Whatever it is, it catches my attention and I love the work involved in creating the novelty.  ENJOY!

Smith updates his blog tonight after more words with Southwest.  Seems like he really just wants them to tell everyone that there was more to him getting kicked off then his weight nad that he wasn't too fat to fly.  I've gotta go with him on this one.  He really just wants to save face and for Southwest to say that he isn't so obese that he would need two seats.  Personally, I've sat next to people way larger than him on Southwet flights, but that is neither here or there.  This adds some perspective to the story.

Kevin Smith gets kicked off of a Southwest Airlines flight after being seated due to being too big for his seat and uses Twitter as a Machine gun to let loose his anger on the Southwest brand.  Southwest catches the message fast and offers Smith a $100 voucher and an apology and even writes a blog on the subject.  Smith doesn't take the apology very well.  If you want more details check out a couple of my friends articles on the story.  One by Jason Harper at Locker Parnter and then my buddy Will Gregory's take on it.  I'm going to break it down a bit and then give you my take.

Kevin Smith

I've followed him through his entire career and follow him now mostly through twitter and his podcast.  He has a very loyal and savvy following and is known to be very blunt and honest about all aspects of his life.  Smith was embarrased for being a celebrity that had to walk off a plane in front of the other passangers for being too fat (this is granted).  His embarrasment soon turns to anger and he flexes his very large social media muscle by reaching out to his over 1.6million followers.  This catches the attention of every news provider on the wire and this thing quickly becomes a very large story for Kevin Smith and Southwest's brand.

Southwest Airlines

Southwest is absolutely no stranger to social media.  In fact, I would put them on a very short list of companies that "get it".  Catch an interview with Paula Berg, emerging media manager at Soutwest on a recent, "The Brand Show"  podcast.  I'm a big fan of Southwest's brand and their simple message to give people the best price on airline travel.  Great leadership and a breath of fresh air in the struggling industry.  Southwest acted as if it would for anyone that has a valid complaint, catches the KS tweets and offers an apology as well as a $100 voucher to boot. 

So what happened?  I thought social media fixes everything???

We're all still learning here and what's most refreshing is that even the smartest of people using these new tactics to listen and and interact with their customer are learning too.  Southwest followed all the rules and did everything they were supposed too and I still think they got burnt on this one. 

What could they have done differently?

I think they actually acted too fast on this.  They treated it like they would a normal customer and not Kevin Smith.   A very upset celebrity customer that's directly connected to 1.6 million potential customers is important to me as a marketing manager!  It's actually so damn important that I would have a special red phone installed in my house that would wake me up anytime something like this happened.  I think that they missed a huge opportunity here.  I'm not saying that they kiss Kevin's ass or give him a golden ticket, but if they new his personality and brand better, they could have easily made this an outcome where everyone was happy.  I'm sure Smith wouldn't have minded the opportunity for some extra publicity with his new movie coming out this week!

The blog wasn't really cool either.  This story brings a lot of attention to Southwest's very shadowy policies on whether someone is too fat to sit on a plane.  It's also a very embarrasing ordeal to one of their customers.  I may have taken it a little more seriously.

Hindsight is 20/20 folks and what's done is done!  I'm still a fan of both KS & SW and hope that they can figure their differences out, but if they don't, I'm sure I'll enjoy that just as much.

It's quick, it's simple and an entertaining way to show our modern relationships with brands in our daily lives.

Great work by an agency out of Atlanta, 22squared.

A lot of folks are talking about bringing in Community Managers these days.  Who else is going to answer all those annoying questions on the boards and keep up the witty banter on your Facebook & Twitter? (I kid) 

Honestly, who is the best person for the job?  You want someone that can  write fast, so do you get yourself an out of work journalist on the cheap?  Then again, You need someone with some heavy duty communication and relationship building skills though.  Maybe a young up and coming PR pro?  You could always hire within and give that new whiz kid in the office a shot. after all, he seems to glow with your brand's personality and swagger and does well with the corporate high ups.  Of course a lot of this depends on your brand and your product.

This is the best part of a position that hasn't competely emerged yet.  Since there isn't and understood "right" answer yet, it allows people to get messy and throw ideas around.  In the issue of community building, I find myself looking towards the video gamers and the people who make said games.  These communities have been around for a while as have the mass chat boards, fan clubs, and community events including them.  This gives them a bit of a rare head start as far as relationships with communities go.

