A week or so ago, I mentioned that I was assembling a pretty cool panel of marketing and advertising experts to go through this year’s SuperBowl television commercials, with their reviews and comments appearing after the game on the website for my new book, “‘What Was That Number Again?’ Crimes Against Advertising, and How to Prevent Them.”

Look, advertising and marketing didn’t start to fall out of favor with the public because it’s not good business.  It’s falling out of favor because most of it is terrible.  And sometimes, there’s no bigger stage for a demonstration of the best and worst-case scenarios than SuperBowl Sunday.

THE COOL NEWS

Our panel has expanded, and now includes Kathy Buckworth, best-selling author, corporate marketing veteran, and now the person who has the ear of some of North America’s biggest corporations when they want to learn how to market to women.  It also includes Mike McCurlie, founder of MJM Productions in Hamilton, and creator of some of the catchiest, most memorable and most effective jingles in broadcasting today (people who live in Ontario still love the work he did for Sleeman Breweries).

They join Larry MacInnis and Michael Kryton – two of the most decorated and celebrated ad men in Canadian history – along with Mark Kaplowe, whose studios nestled in the woods just outside Manhattan crank out more automobile advertising than any other source in North America.

Oh yeah, and Seth Godin’s in there, too.  Wait ’til you hear what he told me the other day about Super Bowl advertising.

The website for the book is here (if you click that link, it’ll open in a new window).  We’ll have plenty of videos for you to watch, and reviews and commentary from some the smartest advertising and marketing people I know.

Advance warning: This isn’t so much a post as a meandering rant.  If you get all the way to the end and can walk a straight line, I applaud you.

I’m going to politely ask software developers to just go on vacation for a little while when it comes to social media applications and platforms.

Seriously – we’re overwhelmed, and we’re losing perspective.

I decided over the weekend that I would audition a few social media platforms that I’d been ignoring.  And while I’m not evaluating whether or not they work for you, I’ve come to the conclusion that for now, I’m pretty good with Facebook and Twitter, and the occasional dabble into LinkedIn and when I have the time, Google+.

I tried Foursquare for a couple of days and realized (largely with Tatiana’s help) that much like Facebook and Twitter, you get from Foursquare what you put into it.  I’m sure there are people who find tremendous benefit to using it, but I don’t know that it really serves my purposes right now.  I know a few people who seem to be using it a lot, and to me these are pretty savvy folks; so I don’t assume that they’d just flush a bunch of time on something just because it was shiny.  But right now, I’m spread too thin to be able to give Foursquare enough “I” to get any “R” from it (shoutout for the Scott Stratten fans).

The key for me was in having to explain to someone what these other sites do.  If the benefit was buried under too many layers of stuff, it didn’t make the cut.

I’m still going to try to figure out how to use YouTube effectively, and I really will get around to using Google+ sometime (Chris Brogan is too smart to be this wrong); but when it comes to the major social media platforms, I’m left wondering what other minutiae of our lives our social circles need to be in on, and what the hell’s left to invent.  I read today that there’s a new app/platform for the iPhone that will tell me what the best menu item is at the restaurant I’m visiting; I’m flabbergasted that there was a demand for this.

I went through what I’ve come to call a “self-imposed Twexile” a couple of weeks ago, that I’m slowly starting to come back from.  The idea behind it was simple: I’m writing two books (the first of which I’ll be telling you about very soon).  I found myself cursing a writer’s block one day.  On Twitter.  I was writing about my inability to write.  I started to think that every 140 characters I was typing into Twitter was 140 characters that wasn’t going into either of my books.

I realized I had gotten caught up.  I got sucked into the social media vortex where I started to believe that tweeting about work was just as important as doing work.

A couple of weeks ago, when the Klout people redid their algorithm, all the wailing and gnashing of teeth made me peek at my own score, and then start looking around at my friends to see who had suffered a similar setback – as if my new Klout score was going to somehow damage my book sales, or hurt my chances of getting invited to speak somewhere.

