What has been the reaction? People love it. They eat it up. Zappos.com has some of the most avid corporate groupies in the social media space. So I paid close attention when Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos, was recently asked the question, “Other than Twitter, what are you currently doing from a social media perspective?”

His answer sounded disappointed, almost offended. “I don’t like the term ‘social media.’” To Tony, his company’s Twitter account is a reflection of the company culture. He never had to force it. He didn’t consider the ROI and pronounce the program “worthy of investment.” It was just something that made sense. Zappos was the type of company that had a Twitter-type relationship with its customers.

This point received further clarification in his response to the follow up question about company guidelines and policies around Twitter.

“Be real. Use your best judgment.”

Tony doesn’t try to mandate some form of corporate PR quality control, he just lets the employees be themselves. He hires the right people for his company and he lets them be themselves.

How novel.

And how frightening.

But if we’re going to keep moving forward as marketers in the present age, we’re going to have to learn to be comfortable around novel things. And we’re going to have to get used to being frightened.

At least we can take solace in the fact that our most valuable social tool (and Tony agrees with this 100%) is still the good, old-fashioned telephone.

Let’s clarify, I am not Don Draper. But if I was, I would be on my 3^rd bourbon, 6^th cigarette and 100^th good idea. Can performance marketing be cool? Why is it that most performance marketers get pigeon holed into a specific type of strategy? Heck, it’s understood that we will grow your search programs. There is no question we will knock the pants off last month’s comparison shopping revenue totals. Yes, we expect to see growth in your dynamic remessaging program this holiday due to results in customer formation.

This being said, why do our branding/creative counterparts get to partake in a more liberal metric orientation? As a performance marketer, we have the unique ability to quantify and qualify brand experience. Why don’t we get any brand love? There are a few barriers to entry, although slowly but surely… more performance marketers are making the brand case.

1. Direct Response vs. Direct Opportunity
   Hey, we hit the ceiling in brand search. We can’t find any room to grow our CSE program and our email strategy is functioning at the highest open rate in the last few years. Where can we scale the program? Your DR programs feed off solid brand strategy. Look for direct opportunity, which I consider to be anything outside of our comfort zone. In a stagnant economy, partners tend to be on the flexible side. Do we have the ability to back into a CPC? Will they guarantee impression volume based on conversion metrics? Is rev share out of the question?
2. Appropriate Expectations
   “You crashed and burned Mav” – Believe me selling a branding buy like a performance placement doesn’t click. Most advertisers have separate P&L for ecommerce and brand initiative. This typically means that you are also talking to two separate parties, which then means two different marketing speaks. Work with your branding counterparts on stylization. Create a wow factor with supporting performance metrics (i.e. reach and frequency + realistic demand, latency estimates, conversion results and interaction to revenue goals). Make sure that your goals are quantifiably “liberal”.
3. Management Comfort
   We are crushing their numbers. Why throw a wrench in what we know best? These strategies will not take the place of your foundation. Go ahead and keep Google’s lights on, but also think about incremental opportunity. What branding placements have intrigued you? What type of metric do these partners focus on during RFP? What branding worked in the past and what type of metrics where reported? How can you apply the same metrics plus your standard performance outlook (i.e. conversion, AOV, demand and revenue per impression)?
4. Piece of the Pie
   Marketers, particularly agencies, love to share budget. Psych! This is hard point to grasp, but performance and branding agency cross-over can be efficient. Learn from each other. Consolidated strategy tends to optimize consumer interaction, thus increasing the likelihood of program success. In the end, it helps to scale business for the client and their partners.

Don Draper, I dedicate the above to you. Let me know if you have any questions.

On Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 12:01am EST, Facebook launched custom usernames and vanity URLs. That means that you could log into Facebook, head over here and grab a username, which would in turn give your account a custom URL. For example, maybe your account URL is http://www.facebook.com/people/Bob-Smith/1795806534. That URL is a little tough to remember. And if you are a person who likes to give out or market your profile URL, that URL is downright inconvenient. That is why Facebook launched its custom username program. If Bob Smith goes to facebook.com/username, he can choose a much more concise URL, such as facebook.com/bobsmith or facebook.com/bsmith.

On June 13th, social mediaphiles worldwide waited patiently for the exact moment the Facebook username program launched. Mashable reported that Facebook users created 200,000 custom usernames in the first 3 minutes of the program. It’s on a first come, first serve basis, so you’ve got to act fast. Most common names are already gone. Much like the land rush for dot com domains, this was very much a land rush for usernames. But there is also another side to this story, and it’s all about branding.

You may not know this, but Facebook Profiles and Facebook Pages are very different. People tend to have Profiles. Brands tend to have Pages. Profiles have friends. Pages have fans. If your brand (Brand X) has a Facebook Page, it makes perfect sense to claim the URL facebook.com/brandx. That URL is very easy to market. It’s great for branding, paid search ads, SEO, etc… It sounds glorious, doesn’t it? But do not get too excited yet.

