Ghost Tweeting is the Milli Vanilli of Web 3.0.

If you've shown up here, why don't you mosey on over to my new blog? Yeah, I just soft launched The BrandForward Blog. It's at http://michelletripp.com. You can find all the same posts you can find here. But it's a bit more pretty.

Yeah, go on! Scoot! Nothing to see here!

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Today I did the unthinkable. For a Mac fangirl it was absolutely preposterious. Egregious. Some might say sacrilegious. Or at least some sort of something with an "ous" at the end. Seriously.

I unfollowedous Guy Kawasakious.

As I rifled through my follow list, my heart was pounding. Was I really going to do it? Was I going to extricate myself from the biggest Twitter party on the planet? Could I really let go of @guykawasaki? Could I accept being relegated to the Twitter clueless who wouldn't know a Guy Kawasaki from a lawn mower? I mean really. Who doesn't follow Guy Kawasaki. And if I dared to hit the ominous "remove" button would he swiftly launch his minions upon me in a mass unfollow? What could I possibly be thinking??? Am I nuts?

(Click.)

I hold my breath. I look around. The sky isn't darkening. Storm clouds not rolling in. No scowling Vincent Price peering through the window. No gargoyles to speak of.

So like, whew! I really did it. I broke up with Guy Kawasaki. No tears. No regrets. And no blood was shed. Or maybe his minions just didn't have my street address. Finally, I had my freedom. Churn, baby, churn.

This is what happens when you do bad. People walk away. They unfollow. They untrust. I am now unceremoniously referring to it as #guyfail. When you represent something so awesome, but then somehow lose what made you awesome to begin with. Guy Kawasaki used to get it. But when he announced last week at #SESNY that he has three ghost tweeters writing under his Twitter account, I realized somewhere along the way, he lost it. If he can't see the incredible value of a genuine, unfiltered Twitter persona and the abomination that is a ghosted account, then my friends the man no longer gets it. And it's time to pass the mantle.

Sure, Guy might get it in a Web 2.0 kind of way, understanding that he must have presence. Write articles. Make Twitter accounts. Build empire. But that's not Web 3.0. The new era of social media is about more than just making sure you have 30 pithy tweets per day attributed to your name. It's about CONNECTING. For reals.

Yeah, I can hear it now. The voice out there saying it's okay to ghost for a brand, and hey, isn't Guy Kawasaki a brand? Well, let me ask you this. Aren't we ALL brands today? Isn't it the new mantra that everyone needs to have "reputation management?" And aren't we all supposed to be building our "personal brands?" How fast would any one of us get unfollowed if it got out that it's not really us behind our Twitter. Or behind our blog. If you found out that Seth Godin wasn't writing his blog would you value him as much? Would his blog feel the same? Would you respect him in the same way? Would anything attached to his name carry the same weight? No, it really wouldn't.

It'd be kind of like walking down Canal Street and seeing a hundred women carrying Louis Vuitton handbags, and realizing maybe one or two of them MIGHT be genuine. Sure, they look nice and all. But having a designer handbag has lost a lot of its cachet. Because so many out there simply aren't real. This is what ghost tweeting does to social media. It injects doubt where there should be authenticity.

Think authenticity doesn't matter?

Put on your denim jacket and parachute pants and let's H.G. Wells ourselves back to the world of Milli Vanilli.

America loved Milli Vanilli. Six times platinum loved them. Grammy for Best New Artist in 1990. But then it came out that the two guys on the cover didn't sing a note on the album. We all know where the story goes after that. Now maybe Guy Kawasaki doesn't want a Milli Vanilli debacle on his hands. So he's using a little Web 2.0 swagger and admitting to ghost tweeters in the name of transparency. But doing that is what makes it so clear he doesn't get it. Because it's not just about connecting and presence and faux transparency.

The magic of social media is in the authenticity.

And if you think people just want the content and don't care about things being authentic, take a look at Milli Vanilli's career after their fans found out about the deception. Lawsuits all over the U.S. with angry album buyers and concert-goers demanding their money back. They didn't seem to care that the albums were great. They didn't care that the concerts were entertaining. It didn't matter that Milli Vanilli's songs were burning up the charts, or that the duo was an MTV darling. The fans wanted authenticity. They wanted it to be real.

