Be a Hedgehog: Marketing as Human Variety Disguised as One Simple Trick

Image via WikipediaScene: London Underground, 1996.  It's winter. A little boy is wrapped up in a plaid wool jacket. His mother holds his hand. She's wearing a violet sweater and a green anorak. Her blondish hair is tied back very loosely in a hair band, and tendrils of her hair spill down her left cheek, which is flushed with the London wind.

On the wall is plastered a giant poster for Sonic the Hedgehog, a Sega Genesis (remember that?) game. It was advertising Sega World, which used to be a little video game playground for kids and adults in Hammersmith. It looked something like this:




As a train heads into the station, the stationmaster's automated voice announces the arrival, and the little boy asks his mother, "why is that hedgehog so clever?"

The mother looks down and says, "Because he can go where he wants, when he wants."

While it seems a proper assessment of the Sonic brand, I think it's also a very accurate characterization of what a branding manager or a community manager should be. Facebook, and other social marketing platforms, should be your video game. You are the hero in your video game and your mission is to be clever.

I don't mean clever in the sense of tricking people to like your product. I mean clever, like a journalist is clever, or a sleuth. You need to go about your day finding things for people, and bringing them knowledge.  You need to be like that cool kid in high school who always had some factual information for you, who always told you something a little bit different, who was gifted in a way that made him seem a little bit out of the ordinary, but very real.



Be yourself. Bring life to people, through the life you live.

If you are like this to people, they will like you. And liking you is the very reason they will like the brand you represent. Because people don't really love brands. They love people.

People matter more than brands, and that's what a lot of branding people don't want you to know, because their whole life has been about selling the brand.

That's changing, especially with platforms like Facebook's Timeline.

What Jobs do Comic Books Do For You and Your Kids? A Teen Titans Case Study

We were a little startled today to see the news that a well-known comic book series has changed the way it depicts its protagonist.

And so, too, was the 7-year old daughter of the fantasy author, Michele Lee, who brought it to light. Dave Peck shared this on Twitter, and it's eye-opening, to say the least.

Lee showed her daughter a copy of DC Comics' "Teen Titans," a comic book series that the daughter has shown some fondness for in the past. This time the copy caught her and her daughter off guard. The jolt came from seeing the main heroine, Starfire, in all the glory God gave her. A lot of glory.

Here's a brief synopsis. Lee shows her daughter the pictures in the comic, which depict the female protagonist in a skimpy bikini that reveals more than a fair share of her breasts. The daughter, as you may imagine for a precocious young girl, feels uncomfortable about this and tells her mother that she thinks the heroine is "trying too hard" to be noticed, by posing and showing off her feminine form (which, arguably, is super enhanced and looks a little different than most women we know).

The lesson from this? What are we teaching young women before they have the mindset and the experience that makes them into the thoughtful and mature young women they are meant to become? Bob Moesta, founder of the Re-Wired Group, looks at this from a consumer interest standpoint. There is a woeful amount of disconnection between what the producers of the comic think is their audience, and the actual audience. Does this disconnection happen because of pressure to be "successful" and create a profit from selling? Bob takes a subtler approach than my blatant questioning of the comic series maker's intentions:

I think the jobs that comic books do has grown well out side the one character fits all model, and segmentation is clearly needed. If you listen to the "Best" consumer - They get what they asked for.  But the real disruption comes from the kid and her job that comics do for her and probably did for the older consumers as well, but they kept living the fantasy. Both are markets seeking candidates, and i am not one to judge the value of either, i just know that one product is sub-optimal, and just feels wrong.

The fantasy here, it seems, is that anyone can consume the comic magazine in the way that it is delivered. But it's different jobs for different folks. We all bring a natural dependency to the product we wish to consume. That dependency is an expectation that the thing we consume, or the product we take up in our daily life, satisfies our natural disposition, or some natural need.

Often, like the young daughter, we are not aware enough to know what that real need is, until we see its opposite firsthand. In this case, Lee's daughter sees a sexed-up super tramp super heroine and she knows right away that this is not the woman she idolized in previous incarnations of the book. 

No product can be all things to all people. It doesn't work that way. that's why a really granular and deep dive approach is necessary. Perhaps there is an entirely different series waiting to be made here, but not at the cost of alienating what appears to be an audience the comics maker failed to see in the first place. 

We don't know the intentions behind the change, or the decisions. We can wonder, did they just decide sexy is better? Did they  have no idea that young daughters picked this book up and fantasized about their own super powers? 

Graphic novel blog Comics Alliance has a more florid response to this approach.

#Infographic: Facebook and Twitter Stepping on Student's First Amendment Rights?

Here's a good one. Are Facebook and Twitter infringing upon First Amendment rights in the classroom? In effect, are they putting the smack down on your student's fundamental pursuit of liberty? Apparently not, according to the Knight Foundation.

