And it’s not because I’m an Apple fan. Sure, I have a lot of iPods, iPhones, an iPad, some old desktops and quite a few laptops laying around.  Hell, if I dig deep enough in the office I’m sure I’ll find a Newton in there somewhere. No…this isn’t about products. I did my senior thesis in business school on Apple. It was around the time Steve was first booted out and John Sculley had just come over from Pepsi. I remember railing on the decision to fire Steve as a shortsighted move. I remember defending my points to the college board and dean, and explaining why “bad behavior” was visionary, and how operators and entrepreneurs are two different creatures.

And that is why I’m truly sad tonight; why I feel the world has gotten a little smaller. There are only a handful of people in this world that are unafraid of the status quo. There are but a scant few people that have the strength to stand up to a culture that increasingly continues to see only short-term. That fights and pushes those that continually fear change and all the good that comes of moving the human race forward. I applaud and look up to people like that. I emulate them and have tasted a bit of the backlash that comes from it. It’s a hard road, but it’s the right road. Without it, we cease to evolve. It takes big people like Steve Jobs to keep things moving. It takes people of that conviction to stand up to the short-sighted boards that defend the status quo with all the strength their fear can muster.

Steve was famous for saying “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” But I think that the Wayne Gretzky quote is more apropos: “I skate to where the puck will be.  Not to where it was.”  Steve Jobs was one of the few brave enough to skate away from the pack and move to where the “puck” was going to be.

And even though these words were penned by the Los Angeles office of TBWA/Chiat/Day, I feel there is no better send off for Steve Jobs:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Thank you for being crazy. Thank you for changing the world. Thank you for changing my world. There is one less round peg in the world today, and no matter what anybody says, I feel that that hole will never be filled.

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs. I already miss you.

The interesting thing is that social media is changing the search marketing industry more so than anything in the past 13 or 14 years.  Not only do social media sites, blogs, comments and other social tools effect search rankings (and therefore how companies market through search), but Facebook and Twitter have their own search engines to surface content on their platforms.  While Twitter’s may be somewhat rudimentary and giving rise to the popular #hastag, Facebook has grown a little more sophisticated as evidenced by their recent presentation on EdgeRank.

Now, this is completely expected.  With so much conversation going on in Facebook, it’s getting hard to hear anything.  Imagine if your newsfeed had everything from everyone you follow (from important stuff to lost sheep in Farmville).  You couldn’t keep up.  So Facebook put an algorithm in place to help decide for you.  This blog post isn’t to explain what an object or edge is, or how affinity, weight or time decay do to the edge score.  For now, let’s just go off of the preface that you need to have great content that people interact with recently to show up.

If it isn’t heated already, this should super-heat the space for “news feed optimization” or just plain “social media optimization.”  And it’s like the beginning days of search marketing in the search engines all over again.  We just have a few new engines (and algorithms) to pay attention to now.

And it matters.  Businesses are utilizing social media more and more, and being “found” is crucial.  And, like traditional search engines, the basis is understanding the “rules of the game” (the algorithm), but more importantly, coming up with great content.  Now, every bit of great content still needs a boost to be seen, for sure.  Smartwater didn’t just put Jennifer Aniston on YouTube and figure it would go viral.  They “seeded” it.  It’s a great piece.  And with some proper PR, social media support, and seeding with influencers, it has over 6 million views in 3 days.  Well done.

EdgeRank is just the beginning.  The traditional search portals are looking at integrating what they can from the social sites, and the sites themselves will continually work on their algorithms.  Social media “optimization” is going to be the thing that the agencies all begin to start touting.

And that’s a good thing.

PR and social media disasters are abound these days as companies and agencies continue to relegate their actives to young, inexperienced team members figuring they “know social” more due to their age.  Social media is quickly becoming an art AND a science.  And that should help shake out some of the so-called “social media experts” in the field.  Anyone can create a Facebook page or post on Twitter (or, or, or)…but you start to separate talent when you need engagement and results from your social media activities.  Now, you need to account for the algorithm along with creating content that engages, and figuring out a plan to make sure that great content is seen.

It’s not easy anymore.  And the harder it gets, the better the agencies will have to become.  That’s good for businesses as there will be fewer (but more qualified) candidates in the industry.  Although, it will be interesting when the question moves from “what’s your twitter strategy” to “what’s your EdgeRank strategy?”  At least the second is a pertinent and real question.  I don’t think many of our competitors would have a good answer to the second.

However, if you would like to know ours, or want us to put one together for you….

And in the agency world, we all will fall on the easy answer: our people.  We hire better, smarter people and our combined experience is better than our competitors’ people.  There is a large amount of truth to that–that a good team of professionals is a strong competitive advantage.  Certainly, Elasticity wouldn’t be able to compete if we had a whole team of non-creative, inexperienced people often times referred to as “not the sharpest crayon in the box.”