Sad thing is, social media is ALL about being real. At the core of what makes social media such a fantastic tool for branding, marketing, and communicating is that it allows consumers to connect on a real, personal level to brands they care about.

But dear Guy Kawasaki, there's a difference between Coca Cola having ghost tweeters and you having ghost tweeters. Last I heard, Coca Cola isn't human. I don't see a smiling, toothy pic of Mr. Coca Cola on Coca Cola's Twitter profile. However, there is one of you. A brand you may be, but if you're going to set up a Twitter account that you don't have the time to deal with genuinely and authentically (ie. Guy Kawasaki, the human, isn't going to be the author of Guy Kawasaki "the tweets") maybe consider changing the name to guykawasakifanclub or guykawasakiinc. And then think about maybe putting an image of a book on your profile. Or an Apple. Or a gargoyle.

Because if @guykawasaki pops up in my timeline, I want to know it was his fingers touching every key on the keypad and that he had that same last-second "do I really want to tweet this" moment we all have before hitting UPDATE. And that occasional tweegret. Because if it's not really you behind the curtain, your account doesn't have AUTHENTICITY. And I've lost a little trust in you. I'm looking at your blog a little differently know. I'll still read it, but the love isn't there. You're now some dude in an ivory tower, sipping mocha frappuccinos shuttled in by an intern. Overseeing your vast domain from afar. Letting the little people eat cake. Give me the @names of your ghost tweeters so I can start following them. And I'll take that intern's name, too.

Yes, people are brands. But they won't be for long if they start acting like a brand, and stop acting like a human.

So yeah, ghost tweeting is not in the spirit of social media, and definitely not in the spirit of Twitter. If social media's value is ultimately in its authenticity, and one of social media's greatest networkers is not using his Twitter authentically, then who else out there is faking it? And can anyone, or any brand for that matter, really be trusted?

Because if Guy Kawasaki says it's okay to put your photo and your name on Twitter and then hire someone to impersonate you, and be a filter between you and the people who buy your books, and go to your speeches and click on the advertisers on your blog and support your new projects, well hell! Maybe it's okay for everyone else! To heck with authenticity.

Which leads us to a total social media meltdown. Back to the days when brands spoke "at" the masses for no purpose other than to create what was ultimately a flimsy connection to gain market share. Do we really want to go back there? With all the opportunity we have to make a difference with social media?

Maybe it really is time for the mantle to be passed. Maybe Guy Kawasaki having ghost tweeters is a good thing. To mark the edge of the chasm. To mark the difference between the social media Milli Vanilli's and the NEW "revolutionaries."

To be sure, this was a difficult post to write. Because I've been a Guy Kawasaki faithful for at least a decade. And loved his Apple branding genius well before that. But creating evangelists is a double-edged sword. Because sometimes they pay attention.

Be revolutionary. Be authentic. And when your heroes veer off the path, never forget this one important thing:

Where the "remove" button is located.

(And where you can quickly hide to escape the gargoyles.)

Brand Fail Whale: Restaurant Owner Turns Negative Yelps Into T-Shirts

If you've shown up here, why don't you mosey on over to my new blog? Yeah, I just soft launched The BrandForward Blog. It's at http://michelletripp.com. You can find all the same posts you can find here. But it's a bit more pretty.

Yeah, go on! Scoot! Nothing to see here!

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Yelp's had some publicity lately, and not a lot of it good.

Let's forget the "holy crap" moment this week when a judge ruled that Yelpers can be sued for libel. And let's move on to something a little less disturbing. If only slightly.

I just finished reading an article from NPR's On the Media http://tr.im/otmy that was basically an interview with a San Francisco restauranteur who got upset about some bad Yelp reviews and "confronted" the issue by turning the offending Yelps into T-shirts. "This place sucks" and stuff like that.

Clever idea but it seems the opportunity to improve and connect with some very important customers was lost. By taking a complaint and essentially turning it into a joke, the restaurant owner made a statement. A big one. Basically that he doesn't take his customers seriously. And if you're particularly demanding (or just expect things to be right), instead of being respected as a paying customer you're going to get called out and put in your place.

Business-to-consumer companies are admittedly having it a little rough right now. In the past, a company that didn't make customer service a top priority or provided an inferior product or service had total impunity. The customer could walk away upset and the company didn't have to care. Now with Yelp, companies are all of the sudden being forced by the customer to do the right thing. And a lot of companies aren't exactly prepared for that.

