Buzz Canuck

Canada's Word of Mouth Discovery #15 - Bernard Lachance

Something very special, very insidious and very savvy is going on in Toronto this week. Relative unknown Bernard Lachance is hosting his own show at Massey Hall November 3, 2007. Haven't heard of him? Just wait...you will.

His music is a cross between Josh Groban (another weird word of mouth phenomenon and protege of David Foster - his fans are self-named Grobanites, kind of Like Deadheads or Phishheads) and Celine Dion. Perhaps a little bit too John Tesh for me, but recognizably a special talent (decide for yourself). 

What's important and different is the way he is promoting these shows. He is literally, as shown in the video,  using every word of mouth, buzz marketing and user generated content trick in the book to get noticed, talked about and to actually help pull off a better show...and it's working.

Bernard Lachance is a hustler of the best sort. For anybody who has been around the music business, they can likely appreciate the fact that the road for most musicians doesn't travel through Amercian Idol or Star Academie. So, for 30 year old Bernard, he's been promoting his own concerts and albums literally one customer at a time since 1994.

His first big break in 1994 - he went home to Montmagny (population 11,654) and sent a demo tape to every citizen in his hometown and was rewarded with a soldout show.

In 2001, he sold over 10,000 albums of his album without a record deal - using street and stage moxie to sell them one at a time.

What's been most impressive has been his ability to sell out entire concert bowls in Quebec and Montreal based on sheer grassroots determination. He rented out Bell Centre without a label promoting him and by himself charming the arena people to rent out the space on generous credit terms based on charisma and creative will power. Thankfully for all , their bet turned out for the best - major local press and a sellout ensued.

This month, his act comes to Toronto with a user-generated twist. He is recruiting amateur musical Torontians to his cause. 150 wannabe musical talents will take the stage with Bernard and sing back up choir to his show at legendary Massey Hall (if interested, get info here).  He did a similar enterprising thing with 700+ choirists in Montreal. By extending his own dream to others, ticket sales by all accounts are going briskly...what thrill-of-a-lifetime participant wouldn't ask their closest 8 friends to attend the show where they make perhaps their only professional musical appearance. Brilliant stuff.

How does he know how many tickets he's selling? Easy.  Bernard wears a T-shirt with a diagram of the concert bowl he is promoting. Ticket by ticket, demo by demo trial,  he checks them off with each sale making late night street intercepts.

For any entrepreneur faced with the challenges of not enough money,  not enough pedigree or not enough backers, Bernard Lachance is a breath of fresh air and inspiration.

Paradoxically, House of Blues-supported and Idol poster girl Kelly Clarkson will be arriving 4 days earlier at Massey, it will be interesting to see which show will generate more buzz and attendance. I for one will be rooting, maybe attending and perhaps even singing the praises for Bernard Lachance - the best feel good Quebecois musical talent to hit Toronto this side of  Rene Simard.

His album, While I Remember You available now on Amazon. Enjoy.

Word of Mouth - A Worthwhile Pursuit and Buffett's School of Marketing Investment

Word of mouth - people really like it. Ads that interrupt - people don't like so much. Yawn...

It's fascinating how media will fixate over new Google ads that edge to the issue of irritating and outightly rejected pop ups or some fascinatingly new social network like "Insert  name" here.

Proportionately however, they do not cover the overwhelming acceptance that people have for recommendations from their friends. Simple organic and managed word of mouth gets nowhere near the press it should deserve for influencing 2/3rds of consumer purchase decisions and exactly half of B-to-B decisions.

I'd liken the rift between what's pressable and what's actaully truly buzzable to Warren Buffett's school of investing.

Buffett's contrarian investment strategy is not popular with everybody, may underperform hotshots within a given year but has stood the test of time.

It's strategy can be summed up in oversimplistically be summed up in 4 statements:
-only invest in things you understand ("circle of competance")
- invest in things that have real return on investment
- look for sustainable competitive advantage
- look for strong and fundamentally sound management not people outside of their expertise

It's why Berkshire Hathaway has outstripped market returns by 7 percentage points over the last decade and why $15 invested invested in 1965 returns $87,500 today.