But that can only go so far.  From flawed processes, to leaders who squash creative ingenuity, internal competition between practice groups to non-motivated employees, there is only so many times you can rely on “we have smarter people.”  But also, what if we all have smart people?  Right now, there is a glut of fantastic talent, and many agencies have taken advantage of that to bolster their teams.  So what happens if we all have smart, talented, experienced people?

The second area that an agency will go to in answering that question is “practice groups,” or “areas of expertise.”  For example, we at Elasticity specialize in PR, Word of Mouth, Digital Marketing/Social Media, and Search Marketing.  Others specialize in graphic design, video, government relations, internal communications, mobile, email, and so forth.  And we all overlap.  But that’s not the biggest issue.

Increasingly, areas of expertise are being commoditized such that just having the skill set is not a competitive advantage anymore.  And commoditized “products” are no longer a “value-add” to the client justifying increased budget.  In fact, taken individually, the marketplace has driven down the price (and often times quality) of each individual skillet or product.

Take our business for instance.  PR in and of itself has been driven down to keyword rich automated press releases sent out on the web for search results.  Social media is a dime a dozen often handled by interns, Facebook apps can be licensed for less than $50.  Web sites are skinned WordPress sites done for a fraction of what large agencies used to price them at, and so forth.

So when it came time to answer “what makes you better” for Elasticity, it was a great opportunity to not fall into the same pattern of other agencies and answer “smarter, more experienced people integrating the right digital skill sets to solve your company’s biggest issues and deliver results.”  (or some similar boilerplate regurgitation like that)

No, Elasticity is different, Elasticity is better because we’ve figured out the right combination of skill sets, and how and when to mix them to deliver the results.  The basic recipe is our triangulation model.  But even then, given the same ingredients (the people) and the same recipe (the areas of expertise), some chefs just make better tasting food.  That’s us.

Let me put it another way.  Remember the Coke/Mentos video?  Dropping a Mentos into the Coke created a surge of carbonated energy that allowed Weepy Bird to do those cool cola fountains.  On their own, Mentos are great candy, and Coke is a great drink.  Both are commoditized food groups (candy and cola).  But put together in a way no one else has done, it created something new that had tremendous energy and explosion.  That’s us, too.

We take commoditized skill sets and put them together in a way no one else has to take our client initiatives from a crisp, carbonated beverage to a fountain of energy exploding to create something wonderful, something with viral potential, something that people will want to talk about.

Maybe it’s the new way we approach PR, our storytelling ability, quirky content ideas, a more advanced way to do search beyond keyword tracking, social media that is actually social and engaging, or something else.  We’re not telling (at least not here).  Call it our special sauce.

Or just call it Elasticity.

Let me run through a few of them.

The Pros:

Creative agencies are fun, dynamic places.  There is a lot of energy and “play time” that goes into creative brainstorming, and you are never bored because there is always something new to do, always some new challenge to solve for your diverse clientele.  There is also the perception of the fun of taking clients out on an expense account, alcohol, and too much “play time” for the sake of creativity.

The Cons:

It’s a pressure-cooker.  Deadlines are tight, and you are often asked to solve the impossible.  Inside the agency, professionals are hyper-competitive with each other (both with other agencies and within the same agency itself).  And clients are often-times over-demanding.  You never have down time because there is always a new task to be done for someone, somewhere.  It’s like dog years, 1 year in an agency is like 7 years in a “regular” job.  And that creates high turn-over, anxiety, and sometimes problems at home (long hours, trips, missed family events, etc.).

But the one thing you hear from colleagues consistently is that there is a tremendous lack of respect in all of the above, and that it is getting worse.  Blame it on the economy, blame it on a society that doesn’t value manners as it once did, or blame it on the two party political system.  But the stories you hear from how agencies treat their own people, to the abuses you hear from clients’ demands, to the downright childish behavior in the boardroom, you can’t help but believe the trend:

People are increasingly treating each other with a complete lack of respect for the individual–as a professional, and often times as a fellow human being.

But I titled this blog post “Thank You, Clients” so let me explain.

Elasticity as been through several phases in its short history.  From conceiving the company, to looking for investment, working with a parent company, buying itself back and working autonomously as a stand alone unit.  But over the course of over 2 years, our success has come completely from our clients.  Now, I know this time of year (well, the end of last year) is when everyone thanks their clients.  “Thank you for sending us business that helps us pay the bills” is the typical sentiment.  But I want to go further because we have been extremely lucky these past few years:

Thank you for trusting in a new agency, and most of all, thank you for the respect you give us as professionals in the industry and as people.  The relationships we’ve built with you buck the trend so prevalent in our industry and makes the work we do much more meaningful.  And that extends past “keeping the lights on” at the agency.  It extends to our personal and home lives, and allows us to focus on the “pros” of working at an agency and not have to worry about the “cons” as much.  What I value the most is not the checks as much as the professional fulfillment of working in a partnership where there is mutual respect.

