Microsoft-Yahoo! Partnership Needs a Culture Shift to Take on Google

As the escalating Microsoft-Google faceoff continues, Microsoft and Yahoo! have finally hooked up, but nobody seems too impressed with their search partnership.

Combining resources, they’ll still have only 30-35 percent of the market, compared to Google’s 65. Then there’s the looming antitrust scrutiny.

But we’re wondering about a separate issue: culture. Can Microsoft and Yahoo! mix successfully—and can they do it in a way that keeps pace with the open-source-innovation model parlayed by Google into Internet domination?

It takes a strong commitment to ingenuity to support a policy like Google’s “20 percent time,” whereby employees spend a day per week taking on projects outside their job description.

Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, Yahoo! are more entrenched, institutional organizations. They’ve evolved, sure, but they aren’t in a constant state of advancement the way Google is and has always been.

To be fair, Microsoft has fired some fairly strong volleys in this match, including the Bing rollout. Bill Gates’ behemoth baby isn’t accustomed to second place, so don’t count them out just yet. But the new MSFT-YHOO partners have big hurdles to clear as they try to cultivate a combined culture of creativity that’s a worthy rival of Google.

As Social Media’s Status Rises, Don’t Ignore the ‘Why’

In an interesting if unsurprising development, BtoB has released a study declaring that “Social media use soars among b-to-b marketers.”

Indeed, we’re all atwitter about the interactive, community-building possibilities. And as we’ve said before here, here and here, you should be experimenting in social media.

But at the same time, a word of caution. We’re talking about experimenting here. And experiments sometimes fail. As marketers, we can’t let ourselves get so tangled up in social media excitement that we don’t recognize when our efforts aren’t achieving any marketing objectives.

For example, as one BtoB commenter points out, it’s nice that we marketers are flocking to social media, but we should also consider whether our target audience in any given case is active in these emerging channels. If not, why waste the time?

So while we’re listening and chiming in online, we also should be thinking about how social media dialogs fit with our goals and strategy. Shooting for a quota of sales leads? Just trying to stay on top of what customers care about? We can’t expect too much from our Tweets, replies, status updates, etc. But we should expect something.
In social media, at a minimum, we need some idea what we’re getting into—and what we’re trying to get out of it.

Social Media: Just Because? Perhaps ;)

There’s some provocative commentary over at Ad Age: “Why I Hate Social Media”

Don’t count me among the social media haters, per se. I do find the media themselves to be interesting—especially all the instant interconnectedness among people around the globe.

But Ad Age columnist Matt Jones has a point, I think, when talking about using this tool for marketing purposes: it’s still about the big idea.

Lots of people are jumping on the social media express. They’re reading about it everywhere, and the knee-jerk reaction is to say “Hey, me, too!” But for jumping on board to be worthwhile, you still have to offer fresh, compelling stories that engage and build community with people who share similar interests. Otherwise, your Tweets will be easily ignored by the same social-media-savvy people you’re trying to reach.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t be experimenting in these fast-evolving realms. But if you’re using social media for your business, you should at least consider how doing so relates to your company goals and strategy. And more importantly, you have to make sure you’re having real-life, give-and-take conversations with customers, prospects and industry people. (Take Dell and IdeaStorm, for example.)

Don’t forget to listen, learn and take action. Thanks to the wide variety of social media research tools available (start by exploring Twitter’s search function), you can tune in to what people are talking about and tailor your messages accordingly. So go ahead and join the conversation.

After all, the big idea of “social media” is being “social.”

Word of Mouth Marketing: More Valuable Than Ever

In these days of tight resources, the quest to do more with less has many of us returning to marketing basics.

You don’t get more basic—or more cost-effective—than word-of-mouth marketing. And today, good old-fashioned word of mouth can be easier and more powerful than ever, thanks to social media and other web 2.0 tools.

To help you get going, there’s a constant parade of great advice and examples to emulate over at the Word of Mouth Marketing Blog.