To prevent bad reviews, companies now have to hire better people, have a more positive management style, and produce a better product. They also have to get serious about their total offering and be prepared to satisfy every customer. Like as in ALL of them.

So back to the whole Yelp factor. Yeah, I know there's always going to be "that" customer who thinks it's funny to give one star and say they saw a rat run across the table. But I went to the Yelp page for the restaurant in question http://tr.im/delfina and the bad reviews were pretty reasonable. They were completely believable, criticizing mostly product quality, atmosphere, and employee behavior. No vicious rats, no people lying in the streets convulsing from food poisoning, no swill dripping from the rafters. Everything was pretty straight-forward.

But instead of looking at these Yelps as an opportunity to see things from a different perspective, the owner of the restaurant looked at it as a way to show he's more clever than his customers and that he doesn't take negative reviews seriously. Even if he's privately using Yelp to improve in small ways here and there, the T-shirts (while a successful media grab) are a total brand fail whale.

News Flash: Demanding customers are the ones that can be evangelized.

You think people don't realize when they're being demanding? You think they don't know they expect a lot? They do. But that doesn't soften the blow when they realize you don't care to please them. They take it personally. They think you're doing a bad job because you don't care about them. They think you want to take the lazy way. Tip the scale in your favor at their expense. These customers don't suffer the mediocre, and they're not about to let you get away with giving them the bum's rush. They want justice. And with Yelp they're going to get it. Let's count the number of times Best Buy has recently found itself on page one of Digg. Companies that fail to meet "demanding" customer expectations are in a bad place to be.

But the flip side is that if a company does meet their needs, they're going to tell the world. Cue the fireworks. They appreciate when a company can meet their expectations because it doesn't happen very often. This means they're going to love you. A lot. These are the customers that will Yelp your establishment in rainbow colors, and confront other Yelpers if they criticize you unjustly.

Still annoyed by those demanding customers?

Yelp is a gift. For brands and companies that honestly want to do the right thing, and value customers as unique individuals who don't want to be herded like King Ranch cattle to the cash register, Yelp is an amazing social media tool that can be leveraged to cultivate and celebrate brand evangelists.

For the companies that don't want to bother, there's always the T-shirt business.

Social Media Experts Are Scary.

If you've shown up here, why don't you mosey on over to my new blog? Yeah, I just soft launched The BrandForward Blog. It's at http://michelletripp.com. You can find all the same posts you can find here. But it's a bit more pretty.

Yeah, go on! Scoot! Nothing to see here!

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This is the kind of post that gets you unfollowed. A post with some very unpopular ideas. We'll call it the Hitler of blog posts. And considering it's a Twitter #followfriday I should probably come up with something a bit more butterflies and sunshine. Or at least margaritas and martinis.

But no. Not me. I like to live on the wild side. Kinda like companies who hire "social media experts."

So here's where I get in trouble today: I think this whole "social media expert" thing is getting really out of hand. Really. And not just because every other person with a Facebook account, a plane ticket to Austin, and a Twitter badge is claiming to be one. It's because even if a true social media expert actually exists, calling yourself one is just another way of saying "I know enough to be dangerous."

By even using the words social media expert it's like you're intentionally not choosing to say marketing expert. Because that would be hard to pull off if you're not one. But social media expert. That's easy. Have Twitter account, will travel.

Which is why social media experts scare me. Because by definition they're not marketing experts.

DOH!

For all the flashing lights and shooting stars, social media is simply a tool. Technically it's an advertising medium. When someone says they're a social media expert it carries the same weight as if someone said "I'm a cable media expert." Okay. That's just one medium. Yes, being an expert of a medium does have value. But I'm not going to hand over a blank sheet of paper and expect my cable rep to write a comprehensive marketing program or decide what the best message is, or work on creative or manage the client's brand. Or (gasp!) all of the above.

Which is what I'm seeing a lot of social media'ers trying to do. Using the term "social media expert" interchangeably with "marketing expert." Which is why it's so scary.