It turns out that Facebook set up eligibility requirements for custom usernames for Facebook Pages. Initially, the requirements were:

• Page must have been active as of June 9, 2009 at 3:00pm EST
• Page must have had 1,000 fans as of May 31, 2009

These requirements were set up to deter would-be username squatters. And it worked pretty well, too. However, I did see a ton of brands scrambling to reach the 1,000 fans mark. On a side note, I saw a couple of posts on Craiglist, asking if any savvy social marketer out there could drive 1,000 targeted fans for a Facebook Page. Gotta love Craigslist, right? Furthermore, if you met those 2 requirements, your username had to be at least 5 characters, and you could not sign up for generic keywords such as pizza, flowers or magazines. Again, this was a way to deter username squatters.

Here’s the part where you can get excited. On June 28th, Facebook reduced the requirements for custom usernames for Facebook Pages. As of last Sunday, the new requirements are:

• Page could have been created anytime
• Page must have at least 100 fans

100 fans? That’s very doable. Even if you are a small brand, you can manage this. Simply go to the Facebook sign up page and choose the type of Page you want to create. Then invite your employees, colleagues, friends and family members to be fans of your brand’s Facebook Page. Once you get to 100 fans, go here and choose your custom username.Facebook just made it very easy to promote your brand. Now go do it!

In other words, we Texans love our bluebonnets. Tell a Texas expat that the bluebonnets are out and you’re likely to get:

1. Tears
2. Smiles
3. Stories about home, Shiner Bock and hot weather
4. All the above

And then, just like that, they’re gone. Hot weather settles in for the next six months and the Texas bluebonnets are the first to go. The next few months are spent pining for them until the fall, when we can be mesmerized by high school football instead. With such a short window for the bluebonnets, you really have to make the most of them.

Unfortunately, times are tougher this bluebonnet season, even though Texas seems to be weathering them better than a lot of other places. It’s a great reminder, however, of the opportunities that lie ahead of us, even in the face of a recession. Sure, customers are harder to find these days and maintaining marketing budgets is a tough sell – let alone increasing them. Everyone’s feeling the pinch right now.

That includes your competitors.

You know, the local guys who had just a little bit of a leg up on you before this? The huge national chains that seem to have you beat on size of selection and price point? They’re all having to cut their budgets, too. That means that there are going to be fewer voices fighting for the attention of your potential customers. There’s a vacuum that can be filled by anyone who has the courage to step up and keep their profile high during this time.

While it’s tougher to get shoppers to buy than before, the bar for being able to reach customers and to put your brand in front of new faces is lower than ever. Finding ways to make the most of your branding opportunities and ways to reach new customers through targeted and low-cost methods online – especially through SEO and paid search programs – will not only help you to find new customers to take the place of those that aren’t buying right now, but will help establish your brand in the minds of consumers at a time when everyone else is pulling back their efforts to do so.

Like bluebonnet season, however, the window is short. By some estimates, the US will be pulling back into positive territory as early as later this year, at which point everyone’s advertising budgets will start to rise again and it’ll be just as difficult to get your unique message heard across the din. Optimizing your current campaigns and looking for ways to drive new, free or cheap traffic via natural search, social networking and feeds or even stepping out into broader branding campaigns are ways to find new revenue now and plant the seeds for further revenue down the road.

Bluebonnet season 2009 is definitely in the sunset of its days, so in Texas we’re all looking for ways to squeeze in a few more memories while the opportunity is there – how about you?

The frustration felt when you see a client throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at short-lived, easily forgotten campaigns while allowing their brand positioning in something as basic as paid search to be ignored is maddening. You go home after days like that and just beat your head into a wall. Then you wake up and go at it again.

That is until now.

Because now, in the ad world, while the news is bleak all around, the light at the tunnel is finally shining in our direction. It sort of feels like you’ve been in a one sided relationship and all the sudden the other one decides you’re the partner of his/her dreams. You’re expected to just accept this, but the history lingers in the back of your mind. See, I completely understand the decision process here – now we make sense to CMOs. We didn’t make a lot of sense when we asked you about branding or share of voice but dollars on spreadsheets? That feels real now. That feels painfully real.

I’m not ungrateful – Quite the opposite. It’s our moment to shine, but a couple of things stick out at me. First and foremost – we want your programs to not only work, but be wildly successful. I’ve gotta tell you, though, you sure picked a tough time. You can’t steal from Peter to pay Paul. People are scared, conservative and downright unsure, but that doesn’t mean they don’t watch TV or flip through the glossies or give the billboard 10 seconds of a loving gaze. I fear brands will dial down spend in one media channel hoping to make it back in the one that they’re currently fixated on. But then that’s our job and I suppose it always has been: to be honest and set expectations. Sure, I think we can do more, but all of the channels working together to support one another? It’s beginning to sound like science fiction to me.