I started looking around online, and found people threatening legal action and trying to get the Federal Trade Commission involved, because of the damage that the new algorithm had done to their business.  No, I’m not kidding. These people are out there.  Look, if your business depends on your Klout score, you seriously need to re-examine your career path.  If you’ve ever joined a social network, or even simply tweeted something solely in an effort to have a positive impact on your Klout score, you need to step away from the screen for a while and remind yourself about what’s truly important in the world.

There’s become something of a cottage industry built around being a “social media guru”.  The irony isn’t lost on me that a number of people were calling themselves “social media gurus” until the term became the subject of well-deserved ridicule, then they too joined the chorus of people doing the scoffing and pretended they’d never considered having it put on their business cards.

I’m going to stir a few pots when I conclude here, but before the Internet, our circle of friends (and their friends) and our interactions with those people – THAT was social media; and when I was a kid, the ones viewed as “social media gurus” were usually the guys on the football team and the cheerleading squad.

I was hoping that we’d all outgrown our need to be “one of the cool kids”.

Related articles

• Why I Deleted Foursquare from My iPhone. Have You? (windmillnetworking.com)
• Does Klout Score Really Matter? (community.constantcontact.com)
• Your Klout Score Probably Just Dropped – Do You Care? (readwriteweb.com)

We all take them.

But when other people take them, we find it irritating.

Shortcuts, after all, are what allow the taxi driver to pull up beside the “No Stopping” sign, put on his 4-way flashers, and sit there.  I’m assuming there’s some special “traffic laws don’t really apply to taxicabs” clause that I’m not aware of.

In a similar vein, I get irritated when cyclists do things like ignore stop signs.  Sorry, but momentum doesn’t outweigh law, and your desire to keep moving doesn’t suddenly make you a pedestrian every time an appealing piece of sidewalk allows you to avoid your legal obligation to do things like signal your turns.  But then again, it’s just a shortcut.

Shortcuts are what allow politicians to ram through legislation that appeals to their party, without asking what it means to their constituents.  Never mind that the first time you passed something without asking me about it you broke every promise that got you elected in the first place; asking for input from the people who hired you would be cost-prohibitive or something, right?

Someone needs to explain to me where corporations get off concluding a job posting with “only applicants being considered for the position will be contacted.”  Hey HR people – that’s even more classless than the “thanks, but no” form letters you used to send without people’s names on them.  If you don’t have the time to treat applicants with respect, hire internally.

I think most women would pass out were they confronted with actual statistics about the number of men who “shortcut” past the sink on their way out of the men’s room.

I’ve talked before about how most radio stations use a technique called “voice tracking” (especially on overnights and weekends) which allow DJ’s to record a six-hour show in twenty minutes, so they don’t even have to bother with being in the building when their shows are on.  Ironically, these are the same DJ’s who love to tell horror stories about the big nasty company that fired their staff via a prerecorded message left on a CD in a conference room.

Now, also thanks to technology, I can have any one of a dozen automated systems send out a “Thank you” message anytime I get a new follower on Twitter.  (Hey, maybe I’ll throw in a sales pitch while I’m at it, so someone in Idaho can read about my great real estate listings in Brooklyn!)  Whew!  I know the six seconds it would have taken to express genuine gratitude would have been exhausting.

Shortcuts let us get away without having to do the right thing.  They make our lives easier by creating a second class of interaction that allows us to act exclusively in our own self interest, without having to even acknowledge that others exist at all.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown tired of a world built on shortcuts.  If you need me, I’ll be listening to this…

(Doesn’t hurt that the video is kinda cute.  And yes, you could certainly argue that by linking to someone else’s video instead of creating my own, I took a shortcut myself.)

Sadly, this post has little to do with Stephen Bishop’s beautiful song from the 1982 film, “Tootsie”.  This is a little more stark.