More specifically, I have been looking at Capcom, the maker of the world famous Street Fighter & Mega Man franchises.  Both games hold a special place in the hearts in most of us that grew up as Nintendo kids.  These legendary series' are still alive today and as you can imagine have a powerful community surrounding them both in Japan as well as the US.

How did Capcom fill their need for a Community Manager in the States?  They hired Seth Killian.  Seth's background is interesting, but nothing out of the ordinary. Working at a university in the physics dept., working in publishing with books on fascinating topics such as gender relations from 1872-1874, and even a German to English translator.  Nothing screams Community Manager for a video game company yet huh?

thanks G4 for the photo of Seth in front of this SFIV banner

Seth's occupational background might not sing the song, but that's not how he got his current gig.  What I've left out is Seth's passion for the arcade fighter Street Fighter 2.  The game that re-invented the American arcade and even put out one of the worst big budget movies starring Jean Claude Van Damme in a time when that was pretty kick ass.

Years before he started working for Capcom Seth spent years helping create the American Street Fighter 2 community by helping host and setup the fan made and very popular EVO Championship Series of tournaments which became famous for it's gathering of gamers from accross the globe.  That and Seth is really freaking good at the game itself.  Many would argue that the Japanese gamers didn't even take Americans seriously until Seth came around.  The guy is so good that they named a character in the recent Street Fighter IV game after him.  Yeah, I said it.  Not just a character but the final and impossibly difficult to beat final boss of the game. 

When Capcom was looking for someone to bring their community together under the brand's own website, they looked within the community itself and hired one of their leaders.

  By doing this, they took advantage of one of difficult ingredients of a successful Community Manager.  Trust!  Seth was already trusted by the community.  By bringing him into this position, Capcom had just made a promise to the community.  Capcom knew that since Killian was already a trusted part of the community, that he was bound by that trust to listen and speak for the community even though he was now getting a paycheck.  This can get tricky, but in Capcom's world, it seems to have been a success.

Seth's also highly respected within Capcom (if that wasn't evident by the character naming thing).  Capcom understands that his position isn't just a community baby sitter, but a funnel of information from the most important source, the gamers and fans themselves.  He is able to speak to the devlopers themselves to share the community's messages regarding hiccups in the game, overpowered or underpowered characters or parts of the game that well well or ill recieved.  It's this mutual respect and understanding that makes things run so well.

The power of the community isn't just in getting them to buy into the next game, but better judging what that next game should be or even fixing their existing product and making it better. 

Capcom and other gaming companies are in a very unique position in that their communities are already so large and so vocal.  However, with the the speed of which communities are beginning to form with the help of social media juice, it's not a leap to figure that it won't take long for other companies to catch up.

Let me know if you've had any experience with Community Managers.  Is Seth's story a rare one?  What qualities have I missed?  Feel free to leave comments and thanks for reading.

Found This pic of a McDonalds Guerrilla ad in Canada over at Ads of the World.

Just shows that marketing can be remarkable outside of a computer monitor.  I appreciate advertising that upsets the usual walk to work with something that makes you smile. 

It's smart, simple and gives people something to talk about.  Just gotta make sure that it doesn't stay up long enough to melt into the background again.

Nice work!

(My cat Zelda makes a cameo towards the end)

You also have to check out the video Ramsey put together over at his site.  One of the best event videos to come out of KC!  This should be fun!

I picked up my mail the other day and I saw that we had received our first Christmas card. Blue envelope, hand written address, pretty stamp, approximate size of a holiday card, all gave me the green light to rip this baby open.

Ever since I was a kid, I've liked the idea of Christmas cards and I guess it's from that childhood memory of helping my mom tape up all of the cards around our doorway that gives me those warm fuzzies about them now at thirty.

I ripped the card open and nothing was odd until I actually opened the card. Looks like I had been duped a bit and this was another piece of direct mail for AT&T's cable service.

Am I angry that I was duped? Absolutely not. The idea was to spend more on the look and feel of a holiday card, send it out around Christmas and in doing this garner a larger open rate.

I'll be the first to tell AT&T that it worked! I opened it! However this is where I stop, because I don't want their cable service and have no need for the product.

What I'm getting at is not that this is a blog post against direct mail. AT&T has been spending a lot on me lately. I've gotten some very high class snazzy mail from them lately and it hasn't gotten in my way, made me angry or annoyed. It's just not something I needed.

My thought instead goes to the amount that was spent on me and the campaign and how that money could have been spent elsewhere and the message could have landed in better hands.

How could AT&T spend money to better know me and my needs? Could they have known that I just signed up for Time Warner only weeks ago and wasn't ready to be advertised to? Would money spent instead on Social Media listening software like Radian6, Spiral16 or Social Radar been a better bet than buying a list?