So thank you, JIm, Jeff, Luci, Laura, Jennifer, Kathy, Kate, Carrie, Andrew, John, Chris, Sarah, Nick, Pat, John, Sloan, Amy, Adam, Ken, Jenn, Scott, Branden, Joylynn, Nate, Todd, Maria, Philip, Matina, John, Brian, David, Andrew, Joe, Erika and the many others we work with every day.  You’ve helped us differentiate ourselves in one more way: that there can be respect and decorum in this industry.  We appreciate that rare gift.

Thank you.

But do we still get the question of “should I do a Groupon for my company?”  And with each blog post, news article, or video of the owner’s experience and announcement of another multi-billion dollar offer — it get’s more confusing.

So let’s just make it simple: Yes, if you can afford the worst case scenario, you should do a Groupon (or similar group-buying, discount-oriented deal).

But here’s the caveat:  You’d better be prepared for a lot more work after the Groupons have all come in to make it a worthwhile endeavor.  Actually, on second thought, you’d better be prepared for a lot more work while the Groupons are coming in.

And here’s why in a nutshell:  Groupon’s customers are theirs….not yours.  You have to win them over to you.  And the Groupon itself is not the way to do it.

Let’s step back for a moment.  We may need a quick recap of the pros and cons of Groupon before going into shopper psychology.  And probably, I should explain what I mean by “if you can afford the worst case scenario.”

Groupon can bring an onslaught of people into your business that has never been there before.  It can get you noticed and exposure to a number of people you can’t reach on your own, or even with a competitor’s list.  It’s big, it has a cult following and it works.

We can even justify some of the negatives.  Groupons cheapen brands.  Maybe.  But you can’t say that a brand is forever cheapened if they offer a mass deep discount.  That is up to the brand experience itself — and how and how many times it uses Groupon.

I don’t think anyone would think less of Apple (or insert your favorite brand here) if they did a 50% off Groupon.  Now… if they did one every other week, we may start to think they are overpriced and continue to wait for the next one.  But a one time shot in the arm isn’t going to cheapen the brand.

Groupon has trouble communicating between their sales team and their operations team.  Probably.  But it’s up to you to know your break-even point, the deal, the merchandise and the stipulations you want to offer.  If you do a smart deal, you can work through the typical left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.  That happens anywhere.

And what do I mean by “if you can afford the worst case scenario?”  Well, a lot of people that use Groupon think that one or both of the following will happen: (a) people will come into my business and spend more than the amount of the face value of the Groupon; (b) people will see what a great business I have here and become a repeat customer, gaining in the long-run.

The statistics tell us otherwise, 25 percent and 19 percent respectively (as of November 2010).  But what you did get was great advertising.  Not only great exposure, but traffic to your store.  Very few other forms of advertising bring feet through your door.  Not print, radio, TV, Google, or even a lot of new-fangled social media “channels.”  So the worst-case scenario is an advertising buy.

Can you afford it at the level you negotiated with Groupon?  Can you afford it if only 25 percent buy more than face value and only 19% return?  If so… do it.  I don’t know of a better way to get people to come check you out.

But here is the catch.  Like any form of advertising, you can’t sit back and count the orders.  You have to work it.  And this goes back to the customers being Groupon’s and not yours.

The people that redeem a Groupon don’t know you.  They know the deal.  They are loyal to Groupon and follow the deals from one to the next.  Always beholden to the 50% off (or greater deal).  They don’t care about you, your company or your brand.  They just want the deep discount.  And most of them will then move on after they’ve gotten what they want out of you never to return.

But with some work, you can stop that.  You can win some of the crowd over.  If the service is fantastic, if the other products around the deal are irresistible, if you can entice them to come back with another exclusive deal or reward, you’ve got a chance to get some of them back.  You have to really work to get them to fall harder for you than for the deal.  It make take more discounting, and some tricks, but if you can get the ball rolling, you have a shot of moving that 19 percent up to 25-35 percent return rate.  And if that happens, then you’ve made a really smart marketing and promotions deal with Groupon.

And if I could get one-third of everyone that drove by my billboard to not only come into my store, but then become a repeat and loyal customer… well, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post….

Would it cheapen the brand if our agency did a Groupon?

We are one of the “small businesses” that have the overwhelming charge of providing all the jobs that are going to bring this economy out of neutral.  A big responsibility to say the least.  And so some extent, I think that we are doing our part.  We provide salary and benefits to a core group of employees (categorized by LinkedIn as 1-10 employees), but also provide work and money to a cadre of freelancers, vendors, and other agencies that help us in our client deliverables.  Two of our freelancers were recently laid off from larger agencies and we’ve given them the platform to start their own companies.