Maybe the HR person at that new company didn’t hire you because their company is biased against people who look like you.  Then again, maybe it’s because your resume isn’t good enough.

Maybe the girl you had your hopes and dreams pinned on was with another guy Saturday night because she’s a horrible person.  Then again, maybe she found being around you to be complete agony.

Maybe your kid’s hockey coach doesn’t play him more often because he’s getting paid off by the parents of the rich kid who’s getting more ice time.  Then again, maybe your kid isn’t very good.

Maybe the reason your last ad campaign didn’t sell a lot of widgets was because the market is finicky, the weather was bad on the day of the sale or everyone was at home watching the championship game. Then again, maybe your last ad campaign just stunk.

I think it happens when we’re kids.  Our parents, in a kindhearted but misguided attempt to insulate us from self-esteem issues, convince us that we’re all special and we’re all gifted.  As we get older, when faced with failures, we create lists in our head of the reasons why those things didn’t go the way we’d hoped.  Seldom do those lists include items like “Maybe it’s me.”

The “it’s not me, it’s them” mentality is dangerous because by placing the blame on others, we avoid having to improve ourselves.  It gets us off the hook, and we get to find more pleasant things to do than take a hard look in the mirror and admit that maybe everything isn’t sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.

When we blame the HR guy, we don’t have to trash our resumes and start over (or apply for jobs that are more suited to our qualifications). When we blame the girl, we don’t have to figure out the things that other people might find unattractive.  When we blame the coach, we don’t have to develop the parenting skill required to tell our kids they’re not going to be the next Wayne Gretzky.  When we blame the market, we don’t examine the deficiencies in our own offerings.

We could work harder, develop more skills, learn more, and do the things it takes to reduce the chances of failing again.  Or, we can blame the other guy.

I’ve made a million mistakes.  Some of them were very expensive mistakes that cost me (and other people) a lot of money.  Some were mistakes of the heart that ended up hurting people.  Still others were mistakes I made when I was battling various demons (that we’ll talk about one day when I’m ready) that caused untold harm.

The problem I’ve faced in my life is that I always blame myself for my failures – even things that couldn’t possibly be my fault.  On some levels, I envy the people who always blame others first – it almost seems like a skill worth developing for all the anguish it saves.

How about on your end?  When things don’t work the way you planned, where does the word “mine” come on that list you carry around called “Who should I blame for this?”

…because I hate to be the one to break it to you…but every once in a while?  It’s you.

On Friday, I took the car in for an oil change.  It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, I was in the neighborhood, there happened to be a service chain nearby, so I went in without an appointment.

They knocked my socks off when I walked in, because I quite literally handed my keys to a guy who ran out to get my car – I was next!  40 minutes later, they had done a great job, they were friendly, thought to put paper protectors on the floor so they wouldn’t mess up the carpeting – quite thorough, and I was completely satisfied.

…until last night.

Last night as I’m getting set to have dinner, the phone rings.   Who is it?  It’s an automated customer service call from a recording that wants me to take a survey about my experience.

Hey Marketing Department: Way to blow the whole thing.  So the local dealer obviously has a motivated staff that really gets it, while the people in Marketing (or at Head Office, or wherever), completely booted it.  You had a whole staff of mechanics who made me feel like the most important customer ever, yet you couldn’t find one live body to call me in person to make sure I would come back?

Here’s a thought: Take the genius who came up with the robo-dialer for customer service (go back over those last five words and read who brutally they go together), strip their authority to make decisions before they kill your company, and have them do the calls instead.

While we’re at it, here’s another idea.  (For those of you who “get it”, forgive me… most of what I’m writing here goes without saying. Yet for some reason, one of the largest auto service chains in the country seems to need all the help they can get.)  This might come as a shock, but people dislike being phoned at home by survey-takers and telemarketers.  So if you’re calling because getting repeat business from me sincerely matters to you, ensure it by offering me a discount on that return visit you’re clamoring for.