I know that direct marketing has a place still in a marketing mix, but so many questions are being asked about the worth of a social media buy, that I think it's only fair that we ask the same questions on our more traditional buys.

In the late 90's the term made plenty of sense. Most people's computers as well as high speed internet connections were at work. Nobody feels like working on the Monday after a 4 day weekend so you have an explosion of online holiday shopping.

However in today's society, unless we're going to turn it into a Valentine's day (An almost meaningless holiday fueled and manufactured by some smart ad agencies & marketing), we need to take a look at what is really going on.

With competitors like Amazon, large retailers cannot afford to not offer the same deals online as to the crowds that wrap around the store at 3am on Friday morning. If you have the same deals and the shipping is free, than there is no difference and retailers will no doubt be forced cannibalize some of their brick & mortar business to not lose the internet piece of the pie. 2009 seemed like the beginning of the end for Cyber Monday.

Black Friday has now become what it always has been. The countries largest shopping day. It will make no difference if that deal is found online or at the store.

I give Cyber Monday a few more years just on media juice backing it up, but with our now highly connected online community. If it's not relevant, it dies.

Basically this horror movie, shot in 2007 with a budget of $15,000 ends up blowing up from a very small theater launch to a nation wide launch within 2 weeks and ends up beating what was supposed to be the Halloween weekend movie "shoe-in" Saw VI. Impossible you say?

Now that we're on the same page, let's get to the heart of what we all are wondering. How & why did this movie magic happen? Let's look at 3 of the strongest.

First: It's a good product

It's got a great story. The movie bounced around to a lot of film festivals in the last couple of years and somehow found it's way into Steven Spielberg's hands. He liked it, but didn't feel like re-making the movie and putting a $50 million dollar budget into it would give the same feeling. So Paramount picked it up and started testing it in a small launch in late summer 2009.

So Steven Spielberg liked it. That would explain why this movie got some early momentum where hundreds of other films do not. Having a movie god watch your movie and put his stamp of approval on it is a huge piece of this puzzle. This at least gave Paramount the confidence that they had a good product. Putting it simply the movie was scary.

The product had to be good in order for the rest of the pieces to work.

Second: Influencers Attack!

Here's where social media comes in. Release something remarkable into the wild in a very limited quantity and give everyone who gets their hands on it a megaphone. This is exactly what the limited release did for Paranormal Activity.

The limited release was intregal because it made the people who watched it feel special. We know the product was good, which makes people want to share. The audiences also knew that they were watching something that others couldn't and that gave the them even more reason to share. This message flowed from web influencers directly to blogs & social networks and this is where the perfect storm starts to build momentum.

Another example was the movie's team up with Revision 3 and the very small but powerful group that got to see it before ANYONE else that gave it even more push. Read more about that here.

Third: Timing is everything...oh and Relevance too.

Paramount timed this storm out rather perfectly. They created a huge buzz and gave everyone the power to jump on the Paranormal Activity website and demand the movie come to their local theater. The website boasted that if they got to 1 million votes, the movie would open nationwide. Reminds me of the old MTV demand scheme in the 80's only instead of taking years, this built up enough steam in weeks because of the speed of social media.

The timing even made was more brilliant due to the fact that the final "Big Win" reached fever pitch only days before Halloween. A Halloween that was on a weekend and only had 1 big horror movie coming out (Saw VI) that was a very tired tradition in the first place. Relevance, Relevance and more Relevance.

This movie was not as much of a surprise as it seems. The build up and marketing strategy was there and it had a plan that worked. They started with a great product, made a huge buzz utilizing social media & word of mouth and then timed it perfectly to be most relevant to the most consumers.

A great play and one that I believe can be repeated.

Ran into this blogpost on Gizmodo yesterday and just had to write about it. A video billboard was put up this month in Liverpool, England and passersby were squashed, tickled, poked and flicked out of existence as they walked to work. A fun experiment showing how the billboards of tomorrow will gain our attention by featuring our favorite celebrity of all time, ourselves.

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

The video speaks for itself, but the what does all of this mean for us as marketers? My mind starts to wonder to that awesome scene in Back 2 the Furture II where Michael J. Fox's character is chomped by Jaws as he walks through the streets, or the scene from Minority Report where the advertising in the airport knows who you are and can put you directly in the advertising.

Of course we're far from any of that, but the technology is certainly exciting and I am really looking forward to where this goes in the next 5 to 10 years.