It’s run by to Gaspedal, a noted word-of-mouth marketing consultancy led by Andy Sernovitz, author and expert in word-of-mouth and its 21st century manifestation in blogs and social media.

OK, full disclosure: We were pleased to see that a Nueske’s tradeshow giveaway we orchestrated got a shout-out recently on the blog.

Nevertheless, gaspedal and its blog have tons of excellent tips for how you can fuse classic approaches and new technology to accelerate your success. So go check it out and put it to use.

Can Pork Producers Win Their ‘H1N1’ vs. ‘Swine Flu’ Crisis Communications Quest?

Let’s take a quick break from all our hand washing and cough covering to note the crisis communications case study in action that is the swine flu outbreak.

Excuse me, I mean the “H1N1 virus,” as industry groups for the other white meat would greatly prefer we call it. In one of the most interesting aspects of this saga from a marketing perspective, pork producers are struggling to save their products from panic and misinformation.

No, pork producers didn’t cause this crisis. But they certainly risk taking a sales hit due to the fast-spreading bug’s potentially misleading common name. So the National Pork Board is wise to be tackling the problem aggressively.

We’ll go ahead and call it H1N1 here, but the odds may be against them winning this name game (although the Obama administration appears to be on board). Today, the chatter about the outbreak is spreading incredibly fast through social media, Internet searches and 3G phones. The virtual masses are guiding that conversation, and ultimately, they’ll call it what they call it. Swine flu.

It’s just another cautionary tale demonstrating why crisis communications planning is more important and more complicated than ever.

And since we have a client that makes some of the finest swine products in the world, we want to help the pork people out. To set the record straight, you can’t get H1N1 from eating pork. In fact, I just enjoyed a hot dog for lunch. Then, because President Obama and the CDC reminded me to do so, I washed my hands.

Harley-Davidson Talks Tough in the New York Times

Here’s an update on the recent struggles at Harley-Davidson, an American icon based in our hometown. Harley’s sales may have tumbled lately—and whose haven’t?—but the brand is still showing some mettle, as a recent dustup with The New York Times demonstrates.

A week or so ago, the NYT ran a piece headlined “Harley, You’re Not Getting Any Older.” It wasn’t a hatchet job by any stretch. But it did paint the future in dark colors, emphasizing the usual criticism that Harley’s core customers, baby boomers, won’t be in the market forever, and so the company needs to find a way to lure new blood.

Well, some people at Harley didn’t think they got a fair shake in the article. So, a few days later, they ran a big ad in an American flag design, with the provocative headline “You can file our obituary where the sun don’t shine.” You can read more about Harley’s advertising response here.

Now, you can say what you want about the logic of responding to a piece of journalism you disagree with by buying ad space in the publication that ran it. You also might take issue with the ad’s tone. Something about the in-your-face, red-white-and-blue attitude plays like 1987. In other words, the ad may appeal mostly to the baby boomer audience Harley needs to reach beyond.

Nevertheless, our local bike maker has a good point. As we’ve noted before, the company has been making moves and trying new things to cultivate new fans. These things take time, especially for a brand as well established as Harley’s is.

In the meantime, this playful advertising volley has earned plenty of additional coverage and conversation. And at its heart, the message is true to the rebellious, resilient image. On balance, that’s surely a win.

For Banks, a Crisis Communications Fail

An article in AdAge offers a reminder why staying quiet about a crisis is bad communications strategy.

The piece cites a new PR survey showing that only 8 % of consumers have full confidence in the nation’s financial service companies. AdAge attributes the low approval rating, in part, to the banks’ failure to communicate clearly with their customers in this time of trouble.

We say it all the time, and we’ll say it again: You’ve got to tell your story the way you want it to be told. If you don’t, it may be told by someone else—and they won’t be nearly as nice about it. In the banks’ case, the barrage of bad publicity in the 24-hour news cycle is telling their story.

So once again, we’re seeing how a “no comment” attitude only digs a deeper hole for businesses stuck in a bad situation.