After all… by calling me while my steaks are burning on the grill, I’m saving you all the money you’re obviously not spending on a focus group.

Related articles

• Vehicle Service Contracts Industry Applauds Federal Actions Against Robo-Dialers (prweb.com)
• How do you transform customer service? 7 lessons from Undercover Boss: npower (customerthink.com)
• 80%+ of the Respondents to a Future of Business Survey Want Customer Service Improvement Strategies to Increase Revenue and Competiveness (prweb.com)

Very quietly, over the years, I’ve been doing some consulting for a variety of clients in an odd assortment of industries.  For some, I chip in on their marketing or revamp their graphics.  There are some young radio personalities who periodically ask me to critique samples of their on-air work.  And there are others for whom I do web consulting, including building out and tweaking their websites, or their WordPress blogs (I’ve installed over 5,000 of those).  There’s even the guy whose infomercial you’ve seen a hundred times, who was only able to sell things face-to-face in his office until I built him a website that allowed him to go global.

Normally, if I’m doing any web work for a client and they need hosting (in other words, need a place to put their site or blog so other people can get to it), it’s something I provide as part of whatever their deal is with me.

It occurs to me now that it might be time to open that up a little, because I have a surplus of resources that are just sitting waiting for me to finish writing my book.

So here’s the deal: I’ll host your website for between six and eight bucks a month.  It’s the same server and infrastructure that holds my site. I wouldn’t sell you something I wasn’t using myself. Six bucks ($5.99, actually) gets you a three-year deal.  $6.99 a month on a two-year term, and if you just need a year, it’s $7.99 a month.  (You’ll find that if you need me to register a domain name for you as well, I’ll do it for less than virtually anyone you can find. The difference between them and me is that it’s their bread and butter, so while their priority is their profit margin, mine is not.)

But I’m only making ten slots available.

What do you get for your six bucks (or seven, or eight)?  A boatload less hassle.  Unlimited this, unlimited that, blah blah blah.  The details are at the link below.  What you also get is a very identifiable face who’s going to make sure you get taken care of.

Why?

It’s what I talked about in this post when I told you about my friend Marc.  If you read that, you’ll see where I’m coming from.

Need help getting set up? Just let me know.  Having trouble figuring out how to get this or that done with your WordPress blog?  I’ll help you figure it out; it’s part of the support you’d get from dealing with someone who was actually invested in your satisfaction.

If you want one of the ten slots available, click here.  If you have questions, drop me a line.

No fair looking it up on Google.

This is an ad that is currently on the side of a building not far from my office.  I’ll save you clicking on it to get the larger image – the text under the “DNA3″ logo says, “It’s Who You Are.”

At first glance, you’re probably thinking perfume?  Wine?  Perhaps a hair stylist or line of beauty products?

Nope.  It’s for a condominium.

Look at it again, and I’ll let that sink in for a minute.  It’s for a condominium.

Dying for your comments.

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No, I didn’t really have dinner with Seth Godin.  (But Seth, pick a day – I know a cool spot in Brooklyn Heights.)  But my imagination did.  Come sit at the table with us for a minute.

Yesterday, Seth published a post that really struck a chord with me, and sent my mind back to memories of what I think was one of the greatest restaurants of all time.

The post is called Three Things Clients and Customers Want, and it explains brilliantly how focusing solely on results isn’t necessarily the best strategy.  In his list of the “three things,” Seth says,

3. Ego. Is it nice to feel important? You bet. When you greet us at the door with a glass of white wine, put our name in the lobby of the hotel, actually treat us better than anyone else does (not just promise it, but do it)…

I have first-hand experience with this one, and it was all I could think about yesterday morning.