Now I'm just guessing here but if the "Oracle of Omaha" was the "Rainmaker of Omaha", he would look at this crazy world we call marketing, communications and PR and I would imagine he would invest heavily in sound-minded, high return, sustainable and well-managed word of mouth activities than next month's gimmick.

Facebook...How 'bout Those $10 billion Apples!

Did I just hear right of is Microsoft going to spend $300-500 million for 5% of Facebook.

Hmm, carry  the two, minus the one, divided by pie...that's $10 billion of value! 

Somewhere in the world right now - Larry, Sergei, Jonathan, Chris D. and Tom A. are collectively groaning.   

Media Schadenfreude and The Countdown to Survival

I read a well-written Vanity Fair article on "Is this the End of the News?" on a flight back from Montreal. 

Michael Wolff rails about  High Beam's attempt to save the common narrative of public life through the power of algorithms and technology in something  called Newser.com - Faster, Smarter News.

If I was a journalist, I would be afraid after reading this article...very afraid.

As a voracious reader of longer form journalism - my readership of the paper version of Globe & Mail, Sunday New York Times and a raft of magazines too numerous and embarrassing to mention is living testament - I will regrettably miss well-crafted professional journalist output in the future. There's  not much to match the joy sitting in a business class seat and getting lost in the prose about a trek from Outside Magazine, a fascinating visual essay of an Asian city I've never even heard of before in Wallpaper or a long weekend feature in The Guardian.

However, I do get a sick fascination when industries go through a "tesseract", an enormous social and cultural upheaval which doesn't have an accurate or predictable outcome but an admission by even the most reactionary, that things are going to change irrevocably and comprehensively.

Call me blood thirsty but I have a discomforting lust to see traditional-minded and occasionally pompous industries go through the meat grinder of change and in this scenario, newspapers, evening news, 24 hour news networks and general interest news magazines are the imperiled sausage meat.

Some interesting insights and facts in article:
- news audiences have been declining steadily 1% per year for the last 40 years but now have accelerated to 10% yearly
- a Shorenstein study suggests that anybody under 30 is almost pre-disposed to avoid news headlines - only 9% of teens and 16% of 18-30 year olds regularly read a newspaper
- Veronis Suhler Stevenson sees 2011 as when the Internet surpasses newspaper as the nation's largest ad medium

Taking the longer view, the Linotype democratized news 125 years ago, network TV news jazzed it up 60 years ago, cable satellite news make news omniscient, omnipresent (and regrettably gossipy) 25 years ago --so is Internet news just another evolution or have we really lost a sense of a common narrative here (you get your stuff from Digg, you get it from Technorati, you get it from Drudge and you get it from Google News - whatever will we talk about around the water cooler?)

Check out this disparity if you will. the paper version of New York Times has 1.1 million readers and makes just under $2 bil./annually - or about $2,000 annually per reader/$5 per day per reader.The online version has 40 million unique readers/month and earns $250 million or  just over $5 per year per reader. Same words, different context, much different value.

So will we pay more for the good stuff - insightful, opinionated, fact-checked and well-written online news?  I sincerely hope enough of us will.  If not, something will give and radical change will transpire...and I may just be smiling ever so slightly and smugly as it all happens to some horse-and -buggy whip, ink-stained wretches.

Canada - Middle of the Pack Social Networkers

So much great information, so many great posts...so little time. I think it's about time I give my feed read a "sock drawer" cleanout and stick to the essentials.

Interesting stuff - from Ipsos, the social network stats - 25% of Canadians have social networked and 17% over the last 30 days - this would make us merely  middle of the packers and only slightly ahead of the 20% global average. This despite the fact we spend the most time of any country online -39.6 hours. It also means there are about 160 million social  networkers worldwide (seems lowwhen you consider the top 72 social networks have over 850 million members).

