Engage in PR

I’m preparing for a long drive from Boston to Austin with the dog starting this Friday and want to make sure that I’m properly stocked up, which meant a trip to the mall yesterday to purchase a FM adapter for my iPhone. I figured that the best place to purchase said product would be at the friendly Apple store at the CambridgeSide Galleria in the People’s Republic (funny only to folks from the area, sorry). Obviously I’m aware of the iPhone mania happening right now, but figured it had been more than a day so things would go smoothly.

There was a line about 50 people deep at the Apple store and according to the folks inside it had been like that since opening on Saturday. Each person was waiting up to three hours or more to get the iPhone 3G. Fortunately for me they had created a separate line for those folks and those of us with iPhone classic, a Mac or, shudder, an iPod, could go right in and do what we needed to do. Ten minutes later I’m walking out of the store still giggling to myself at the people in line, but also understanding it a bit as an iPhone user and lover of 2.0.

Here is the rub folks…100 steps from the Apple store was an AT&T store with a HUGE display of iPhone’s waiting to be bought and ZERO people in line.

My wife was the first to notice and we both laughed a bit at the insanity of waiting in line at the Apple store for the same phone you could have at AT&T in four less hours. Sometimes brand loyalty is blind, but in effect that is the power of proper branding. When you do it correctly you create a systemic need for people to be with you, buy from you, support you and defend you. It didn’t matter to those people that they were waiting hours for the iPhone; they wanted it and the only proper way to purchase the phone would be from Apple itself.

–Kyle Flaherty

They say that there are three really stressful moments in your life:

1. Moving
2. Starting a new job
3. Having a baby

In 2006 I decided to do all three at the same time, brilliant! Started a job on March 1st, closed on a house on March 17th and my wife had our son on March 20th. It is no wonder that since that time I have much less hair on top of my head and horrible back pain. “They” also say that you forget pain and stress over time, which really can be the only explanation for why I’m now doing the SAME EXACT THING! But now I decided to up the ante by moving 2,000 miles away. Good times.

Why do I share this information, because throughout all of these types of life-changing moments you deal with lots of ‘third-party people’. Realtors, movers, banks, mortgage brokers, doctors, new colleagues, etc. I’ve already talked about our broker, mover and Realtor, but this week we had to have a face down with the banks.

I’m not going to bore you with the details, but let’s just say that we decided to put the proceeds from our sale in Boston into the ING Direct account I set up in 1999 and have been using as a regular since. It was a good idea at the time…make a little bit of interest on that money before I needed to transfer it to the title company for the close in Texas. ING, by the way, markets themselves as the online bank, using words on their “About Page” like “electronic banking”, “24-hour access to your account”, “flexibility, freedom, and security”.

Well, unfortunately, yours truly did not read the fine print…ING does not allow any electronic transfer of funds AND they put a five-day hold on all fund transferred into your account once deposited. I had transferred the money on June 30th, it reached ING on July 2nd and because of the July 4th holiday would not be available to me until…wait for it…July 10th. I found all of this out on Monday of this week, three days before I needed to use this money to close on our new house in Austin.

This is an online bank, but they don’t allow you to transfer funds electronically (like all other “brick and mortar” banks) and they take nearly twice as long to recognize pending funds than Bank of America. That sucks, obviously, but it’s actually all there in the writing and shame on me for not reading the fine print. But here, my friends and loyal readers, is what they call “the rub”.

We called ING on four different occasions, talking to 9 people in total and not one person at ING was helpful nor did one person try to give us any sort of creative ideas to try and make this happen. It was at this point when, and this is difficult to write, I stated to a manager at ING “You don’t seem to understand, if we can’t figure this out, in some way, my family is homeless…we have NO place to live.” Imagine that said in a very dramatic tone and you’ll realize how pathetic I was and felt at the time. The response, “Nothing we can do for you.” In 2 cases I didn’t even get a “sorry”.

Ultimately we figured it out because we have an amazing mortgage broker (Zander, many thanks) and because Bank of America was understanding, compassionate, smart, creative and downright human. The latter was particularly true when we visited, face-to-face, with B of A branch managers. My wife got some amazing help from a great guy in Boston (Regan, leave the guys’ name in the comments if you have his info) and I went to two B of A’s today and got some tremendous help at the last minute from folks who honestly wanted to make a positive impact on my life. Thank you!

