. You can learn more from their Windows Live Spaces. Each time you search here until March 31, 2007, Microsoft will make a contribution to ninemillion.org, a UN Refugee Agency-led campaign providing educational resources for the nine million refugee youth around the world. The campaign has been promoted mainly with word of mouth efforts. There is even a gadget you can get here to add to your Space or your Live.com page. The campaign is a great way of getting people to try Live.com search while still helping a great social cause. The money Live didn't spend on advertising gets funneled to a very worthy cause. Win/Win. So started searching now!