One of my theories on why Facebook is doing so well in Canada is  perhaps the theory that we don't have a long or entrenched history of social networking. it would appear Korea and other countries are telling us social networks have a long way to go before reaching saturation.

I can only imagine what my world would be like browsing through Cyworld for my mom in South Korea or my uncle on Orkut in Brazil...eek.

The Nokia House Diaries

Sorry for my absence from the blogosphere for awhile, as you can see through this post - my speaking gigs are taking me a bit further afar than normal. I had the pleasure last week to speak to a couple hundred Nokia Headquarters employees in Helsinki on my presentation "Wiki Brands - Reinventing Your Brand in a  Customer-Controlled Marketplace".

I genuinely appreciated the engagement and breadth of the Nokia audience. Many of their functions were represented and there was an earnestness about wanting to experiment in the "conversation marketplace" without any of the baggage or cynicism that I see in some North American companies. For a company that has crested at 40% market share, they certainly aren't taking their success for granted.

Some key takeaways from the Nokia mothership experience:

1) The Future is Portable -  Fact: Mobile will be a huge force in the future. Consider that 2.7 billion people use cell phones in the world and only somewhere north of 800 million people have TVs and 1.1 billion on the Internet and you see the potential mass appeal.  BUT....there is a chasm between now and then. There will be a tremendous first mover advantage for a manufacturer (Nokia), Service provider (Orange, Virgin, Vodaphone, Verizon) or Outsider (Google, Yahoo)  who can tap into this mobile social behaviour set, marry it with the rise of social networking, e-commerce, local search and incorporate services that add value to people's lives (and not just take something internet and translating it into mobile which seems to be de rigeur) . Framing it up - who will be the first MySpace, eBay, Google, Flickr or Facebook of the mobile world? And will it be a user behaviour, technical or platform issue that will be  the toughest hurdle to overcome?

2) From Commodity to Product to Service to Experience - Nokia is thinking right about this challenge. If the world of electronics, computer hardware and soon-to-be autos has told us anything it's that the constant downward pressure on the cost of hardware and technology makes this a frenetic paced race to $0 phones. In order to avoid being commodified or defend against this pressure, I believe Nokia has recognized it needs to become much more customer-centric and turn its products into contextually relevant services and conversation worthy experiences. It's a tough mindset shift and takes an investment of smart ideas and effort... but imagine a world where - mobile truly allows your web to be portable, to pay for stuff without need of a wallet, to be able to wear your mobile as an accessory not as an extra piece of baggage, to have your next jogging  partner not be a sport Ipod that plays you music but a Nokia bounce mobile device that plays voice-activated tunes, gives you a heart rate, tells you where to run based on GPS, shouts encouragement from your mobile  coach and takes pictures of the best stuff you see on the trail. The web can't do this for me now, mobile can and that I would pay extra for.

3) Every Courageous Action Starts with a Small Step-  Not surprisingly the common anthem, particularly among the young and progressive in the audience was "so, how do we start?". Easy to go from an idea and a garage and embed this new Wiki world in a company's DNA - admittedly much tougher to turn a colossal global ship around that has been performing successfully using a variety of tactics that have worked for the last decade. Answers: start small - tackle the conversation marketplace with one division, one phone, one initiative and have those project managers become your sherpas, scouts, lab rats and  ambassadors.  Take J&J's lead and allocate 20% of your  marketing dollars and dedicate it to leading edge stuff that doesn't have the supposed predictiveness of the mass marketing world nor the quarterly need to perform and payout. Take Southwest's lead and vest your CEO and executive with the  championship of customer experience and brand advocacy. And point to case studies from other large manufacturers that are getting this relationship building component right - they're out there and they are producing good returns by shedding their traditional wardrobes and becoming smart Wiki brand marketers.

