Marjorie Clayman’s Writing Portfolio

Professional writing profile of Marjorie Clayman

Marketing Talk

Post #6: Foursquare and the Open Graph, Achtung Baby

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Okay, let me start by saying that yes, I am aware of the fact that I am a marketer. I know that nothing should thrill me more than something like Foursquare, where people can holler to the winds that they are at such and such a place doing such and such a thing. I know that as a marketer the news about the Facebook open graph should have me feeling like I’m on some sort of Cloud 9. The marketing future has been paved with gold. The internet is forever young. All of the goals of the great explorers, from Coronado to my personal fave, Ponce de Leon, have been fulfilled. I get it.

However, and I just add this as a bit of an aside, marketing is only a portion of my life. I mean, don’t get me wrong, marketing is great. Love it. But I do have other facets to my personality, and those facets are all curled up into the fetal position right now.

Let’s start with Foursquare. The first time I saw a friend posting Foursquare updates, I left a comment along the lines of, “If I am going to stalk you, I want to have to work for it.” As I saw more and more updates, I began shaking in my boots, not necessarily for the folks I saw, but rather for possible ramifications.

I tend to jump mentally to the worst case scenario. It’s a gift.

But to me, what jumped to my mind is that now, if someone (heaven forbid) wants to hurt a child, they don’t have to go to a chat room anymore. They don’t have to plot and plan. They just have to watch Twitter and see where kids are going. How can this be monitored? Another good point that even my paranoid mind hadn’t thought of: if you are letting the world know where you are, you’re also telling the world where you are NOT. Other folks have thought of this and created a site called Please Rob Me. You can read more about that at Tech Crunch.

I understand that there are a lot of other things out there that, like Foursquare, help broadcast your location to the world. It just seems like this one is spreading a little bit more like wildfire. Are we being careful?

Now for the Open Graph thing. I’ve had a bone to pick with Facebook for the last year or so, full disclosure. I don’t like the fact that the site’s interface changes every five seconds. But what I especially don’t like right now is that if my friends decide to play Mafia Wars, they are not only sacrificing their time, which is fine, but they are also sacrificing some of my privacy. No matter how locked down you think your account is, applications can still access some info like your profile picture. And this new Open Graph thing? It’s built on that same kind of application platform.

I’m not really worried about myself in this scenario. I always was kind of creeped out by Facebook. “If you enter your email address we’ll find all of your friends” stood out as an “achtung” sign for me from the start. But there are people who are using their credit card on Facebook. There are people who are probably posting things that they really shouldn’t be posting. There are kids posting things that probably shouldn’t be posted. Are they aware that their settings have been changed to automatically allow Social Plug-Ins? I was aware of it because I saw the news because that’s part of my job. I went into my settings and dug all the way to manually blocking Microsoft Docs, Yelp, and Pandora as applications. Is everyone that aware? I don’t think so. And they’re not really getting a kosher heads up.

I don’t really have a problem with the idea of the internet becoming a social mechanism. I’ve been frightened enough times by PPC ads related to email content showing up that I’ve just accepted that you have to live with what you post. And as a marketer, the possibilities are exciting. But as a person, and in particular a person who worries about other people who may not be plugged in mentally even if they are plugged in socially, I just worry that maybe we’re not being careful enough.

What do you think?

Post #5: What Jim Henson can teach us about marketing

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I have been a muppet fan for as long as I can remember. One of the most tragic days of my life, however, is when I watched Muppets Take Manhattan for the trillionth time and really dug the scenes where Kermit (aka Phil Phillip Phil) is working for an amphibian-owned and run advertising agency.

Youth, where art thou?

Still, I’ve been thinking a lot about those scenes and then other general Jim Henson knowledge, and I’ve decided that marketers and people in general can learn a lot from the muppets.

You don’t believe me, huh? Or you just can’t believe I’m doing this to your muppets. I sympathize. But take a look.

Remember yesterday when I was pondering whether we can really talk human? Jim Henson was already covering that topic close to 30 years ago. “you mean just say what the product does? Nobody has tried that!”:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwDUzSWoCjo&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

Yep, he definitely said what he meant.

Of course, one could also argue that Rainbow Connection could be equated to a modern day Facebook page (join the lovers, the dreamers, and me). But we won’t go that far, will we?

Post #4: Is it really possible to talk human?

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Yesterday, I watched Harry Gottlieb’s webinar on talking human (It’s called Corporate Blahblahdiblah) and how corporations generally don’t do it. His point was well taken. Corporations seem to use words that have been proven to be good sellers, kind of like the word “ambitious” or “dedicated” when it comes to applying for jobs. It has gotten to the point where it’s hard to tell what a company actually does or what they are actually trying to say. Fair enough.