Even though teachers cringe at the idea of using social media in the classroom, it appears that using social media (or at least learning since the advent of social media) has pushed students to a more fundamental appreciation for freedom of speech.

Check out this infographic:

Why Dieters Fail: A Mission to Find Innovators and Outliers

For most of us, finding a good solid set of statistics confirms what we want to believe. Not for Bob Moesta and the rest of the Re-Wired Group. Take this example of a recent startling discovery about dieters failing to keep off the weight.

When I showed Bob this article and pointed out the part in the article that showed people who don't fail at dieting actually end up subconsciously eating more as a reaction to their own dieting, he urged me to "find the outliers."

Scientists have concluded that the standard practice of restricting a specific number of calories every day is actually not enough for people to lose weight and stay thin. Here's a key point in the article:

The model shows that lasting weight loss takes a long time to achieve and suggests that more effective weight loss programs might be undertaken in two phases: a temporary, more aggressive change in behavior at first, followed by a second phase of a more relaxed but permanent behavioral change that can prevent the weight regain that afflicts so many dieters despite their best intentions.

Bob thought about this and sent back an email:

So where is the innovation and where are the innovators? If human body is the "system" and that is how it works, then what do we do? Nothing? I don't think so.

This is the problem with protocol medicine. everything has to be proven the scientific method and applied across the human species. but what about environmental, history and culture factors? What about situational context? Innovation in medicine has to look beyond the obvious and find the second and third order effects and build simple ways to help everyone compensate not control our way to health. We know what doen't not work on average, but what about the tails - the really successful and the really unsuccessful. what can we learn from them.

The key is that we don't know enough. We believe easily enough in science and the general conclusions it creates to think that an overall statistic is worth its weight. It's most likely not. What Bob and the other innovators at Re-Wired realize is that there are facts, and then there are the human experiences that determine our reception of those facts.

It's how we received, and then act on, the information from our experience with those facts that determines the job that gets done.

What does dieting get done for you? What do you do to get dieting done?

Are Citizens Turning to Newspapers Out of Habit?

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeA new Pew Study on local news reading  habits says local print newspapers account for the top slot in people's news-seeking habits when looking for locally relevant information.


Contrary to popular belief, the most prevalent source for local news is the daily newspaper in someone’s city. Most American information seeks use new and traditional sources to get their information.


This could be good news for a struggling Patch.com, which is built on the premise that the best source for <a href=” http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_new_aol_local_reporters_covering_your_neighbor.php”>hyperlocal information</A> is the web, and preferably on a mobile device.

A dive through the Pew study reveals that most people depend on a hybrid approach to getting information and that it may not actually mean anything at all that 29% of those surveyed turn to local newspapers, suggesting that they may turn to newspapers out of habit. The survey reveals that 69% of American say that if their local newspaper disappeared, it would not have a major impact on their ability to keep up with local events and news.

But then there is this weird caveat at the end: "Yet when one looks at the 79% of Americans who are online, the internet is the first or second most relied-upon source for 15 of the 16 local topics examined. For adults under 40, the web is first for 11 of the top 16 topics—and a close second on four others."

Maybe people are picking up local newspapers for more granular information, not exactly culturally-necessary information. 

#Facebook Privacy Issues You Should Learn, Even if it Doesn't Alarm You

Image by aJ GAZMEN ツ GucciBeaR via FlickrIt is not clear to me whether this issue is what it is being made out to be, but Nik Cubrilovic has taken the time over the past two years to examine the way Facebook places cookies in your browser and your laptop. He's taken enough care that I thought it would be worth posting here the central tenet of his message.

Logging out of Facebook is not enough, the social networking site has privacy issues.

Facebook may be tracking much more than we think they are tracking, for more reasons than we care to imagine. After all, they have a job to do -- get the world to share its information.

If Google is the repository for the world's information, then Facebook is the international airport terminal for all the shipments of data we call our social context. 

Whisperware: Target.com Rumored to Have Switched Over to IBM Smarter Commerce

Image via CrunchBaseWe have not been able to get confirmation of this, but a friend visiting a conference in San Diego tells us that Target.com dropped Amazon EC2 for competitor IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions, allegedly because Target was peeved that the cloud services functionality they were promised failed to perform.

Our friendly source tells us that Target has been wanting to do this for a while. Again, we don't know if this is true, and we have not been able to confirm this with anyone at IBM.

The breaking point seems to have been the failed Missoni launch at Target.com which led to outages.

The source tells us: “Amazon basically failed to deliver as promised a platform to Target. Same issue that Toys R Us faced. Amazon ended up competing with their customers as they shifted strategy from store to provider and back.”

Target.com late last week launched a line of Missoni clothes on its online shop, only to see the server’s crash and thwart angry customers, who clamored for the new release. The Target relationship with IBM is supposedly very good and very positive.