4) Internal Wiki Factors -Impressively, Nokia's internal HR and operations departments are actively looking at technical blog, social media and wiki-based solutions that will integrate valuable and currently disparate and hidden information and insights that exist internally around the world. Headquartered in Finland, Nokia may have a collaboration advantage here as a  NIMBY arrogance ("not in my backyard") doesn't appear to exist; allowing perhaps for a better flow of information than might seem possible in a corporate multinational.

5) Do Europeans buzz more quietly than North Americans or other countries? This was a very interesting question and one I've only glanced at in the past. I know factually an average Net Promoter Score (a standardized measure of  a brand's word-of-mouthability) is 17 in the U.S. and  9 in Europe - so there are differences. Likely a subject for a future post but my topline would be that beyond language differences, perhaps slightly higher suspicion of large companies and  a bit extra scrutiny and elevated expectations of its consumer population, the continents are more like than not like. Let's remember before there was a brand splashy Nascar there was premium brand bumperstickered Formula One, before Marc Jacobs their was the Houses of Paris fashion couture and last time I checked, don't professional soccer teams wear sponsor's logo on the front of their chests (a trend I hope that doesn't cross the ocean).

Thanks again to Stephen Johnston for the invite and allowing me to speak where legends have tread previously (Stephen has rung up an impressive collection of luminaries of which, humbly I am now one). I enjoy his intellectual curiosity on things and let loose within the Nokia empire, there is no telling what big shiny things he'll produce. Sari, appreciate all the organizing effort. Stefan, thanks for riding shotgun and a great mobile blog by the way.  Matt, I still need to tantalize you with some people-friendly ideas and to the Nokia drinking club, you know you are - i enjoyed your company a lot and thank you for your ability to show a tourist the best of your city.   Kiitos!

Beach Soccer - The Next Big Grassroots Sport

I'm sitting in the international lounge of Pearson International watching The Euro World Cup of Beach Soccer. Never mind the fact that the Ukraine and Switzerland are playing in the semi-finals (do they have beaches in Switzerland), this sport looks pretty damn cool. There is more action, more offence, more sun, better cheerleaders, more freakish bounces, acrobatic scissor kicks...etc.; it's designed for North America. Sadly, yes there are still grown men who wail convulsingly on the pitch after getting sand kicked at them.

When you think about the universal particpation appeal of soccer and the grassroots appeal of beach volleyball, expect to see this at your local sandpit soon.

MySpace Vs. Facebook - Social Network Darwinism and 11 Potential Blind Spots

"Companies which get misled by their own success are sure to be blind sided."Warren G. Bennis

Man, it is so tough in the connected world of technology for the top dog to stay on top. As it relates to social networking, first, it was Classmates in '95, then Six Degrees in '97, Live Journal '99, Friendster in '03, My Space in '04/05 and Facebook in '06/07. History suggests success can be fleeting.

In the current #1 vs. #2 battle being waged right now, beyond scale,  Facebook has been winning most rounds:
- is has much cleaner design and directory
- it has the hegemonic established audience not the subaltern freaks
- it's not owned by Fox or any other conflicted owner
- it has open sourced its operations
- it is centred around real world communities
- as a member, it is very tough to game and fake
- it has much higher frequency of day-to-day interaction amongst its audience
- it makes better use of groups and finding people and content
- it's more search engine friendly
- it's pervasive and much better telling you stuff that's new

If they are able to dodge the bullets of progress and innovation, they'll be positioned to stay on top for awhile. But let's play a game of "what if".  What are the blind spots that Facebook isn't thinking about which may eventually Friendster-ize them...

1) Mobile - there are 2.7 billion global mobile phones users in the world with expected growth and sophistication levels to continue (80% of them will have camera phones by 2010, GPS-enablement) - a cross-platform social network will develop around mobile use likely in Europe, more advanced than Dodgeball,  both from an integration and user friendliness standpoint, creating the first true portable social network

2) Private branded communities - if you want to market on the big social networks, there are some obvious limitations currently on owning the data, selling stuff, promoting stuff in a competitor free environment, integrating key brand functionality  and creating customized relationships with brand audiences. Firms and Brands will come to realize these restrictions and decide to get their own networks that may or may not integrate with the big social networks. With 80,000 communities, Ning has been the flagbearer for outsourcing and making brand community simple to setup for the small organization; the big brands will jump on this idea soon.