So with all due disrespect when I see iPhone app writers and web site designers and 26 year-old "self-employed" twitterers and mommybloggers claiming the title of "social media expert" I feel like I'm Alice in Wonderland. Falling down a really deep hole. Into a world where anyone can be an expert, and having a few years experience and barely any real marketing under their belt somehow confers the status of rock star. It's like strategic marketing never existed. Like Elvis walked in and everyone lost their head and started throwing panties.

A lot of people with knowledge of the internet but little or no marketing experience are riding the social media hype to make a buck. Or launch a new career. And because a lot of companies don't have the first idea how to proceed in the social media space they're forced to trust these "experts" for marketing advice.

A train wreck we are a'pproachin.

So let's digress for a moment. Let's assume there is such an animal. The social media expert. The rock star. Versed in all things Twitter, Facebook, Flicker, YouTube, Vimeo, and you name it. Let's just call them channels. Thing is I don't ever remember any of my cable reps fancying themselves up and announcing they're an expert. I respect them for that. Which is why I have an issue with the social media variety. The humility is missing. They're not happy as simply the purveyors of media planning information. They want to be on stage. With the panties.

So panties aside, I trust cable reps to provide recommendations that include (quantitative) demographics, reach, frequency, GRP, CPP, and CPM for every channel on the line-up. Similarly I would also trust a social media rep for the same type of advice for social media. Am I going to let them dictate what percentage of my budget belongs in social media? No. Am I going to let them have carte blanche to develop creative and determine the best message? No. Am I going to trust them to handle Adsense and affiliate marketing? Unless they can prove they were too busy with clients to get anywhere near SXSWi, probably not.

What's truly the scariest part of the "social media expert" craze is a lot of companies are getting caught up in the glitz and glam of social media and letting these "experts" have a go at their marketing budget like Mike Tyson at a casting call for America's Next Top Model. And even a lot of ad agencies are parading their shiny, new "social media departments" in front of clients. Further feeding the frenzied perception that social media experts are the second coming.

Now don't get me wrong. Social media and internet marketing are good things. And I believe in SEO, SMO, SEM, SMM, CGM, PPC, CTR, PFI, SERP, CPC, SES, and OMG. And I love love love social media. I'm right there with it. No fewer than a hundred beta accounts to prove it. Internet is an effective advertising medium. And social media is an amazing marketing tool. But it's just a tool.

Kinda like the Twitter search tool I'll be using later to check my #unfollowfridays.

Bloggers who pop the big smiley-face balloon of social media can't exactly expect to be a twitterverse favorite, now can we?

Forget the Ad Degree, Watch Mad Men Instead.

When the heart of good advertising can be captured succinctly and brilliantly in a three-minute YouTube video, it kinda makes you wonder about the actual value of spending four years sleeping through advertising classes.

And kinda makes me glad I didn't bother.

One of my favorite bloggers, Edward Boches (http://edwardboches.com) posted a link to one of the greatest moments in television history. Nope, not James Harrison's 100-yard interception return. Although that definitely could qualify. But of all the moments in TV history that I could watch over and over and still need a Kleenex the 50th time I see it, an episode of AMC's Mad Men takes the honors.

What made this clip such a great moment was how it took a critical (and oftentimes forgotten) advertising philosophy and executed it in a way that reminds me why I got into advertising in the first place. It's about getting to the truth and communicating what's real. It's about connecting with the consumer at the deepest level. It's about not just getting into the consumer's head, but also into their heart. And when the stars align, into their soul.

I've seen both creative and account people get lost in a sea of analytics, deadlines, billable targets, and executional mandatories and forget what really matters. What makes advertising matter. When we do our job right, we can turn a simple product or service into an emotional experience.

As advertisers we add a magical ingredient that no tangible product could ever have on its own. We tell a story that makes a connection. We help the consumer see value beyond the price tag. It's no longer something they can own, it's something they can live. We take a product that exists in the outer world and make it a part of their inner world. As humans we're driven to define ourselves through association, and we begin to LOVE the products we choose, because they fulfill our need for identity.

As advertisers we help inanimate objects and everyday services gain entrance to a special place in the consumer's heart and mind where the identity lives. We help build a consumer's "brand family," the group of products and services a consumer is connected to, has an emotional bond with, and will have a hard time abandoning.

I love how Mad Men demonstrated so eloquently the difference between agencies that create advertising and agencies that build that amazing connection. The difference between agencies that build powerpoints and agencies that build evangelists.