So, here is the thing, when it came down to it, two things became very apparent to me:

1. Just because something is “online” does not make it smarter and in fact doesn’t even make it more modern;
2. Face-to-face still rules when you need to just get something done or when you need to connect with people on a deeper level than online can ever allow;

–Kyle F. Flaherty

Post and you shall receive.  I asked you guys about social media use and the Olympics because I really think NBC is doing a horrible job at using any sort of medium to promote the athletes.  Two came to my attention quickly:

1. zAthlete: a former client, zAthlete is a social network for…you guessed it, athletes. Justin Benson left a thoughtful comment yesterday to my post. Looks like they have some athletes over there who are using the network to post their thoughts prior to the games. It will be interesting to see if NBC clamps down even more as we get closer to 8/8/08.
2. “Voices of the Olympic Games“: I found this site through Kevin Dugan’s blog post. The site is being run by Lenovo, but it is quite firmly stated that none of the athletes need to say anything positive about Lenovo, instead they are just helping provide the tech.

I really like what Lenovo is doing and it looks from what I read like the athletes are really responding. The great thing is that the Lenovo site is aggregating different blogs, video, pics, etc and just giving you a place to find them all. And now I know I’ll be rooting for Nancilea Foster when she is swimming in Beijing.

–Kyle Flaherty

Seriously, 2008, the Olympics are THIS year?

OK, I’m half-joking, I too have seen the extra-sappy comercials running on NBC, making me dread hearing over-the-top documentary style renderings of some javelin competitor from Lithuinia.  Let me just put it out there, I have zero interest in this years Summer Olympics. The reason actually isn’t about the sports, it’s about the decision to create an over-hyped marketing machine that drowns out the stories of these athletes. Here is a partial list of products that are “Official ENTER PRODUCT CATEGORY HERE of the 2008 Olympics”.

I’m a realist, so I get that you need these folks to make the Olympics the production it has become.  My issue is actually with the way the Olympics is being marketed to us in the U.S. by NBC Sports.  Although I don’t agree with the 404’s “All-Naked Olympics” (although….no it’s not worth it), wouldn’t it be nice to be a bit more involved with the actual athletes at the Olympics, the actual reason they have these events every four years?

There are moments in marketing when you are faced with decisions about how to communicate, often revolving around traditional means like advertising and PR.  NBC dropped the ball on both fronts because they forgot what they should be communicating AND how they should communicate. The “what” is simple; it should be all about the athletes.  Granted they are being featured in NBC ads, but rather than leave you wanting more, you have forgotten the person’s story a minute later.  I’m positive we will be assaulted by deeper coverage of the athletes throughout the NBC family as we get closer to the games, but I can’t help but think they are missing the boat, and that is where we talk about the “how”.

Not surprisingly I see this as a place where social media could really help NBC engage us before 8/8/08. I did a very quick search through the online entities around the Olympics. The official Olympic site has zero blogs that I can find, in my searching I haven’t been able to find any athletes blogging and even NBC is doing little in the way of engaging their potential audience besides pissing them off.  NBC’s Olympic website does have blogs, although absolutely buried at the bottom of the homepage and not in the nav at all.  The blogs do included a couple of athletes, but there is zero ability to interact with these athletes as they prepare for the game, even just to give them a “Go get ‘em”.

NBC needs to scrap the annoying advertising and get serious about portraying the personalities of some great athletes heading to China.  At the same time let us engage with them, discuss the games, debate topics.  Remember when you felt part of the U.S. team, normally because of geo-political reasons?  I think a small dash of social media could help bring that back, without the need for another Cold War.

I’m going to keep looking at this throughout the next 35 days and PLEASE send me any blogs that are Olympic focused that you are following, particularly anything done by athletes heading to China.

–Kyle Flaherty

One of my main issues lately with blogging and Twittering has been the, what seems like, constant bowing down in front of one another of ’social media types’.  Jason Falls had a great post on Friday summarizing many of my feelings.  During the weekend we were lucky enough to mooch off of our good friends, since we are currently ‘in between homes’.  Several times during the weekend we talked about things like Twitter, Facebook, blogging and more.  The conversations, at least for me, were invigorating, challenging and refreshing.  Mainly because neither of our friends are into any of these activities.

Talking with people who have little interest in social media makes you much better at expaining it’s importance.  Fielding questions that are completely untainted makes you understand how all of this is perceived by the majority of people. Finally, it puts it all into prespective and you realize once again that just because you have thousands of followers on Twitter that does not measure your impact nor your importance.

After these types of sessions I actually feel much stronger about my own personal use of social media, but also how we are using it professionally.  I can now go into a meeting and better explain what Facebook is, why it is important and the pitfalls you must watch for when entering social networking.  Also I can see more clearly what tools are most effective, again for me, and what social media gadgets will never have value-add.  My mind feels a bit more clear today, at least in terms of this topic, because I was questioned in a challenging manner by people who were not ’social media celebs’.

Have you talked to someone not in the social media world today?

–Kyle Flaherty