My all-time favorite restaurant in the world was in my hometown – Toronto – and was called “Vittorio’s Osteria.”  The head chef was Vittorio Masi, one of Canada’s most renowned Italian chefs,  called “a master of culinary taste” by the Toronto Star newspaper. Vittorio’s second restaurant was an open-concept; every one of the twenty tables table had a view of the kitchen, and you could see the master cooking, consuming and cursing up a storm as only Vittorio could.  The waiters would all sing Italian songs at the top of their lungs as they moved around the place, greet the person you were with as “bella” and act as though they were going to steal her away from you with their European charms.  The place was always festive, it always felt like family, and it was always fun.

…and, it was always full.

Because Vittorio (who passed in 2002 of a heart attack) was regarded in Toronto much the same way Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay would be looked upon many years later, showing up without a reservation was usually futile.

But I’ll never forget the night that made Vittorio’s my favorite restaurant in the world; the memory was tweaked again yesterday when I read Seth’s post.  Saturday night in the summer, place was packed, I lived nearby and showed up on a whim to see if I could get a plate of pasta (Vittorio was in the habit of making whatever he felt like), when I saw a line of 20 or so people out the door.  Knowing it would be two hours before I could sit down, I decided it was worth the wait; yes, the food was that good.

It wasn’t long before Vittorio spotted the line, and came wandering out with some glasses, and a couple of bottles of wine.  In between juggling the demands of the kitchen, and taking time to talk with the customers inside, Vittorio was chef-turned-host-turned-sommelier as he treated the sidewalk as just another table – his table, that he was enjoying taking care of personally. He’d come out to chat, talk about food, wine, fishing, whatever, while keeping our glasses filled with some of the best wine I’d ever tasted, all on the house.  He appreciated the loyalty of a customer who would be happy to wait two hours for a table, and knew that we would appreciate being taken care of like no other restaurant ever had.

I’ve retold the story about that night on his sidewalk a few hundred times; everywhere I’ve ever lived, I’ve recounted that night in inevitable “best meal you ever ate” conversations, and I’ve tried to find another place like it.

When I think of that night, sometimes I recall the part of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” when Scrooge is taken by the Ghost of Christmas Past to a party thrown by his old boss, Fezziwig.  Swept up in the glee of the event, the ghost asks, “Fezziwig spent but a small amount of your mortal money.  Is it so much that he deserves this praise?”  Scrooge goes on to reply, “the happiness he gives is quite as great as if it had cost a fortune.”

Spirits, both real and imagined, have many lessons to teach us indeed.

How to move the world in three-inch increments.

See the photo at the right?  It is, for me, the very picture of defeat.

I belong to the “if nothing moves, nothing breaks” school of packing and moving.  And so on my recent relocation, I did the best I could of loading everything into a small U-Haul truck in such a way that there wasn’t room for so much as another toothpick.  Indeed, even the photos taken of the load in progress make me wonder how I did it.

And in my defense, I must say that everything arrived at the destination intact.  If only everything had survived the unloading process.

You see, we were lucky enough to have help at the other end when we arrived in our new space, which came in handy when it came to things like taking the MALM drawer set from IKEA off the truck.  Unfortunately, the person who was at the other end was unaware of the fragile nature of some of the pieces which are, as the photo above shows, sometimes made of particleboard with a birch veneer.  To get a better grip, he set the piece down on the lip of the truck deck, which resulted in the lovely collection of particleboard fragments you see in the picture.

For me, this was unmitigated disaster.  Because where the item gets broken during the move is irrelevant.  The fact that something broke at all would put an end to my streak of damage-less moves forever.

My salvation in this case came from an IKEA employee who did something remarkably simple: He went the extra mile.  Now it’s entirely possible that this extra mile is hard-coded into a policy manual somewhere; so if what I’m about to describe is something that happens every day, forgive me.

I saw an IKEA store close to me the other day, drove in and headed for the “As-Is” section which, if you’ve never been, is the first place you should go when you walk into an IKEA store.  (Trust me on this one.)  There were several sections filled with random parts and orphaned pieces of wood; sadly, none of them was the one I wanted.  As an IKEA staffer walked by, I said, “How often would a piece like that one come in here?”  He immediately -and cheerfully – suggested I go to Customer Service with my question.