We all want to make a difference in our world and sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the value of what we do. Thanks to Edward for digging up a reminder that as advertising "inventors" we bring something powerful and beautiful to the table. What we do doesn't just create revenue and profits. We don't just create ads and reports and powerpoints.

We create MEANING.



Watch the YouTube clip of Don Draper's presentation to Kodak. It's three minutes well-spent.

Old Media Falling Into The "Digeration Gap"

If you've shown up here, why don't you mosey on over to my new blog? Yeah, I just soft launched The BrandForward Blog. It's at http://michelletripp.com. You can find all the same posts you can find here. But it's a bit more pretty.

Yeah, go on! Scoot! Nothing to see here!

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I'm a little confused here. Haven't magazines learned anything from the music industry?

Some questionable protests were recently made by Time Inc.'s CEO Ann Moore that are the epitome of what I'll call the "digeration gap." Apparently she preached at some college students that "good information costs money." By her own admission they started to throw shoes at her.

What should have been a newsflash for Moore turned out to be more of a bake sale challenge. Instead of walking away from that interaction with a renewed quest for finding a viable business model that works with emerging technologies and the evolving consumer climate, she gave lip service to the idea of a new model in one breath, while reinforcing her own perceptions in the next:

"I think it is time for Time Inc. to sit down and seriously think, what is the model? We are going to have to figure out a way to have paid content in the future."

Our little peek into Moore's business strategy speaks volumes. Time Inc. intends to look for answers by going back to the old business model: subscriptions. They're taking a move from the RIAA play book and repackaging it. They're not looking for a new way of doing things. They're looking for a new way to do it the old way.

What's happening at this critical juncture is that some really smart people are just not getting it. Yesterday's business model will not work now. And it really won't work tomorrow. But instead of being at the forefront of developing this new model, a lot of key executives are trying to bulldoze past it, hoping somehow it'll turn into fertilizer for their own crop.

So this is the digeration gap. The difference between people and companies who embrace the internet and the future of information, and the ones who are still in love with the way things were, and desperately hang onto the "tired and true" way of doing things.

There's one little piece of information that those on the wrong side of the digeration gap are failing to realize: Tomorrow's business model is about the individual, not the corporation. Executives like Moore are trying to come up with a model that supports the corporation, that reinforces widespread control, that focuses on selling a lot of things to a lot of people from a central point of vantage. And they honestly believe they're being strategic and logical about it. Sure. But it's as if they're trying to play major-league baseball on a croquet course. Things aren't fitting but they'd rather fumble around instead of just looking down.

Another comment made by Moore that's hurting my head like a blunt object:

"Who started this rumour that all information should be free and why didn't we challenge this when it first came out?"

Wasn't it some Chinese fellow that said "the answer is in the question?"

Moore wants to know why "we didn't challenge it." I think the real question should have been "why didn't we challenge ourselves?" Companies that fall into the digeration gap are the ones that aren't just asking the wrong questions, they're also looking for the wrong answers.

Let's take one more look at this doozy:

"Good information costs money."

Now that's the ultimate rub. Good information no longer costs money. As more people on the planet gain the ability to communicate to a mass audience, it's clear that quality reporting can be done by someone without an editor breathing down their neck, without the necessity of a "Baghdad Bureau," and without the corporate structure propping them up (and no doubt influencing them). Time Inc. is operating on the concept that information is expensive, and that to survive they need to keep it expensive.

Yeah, I realize they have this big huge multi-national corporation to run, but the consumer doesn't care. Ann Moore can do the lecture circuit at every high school and university on the planet trying to convince the next generation they should pay for information. Hell, she can turn it into LollaPAYlooza and bring the RIAA and MPAA with her. I hope she has a lot of room in her closet. The shoes will be forthcoming.

Job number one for corporations like Time Inc. should be one thing: "How do we maintain ownership of the space we've built in our consumer's mind over the last 50 years." Because right now the one thing they stand to walk away from the ashes with is their brands. Brand as in mindshare. When the magazines shut down and the newspapers fold and the television networks are lost in a sea of original non-network INDIVIDUAL content, the brands will be all that's left.

As aging corporations use their might and brawn to resist their forced approach to the ledge of the digeration gap, they have only two choices:

Corpse or phoenix.