U2 as a multimillion-dollar, multinational media company

Great write up on U2 and their marketing operation in the NYT today.  Somehow U2 manages to be a corporation, advertise with Apple which is completely proprietary, and yet have a glow of being open, honest, young and progressive.  That is a challenging brand position to reside in, and hats are off to their management and to the band/brand itself.

Quote from the NYT article on U2.

"We always said it would be pathetic to be good at the music and bad at the business," said Paul McGuinness, the band’s manager since the beginning. And while U2 hasn’t become a Harvard Business School case study (at least not yet) it offers an object lesson in how media can connect with their customers.

Speaking on advertising on the web I frequently get questions like "that is not what Nike does" and I have to keep reminding folks that YOU ARE NOT NIKE!  So while I am in awe of U2 and what they have accomplished in music, in business, and in philanthropy, I would caution new artists to remind themselves YOU ARE NOT U2.  New bands have to be a new brand and build on the latest in advertising evolution.

Public Relations – blogging authentically with your customers

A public relations and crisis communications post worth the read at On the AOL Journals advertising mini-brouhaha.

Public relations has changed in a big way over the past two years. Sure, you still need a PR department, but the most important thing is to have your executives and product managers blogging authentically with your customers.

Here is the outline, and it is truly something out of a textbook with frankness, humility, actionable lessons.  Job well done on the post at least, although turning ads loose without warning isn’t a way to endear the public.

Here is the top level summary, and it is a well articulated PR post

1. Huge disclaimer
2. What happened
3. Background
4. What we did wrong
5. What we did right
6. What should we do next
7. Reader Comments

He even has the class to discuss Mena’s success with SixApart crisis/honest communication.  As a typepad user, I appreciate that.

A9 Block by Block Photos – Maybe Storefront Advertising IS the “in thing”

Scobelizer points out that A9 has block by block photos on their A9 mapping service.  Several large cities are already done, including Houston.  But surely the photos will be updated and this brings up an interesting cheesy marketing opportunity.  What exact DATE AND TIME are the photos taken in your city?

If you know WHEN they are going to take the photos, isn’t that the day to be sure your signs are lit up so they show up in the photo for permanent street level marketing?  Or to have a performance artists in front of your theater?  The photos I saw don’t seem to care about image.  Yes Houston is always under construction but even given that I don’t think we got a fair shake based on the construction in our downtown snapshot-in-time.

What about laser and/or infrared signs that blare in photographs but get past the city’s sign ordinances being invisible to the naked eye?  Perhaps draw an image on the road with lasers that only shows up in photos?  Tell me Red Bull wouldn’t jump on the opportunity?

As always, timing is everything.  I look forward to geospacial signage soon.

Child Labor, Globalization and One Persons Attempt to Figure it out

You can’t discuss child labor without also discussing globalization, marketing and collective action.  I really do try to keep this blog on marketing, public relations and social software.  But sometimes those topics are a bit bigger.  You can’t discuss public relations without knowing that Ferdinand Marcos was created by a PR Practitioner.  You can’t discuss Bernays or Ivy Lee without also discussing pre-war Germany and McCarthyism. 

As a trackback to this post by Katie she points out this article "Child workers refuse to quit jobs" and questions "what should we do?".  As Katie notes, destroying StarBucks is not the solution.

I think (and this is me exaggerating a bit) that most Americans view child labor as kids being made to work in mills and sweatshops instead of staying home and playing Playstation and getting an education.  Like their lives at home would be so much better if only someone blew up Starbucks.

In reality, it seems that many would stay home and watch their siblings die from lack of medicine and food, see their parent(s) struggle to find work that is not there for them and would have no school to attend because there simply is none to go to.

I was thinking, when reading this newsbit, that a problem I have with obie-noxious outspoken protesting go-against-the-grainers is that they have many, many complaints against… well, sometimes everything…  but no solutions.

What is known is making donations of goods through NGOs is not the solution.  Pure free-trade-zones also cause problems because they do not contributed tax back to the local society and create an uneven playing field, thereby encouraging the creation of more free-trade-zones in other countries which also don’t contribute to the local society.  Capitalism with limits (reasonable taxes to solve collective action problems for example) actually does improve the lives of the many.  The question is where are those limits?

May I suggest four books that relate:

1. NOLOGO, Naomi Klein (despite being sensational at times, a tremendous concise history of marketing is included as a bonus)
2. The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman
3. George Soros on Globalization (bad writing style, but he makes some good points about the anti-globalization process being co-opted and solving the right problems with the right groups)
4. Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Mancur Olson

As for me, I have studied the topics of PR, collective action, social software and politics to the point that I no longer believe I have any answers.  But I definitely DO believe in the wisdom of crowds and therefore distributed authoring.  So back to programming the systems to help others solve the problem collectively….

Social Software, or Web 2.0, requires changed behavior from the organization

We recently launched a site for the Houston Theater District (awesome design Tim!).  In a meeting with them on Wednesday we talked about the reality of a content driven search engine friendly web site with distributed authors.  It not only gets a different reaction from the public, but it also requires changed behavior from the organization itself.  A brochure becomes a vehicle to provide content, to serve the public. 

The Houston Theater District gets this, which is precisely why I am highlighting them, but I have seen many clients that do not get this fundamental shift in their way of thinking.  It is more cultural than marketing, more servant than arrogance, and certainly more demanding than static sites.

But this is a very old lesson.  In the article below on Ivy Lee, arguably the father of public relations, the author highlights that Lee sought to actually change the behavior of John D. Rockefeller.  I don’t imagine it was easy, but it was the right thing to do.

Lee even prefigured the mutual satisfaction phase.

At a time when other cutting edge (Public Relations) practitioners were trying to explain their clients’ activities in ways that were palatable to their publics, Lee was realizing some things just couldn’t be explained in a palatable yet honest way.

When Lee went to work for the Rockefeller family, John D. Rockefeller had a long and well-deserved reputation as a robber baron because he was one. He and several other well-known tycoons had achieved success and wealth by being ruthless, profit-driven businessmen whose actions were often harsh, arrogant, and uncaring. Some of what they did could be explained away, but much of it was beyond any hope of gift-wrapping. The public would never approve of such behavior.

Faced with this realization, Lee came up with a suggestion that was totally contrary to the robber barons’ prevailing philosophy of the public be damned. He concluded that changing Rockefeller’s behavior — or at least his companies’ actions — might be the best public relations of all. Initially, Rockefeller resisted, but Lee’s persistence and persuasiveness wore him down.

Instead of limiting his role to writing press releases and public statements and arranging special appearances for Rockefeller, Lee was soon advising Rockefeller on the public relations advantages of a broad range of business decisions and management policy that included mechanisms to redress workers’ grievances, the selection of new plant sites, setting employee wages and working conditions, and negotiating contracts with suppliers and vendors. In many ways this presaged the interactive adjustment and mutual satisfaction approaches to public relations that weren’t fully articulated until 70 years later.

(emphasis added by me) .. Finish the article on Ivy Lee here.

Picture of Ivy Lee and his papers link.