3) Companies/media taking control of communities - some of the attractive larger brands will build their own communities laden with exclusive incentives. People may exchange their attention freely in return for getting cool stuff. Imagine what a true iPod, Nike, Starbucks, Nokia or New York Times social network looks like and think about the privledged content, product, experience, gadgetry or news you could get access to.

4) Vertical-ization - My Space was popular with indie bands initially, Facebook with university students - how many other interests out there will be harnessed in building up competing social networks?   Travel, sports, reading, arts, home renovation, foodies, government and politics, environment and shopping all represent interesting verticals that will expand a given social network based on an initial core group getting interested and a network capable of building open source apps and a design consistent with that passion tribe

5) Youth Vacated Segment - now that Facebook has expanded itself well beyond the college crowd and My Space has high-schooled itself, there is a burgeoning gap for another post-secondary focused social network, perhaps one built with the endorsement of the schools - think NCAA-ster - win scholarships, get tickets, become a booster within the network. Who will be the big campus winner 2 years from now when the cool kids have walked away from Facebook as yesterday's news.

6) Internationalization - perhaps you've heard of these waking giants China and India. Each will have a significant impact on where social networks go next. With My Space and Facebook generating 2/3rd of its audience within North America, they are quite narrow in their geographic focus. Expect them to expand elsewhere, others (Orkut, Bebo, Cyworld) to expand here, newcomers to launch as true international sites (my bet would be on networks that can seamlessly integrate across languages best) and lead candidates to emerge as true global networks consistent with their global web cousins in search (Google), ecommerce (eBay) and browsers (Microsoft, Mozilla)

7) Integration - I personally hate having to check what's going on in Facebook, Linked In, email, Typepad and other networks , somebody is going to crack this nut and become a true social portal able to receive updates from  all comers. In addition, whoever will be able to pull off this coup and overcome  non-standardrized coding and privacy issues, will also be able to link seamlessly with email management, Windows, Skype, mobile, banking, travel and graphics and storage technologies

8) Semantic-ism - the coming of web 3.0 - where computers do all the work for us. For a poor typer like myself, speech recognition will be a part of this too. Imagine talking to your social network and asking them to track the top 10 most active people on Facebook, the 50  most influential people into politics, the 100 people most likely to have consistent interests with you and having this spit back immediately and effortlessly.

9) Video - with file compression technologies lowering, video editing becoming simpler to use and more available, the new iPod war being visual media and the big media companies and producers all interested in making ancillary money on their libraries and season-long TV series - a You Tube-like social network that can embed video into their operations seamlessly without overloading their servers will be positioned well for the future. 

10) Social Network E-Commerce - marry eBay with a social network and you get the ultimate shop-and -share network. There may be interesting fusion spinoff effects - think about eBay's trust rating being applied in a social network universe, think about Facebook groups being used in an eBay environment. It is an unstoppable truth- where there is money involved, there is interest.

11) Business Social Networks - at some point Linked In will say - enough with being a steadily rising rolodex of contacts, let's make ourselves a true social network and address the concern heard and felt  by many Facebookers that they would like to have a business and social profile (two very different universes for most people).  For the consultant, independent contractor and free agent, this will become a lifeline to finding the next gig and groups of similar interest or skill my end up congregating together, being rated and working collaboratively on projects within this environment.

Agree? disagree? What's your prediction of what will be happening to social networks in 2009 and what are the blindspots that will eventually  bring the likes of My Space and Facebook down?