However, coming at this issue from the marketing side, I have to say that there are a lot of obstacles in the way of “talking human.” For example, there’s Search Engine Optimization. Everybody wants to be on the first page of search results on Google or Bing, right? Well, you need the right keywords, among other things, to accomplish that goal. Unfortunately, keywords do not always jive with how people talk. If you are a medical company, you might want to talk human and talk about headaches, but SEO demands that you talk about “pain in the occipital region.” Who talks like that? Not many people. But maybe a lot of people search like that.

Facebook, Twitter, and texting have me worried too. Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation using 140 CHARACTER statements? I haven’t. As you probably are learning from my blog posts, 140 characters for me is like the calm before the storm. However, this kind of limited communication is what corporations are facing on increasingly regular occasions. They are having to update fan pages (or is it “like” pages now?), they are having to update Twitter accounts, or they are sending out text messages. Is this how they would normally entice customers? Probably not. Is that talking human? Probably not. But it’s the new reality.

That has me wondering. Are we in danger of having more human contact but being less human about it? A fan page can have hundreds of fans, but if you can’t *really* talk to people the way you’d like to and the way Gottlieb recommends, how effective is your marketing going to be in the end?

I guess, being a human, this all just gives me something to ponder.

Post #3: The fine line between Shock & Awe

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I saw an ad the other day while I was watching the Cleveland Indians game…it was for one of those trivia companies that you can text to get random answers to dumb debates in which you are engaged. You’ll note I can’t remember the company’s name. I”ll get to that later.

The main visual of the ad was two guys with their heads stuffed up into their…well, butts. I found the image rather uncomfortable and gratuitous, and that’s saying something because I’m a fan of shows like South Park. The visual was shocking in that you don’t usually see those kinds of things, and it was gross, and clearly it stuck with me. But again, I can’t remember the name of the company who did the ad.

I’ve noticed lately that a lot of ads are like this. They try to gross you out or weird you out. Have you seen that Viagra ad where the guy’s reflection is begging him to talk about his “E.D?” Creepy. In that case, I do remember the name, but that’s only because the ad seems run during every show that I watch. Clearly I’m a surprise demographic.

Is there really a point to these ads? They might get people talking, but if people are just talking about “that gross ad” it’s not going to do you any good. Does anyone still remember what that Betty White commercial was for during the Super Bowl? It was great for her brand, that’s for sure. But did it do the advertiser a lot of good?

Sometimes there are ads that stay with you and you know why. The ads for animal rescue charities are good examples of this. Seeing abused animals isn’t easy. It’s shocking and uncomfortable, but there’s a reason for showing it. I can’t really think of any good reason to show a person, literally, with their head up where the sun don’t shine. I’d tell the advertiser that if I could remember who they were.

Blog #1: The Tale of the Indian Bead Loom

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about an event that happened over a period of months when I was a little kid.
You have to understand, in order to “get” this story, that when I was real little, I found out I had Cherokee blood in my family. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. To think that this rich culture I had already kind of liked was part of my family tree was just too amazing. I wanted to learn everything I could about all Native American cultures. 
 
So with that in mind, the following might make a bit more sense. One day, I went over to a friend’s house, and she had a little loom like the one in the picture there. She was making a bracelet that had a beaded pattern in it. I of course was enchanted. She showed me how to use it. I knew that I had to have one of these.
I asked my mom if I could get one. Her first vision was not the beautiful jewelry I’d make but rather the millions of tiny seed beads that she would get to step on. Despite these obstacles, one Christmas, I found a long, rectangular box under the tree. I had gotten my Indian Bead loom.
After Christmas breakfast I ran upstairs to my room and ripped open the box. I already had visions of what my beautiful “authentic” jewelry would look like. But what was this? What came out of the box was not a fully functional, put-together loom. It was in pieces. You had to put it together. Being a kid, I didn’t think I needed to bother with the directions. I had seen the loom in action. I had worked with the loom. I started fitting pieces together and…broke it.
I’ve been thinking about my Indian Bead Loom a lot lately because I have found that there are a lot of experiences in life that could potentially go better if you bear such lessons in mind. In life, one could apply this to something like relationships. Everyone seems to have a great relationship. You see it, you think you are pretty sure how it works, so you rush to get one, but it doesn’t come all put together. You have to work for it.
 
In the business world, this comes to mind when I think about marketing through Social Media. Everyone is pretty sure they know what Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are by now. Heck, teens can use this stuff, so it would seem like a business could. And everyone is talking about how great Social Media can be. But Social Media, corporate identity, whatever it might be…these things don’t arrive all put together. It comes through bits and pieces of information and experience, and yes, some directions. But like a relationship…like my Indian Bead Loom, if you try to rush into things without doing the research….if you try to put things together haphazardly, you can end up breaking it.
Years later, by the way, when I was an adult, I bought myself another loom, determined to learn from my mistakes. I did put the loom together successfully, and I got a third of the way through making something. I realized I didn’t know how to change the tension on the strings. I moved that in-progress bracelet to three different abodes before finally throwing the whole thing away. With a little more research, a little more care, well who knows. I could have been a Native American bracelet guru by now.