Upon arriving, the fellow behind the counter heard my story, and helped me nail down a specific description of the part I was looking for.  To me, hearing “I wish there was something I could do” was imminent.  Instead, he said, “hold on a second,” and disappeared into a storage room.

About a minute later, he emerged with exactly the piece I needed, put it on the counter in front of me and said, “Is that the one?”  As I nodded in excited agreement he smiled and added, “Glad I could help.  Better luck with the next move.”

And that was it.

There wasn’t even a charge for the replacement piece.

On several levels, the store went above and beyond the call; you could start with the fact that they even have an “As-Is” section to begin with.  The staffer in that section could simply have said, “No, I don’t know when those come in,” and gone back to whatever they were doing.  And the person who actually gave me the replacement piece made me feel like he actually cared about making my experience a positive one, without having to ask a manager if it was okay to care.

How many layers in your organization before a customer is allowed to talk to someone who cares?

I have a few Twitter accounts.

One is my personal account (@neilhedley), and it’s the one I use 99.5% of the time.  I also have one that I set aside to tweet news about my upcoming book, and one to tweet updates for a website I’m getting set to launch that serves as a repository for bad advertising.

As you might imagine, there are people who have pseudonyms on Twitter for other reasons, as well.  Consistent with the way I run my life, this post won’t judge.  People have reasons; some use their alter ego to say the things they can’t really say under their “real name”; I even know a musician who has an account that he uses as a pseudo-PR feed, to tweet reviews and comments from fans.  I believe judgment is to be reserved for deities. So I’m not judging.

Be aware, though, that your cover has been blown.  And if you’re in business, it can kill your credibility.

If you use the free Google Chrome browser (which is the best I’ve come across so far) instead of Internet Explorer, there’s a great free add-on called Rapportive that integrates with Gmail.

When you get email from a contact (or send mail TO them), Rapportive pops up a complete profile in the sidebar that includes a list of your most recent communication with them, their latest tweets, LinkedIn and Facebook information, and so on. (One of the bonuses is that the profile info goes in the place where the Google Ads used to go.)

The image here is what MY Rapportive profile looks like – I haven’t entered occupation info or any other details, but you can see the three most recent tweets I’ve written, and the Twitter account linked to my email address.

And that’s where the problem lies.

I’ll repeat it: Rapportive shows the Twitter account that is linked to your email address.

So, if you used your regular email address when you signed up the Twitter account for your pseudonym, Rapportive users can see that.

Let’s say you’re John Smith and you work for XYZ Corporation, but you hate your boss, so you signed up a Twitter account called “XYZSucks” with your username@gmail.com email address, and you’ve now got a hundred thousand followers who think your behind-the-scenes observations are hilarious.  Any Rapportive user who you’ve interacted with from the username@gmail.com email address now knows that you’re the one behind the account.

Busted.

Same thing if you have a fake account you use to talk about how great you are, or get into conversations with yourself just so it looks like people agree with you on something.

Busted.

Don’t get me wrong, Rapportive may be my favorite all-time Gmail add-on.  But if you use your social media accounts for anything that isn’t exactly on the up-and-up, you now have a problem.

The good news: When you use Rapportive and look at your own email address (as I did in the graphic above), you have the option of removing the link to the Twitter feed.  Not editing, removing.

Credibility-wise, you and your business also have the option of transparency, and having actual people promote you, retweet you or rave about how great you are,

But I’m not judging.

Related articles

• Learn About the People You’re Emailing, as You Email Them (mashable.com)
• Gmail plugin Rapportive now gives you insight into the people you’re emailing (thenextweb.com)
• Rapportive lets you retweet and more from Gmail (venturebeat.com)
• Use Gmail as a Sort of Twitter Client with Rapportive [Updates] (lifehacker.com)