Sidney Crosby Word of Mouth Brilliance

In a world of Michael Vick, Pac Man Jones, Todd Bertuzzi, Kobe Bryant, Barry Bonds, Floyd Landis and Chris Benoit, it's refreshing to see hockey bring back the values sports heroes should embody. After seeing this video, I'm even more glad the Penguins are in Pittsburgh and believe we may be seeing the next coming of Gretzky on and off the ice.
- $10,000 spent on Season Tickets
- Countless years of watching the Penguins miss the playoffs
- The chance your team might leave for Hamilton at any moment
- An arena that is the oldest in the entire sport
- A town whose favorite four sports are football, football, football and football
- Sidney Crosby showing up at your door with season tickets....
- Absolutely word of mouth priceless!

5 Minutes for Facebooking - Caveat Facebook Emptor

Ok, so I'm sitting out of Facebook for awhile. Originally, it was because I was getting in some late summer cottaging, now it's because apparently in Facebook's view I have too many friends.

Rest assured friends - you did not say something wrong to me at a party, I have not found some new anti-social religion and changed my name nor am I wringing my hands of the whole world to social networking (on the contrary, this is told me how dependent I had become) and I most assuredly did not de-friend you.

Facebook has sent me to the social network equivalent of the penalty box to think about my sins. I now recognize Facebook's version of social is lower case not UPPER CASE when it comes to social networking. Make friends just don't make too many. I also now understand fully whatever I post on any social network is their content, their photos, their list of connections and their  way of doing business,  but please, have some respect for the energy people invest in your product. 

Here's the piss off factor (are your ready for the whine?), this experience has told me my once great love Facebook - puts on their pants like nearly every other company:
- no official policy on what gets you kicked off (no member rights)
- in this case, no accompanying warning before I got bumped off (very Soprano-like)
- no formal proceeding on how to get your account back (no ombudsmanship)
- some of the more genuine and hardcore users of Facebook get sent off - not a great word of mouth strategy to piss off your best customers (no community building)
- it's now been 36 hours and no answer/sense of when I'll get it back (no service orientation)
- Bebo and LinkedIn aren't nearly as punitive in taking down its members and still maintain a high integrity  (a competitive flaw discovered)
- no official blog forum or human element on what other people have done in similar situations (no forum for debate)
- when i return (I've been told these episodes as first time misconducters last 36 hours to a few days), likely I'll be on pins and needles on what activity i should or should not do in the future - I feel like a member with a bad credit rating (no openness)
- and finally, if you dependent on Facebook , as i had become for certain surrogate forms of  emails and Facebook relationships, continued disablement forces people to put fake profiles to try to get access to time sensitive information or contacts (leading to reduced openness and transparency)

Think I'm alone. I know of at least 4 well-respected social media friendly friends including Guy Kawasaki of all people that have spent time in the box - their only issue - they loved Facebook too much.  So I feel like I'm in distinguished company.  Based on these five posts below, my lot in life, is perhaps better than some.
http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/08/when-facebook-closes-your-account/
http://akumukun.com/?p=142
http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index.php?qid=20070710104523AApAnFU
http://prez.wordpress.com/2006/10/16/facebook-has-a-post-limit/
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/07/disabled-by-fac.html

So imagine organizing a massive group, charity/cause or an event principally through Facebook and then being told to get lost, what a horrible loss of sweat and reputation equity.  I've learned my lesson the hard way...Caveat Facebook Emptor - let the Facebook social networker beware, always have a back up plan and always know, you're not the one in charge when your on someone else's network - no matter how complimentary  or influential you are.

Please 1% Army, Influencers, Trendspotters, Social Superfriends, Go-ites and Merchants of Influence - we're experiencing technical difficulties - hope to resolve soon and be at your service shortly.

And to you Facebook - I still love you but why do you have to be so cruel and more importantly, when are we getting back together?

P.S. I've learned through this odyssey that it would appear you can join a max. of 200 Facebook groups, have 3,600 friends, get three strikes and you're out for good and perform a maximum amount of posts, pokes, emails, stored stuff or friend acquisition before your penaltied