And we’re proud of that.  We doubled our size from 2009 to 2010 and were able to purchase ourselves from our parent company to own ourselves outright based on our own client work in under 2 years.

But enough of the braggadocio.  Here’s the point:

Since we’ve spun off and created our small agency, we’ve received several things from the politicians looking for us to help pull this economy out of the ditch.  We’ve received our tax vouchers to send in with our payments, we’ve received account IDs for workers compensation, we got letters from the local tax authority explaining the penalties of not paying them their money in a timely manner.  Money generated from our payroll nonetheless.  We have plenty of schedules, coupons, instructions, and 5 folders worth of information on how to pay our money.

But you know what we don’t have?  Help.

We don’t have a letter from the city mayor’s office thanking us for setting up shop in downtown Saint Louis vs. Saint Louis county (where there isn’t a local tax).  We don’t have anything from the State of Missouri asking if there is any way they can help us become a successful (tax-paying) business in the State of Missouri.  (And believe me, there have been plenty of people asking why we are in the Midwest and asking that we move).  No state senator or congressman/woman has offered their assistance in any way.  Or even acknowledged our existence.

We haven’t even gotten any recognition from local organizations whose job is to attract companies to the region and create jobs.  We’re helping them do that job for them by quietly being successful on our own merits.

Well, our own merits and the help of other small businesses.  You see, everything we’ve gained, any help we’ve received, and the talent pool we draw from to help us with our business has all been other small businesses.  Everything around us from the printing shop for business cards, to the places we eat lunch, to the freelancers we use in client work are all small businesses out to help each other.  Our landlord, our CPA, even our bank is a small, local bank who was willing to loan us money when the national banks drug the process out.

So what’s the point of all this?  It’s simply to say this: If you are going to make speeches about how small business is the economic engine and driver of jobs to get this economy going, then you need to do more than state the obvious.  Don’t just send tax deadlines and ignore the part where we need to be successful to make those tax payments.  On a national level, this may be more policy-related, but on a local level, there is so much improvement that is needed and can happen.  Somebody just needs to actually pay attention and genuinely be appreciative of what small businesses do for the region.  Don’t just pay them lip service.

It comes down to the core of what an agency is.  There are a lot of cogs that make an agency work, and a lot of ways that agencies can become great.  Most companies will say it is their people.  You may also hear about processes, tools, client lists, and otherwise.  But really, it comes down to ideas.

If you are in the industry, you’ve most likely been part of a few “brainstorms” in your day.  These meetings are generally where ideas are created — and killed.  And if they don’t die there (there are no bad ideas in a brainstorm), they have two more death traps to get past: the account manager and the client themselves.

All too often, account managers are to blame.  They get too comfortable with what they believe the client wants, and… more likely, too comfortable with the money the account brings into the agency and they get complacent.  They are afraid to present an edgy idea.  Or they are afraid to stand up for an idea and really sell it into a client that may show hesitancy at first to a new idea.

We’ve always stood behind the fact that ideas are much more than what is being drummed out of most agencies today.  We’ve always said that a list of tactics is not a strategy.  Proposing tool checklists are not ideas.  But we realize that the agency may not be completely at fault for not creating truly compelling ideas.  We realize that there are a lot of young, talented, and creative folks that are not getting their ideas to the table.

We know that clients want to hear those ideas.  We know that you can stand behind a good idea and not jeopardize your business, but rather, gain respect with your client.  Even if they don’t buy that idea.

So for the creative talent that watches good ideas die every day, for the clients that miss out on truly ground breaking campaigns due to complacency, and for the ideas themselves, we’ve pledged to create, nurture, and not abandon great ideas.

Long live the great idea.

If nothing else, we’ve (mostly) all heard about the media darling that is the Old Spice Guy.  And we’ve heard countless debate on the effectiveness of this campaign.  There are two camps and they bolster themselves with plenty of data.

One of the first in the camp of “it didn’t work” was MaggieMcGary1 on socialmedia today. Citing an article in BNET, she states that sales were down.  ”Shocking.”  The BNET article actually has corrected itself recently, but they stated:

“But sales of the featured product—Red Zone After Hours Body Wash—aren’t necessarily tracking with that consumer appeal: In the 52 weeks ended June 13, sales of the brand have dropped 7 percent according to SymphonyIRI. (That amount excludes those rung up at Walmart.) P&G execs were not available to comment.”

This was quickly followed up by BL Ochman: “The bottom line: there is no such thing as a social media strategy. There is business strategy incorporating social media. But if that strategy doesn’t include sales, it’s nothing more than a tactic. Tactics don’t move markets.”

On the other side of the debate is PR Week who are reporting:

“The brand’s ad agency Wieden + Kennedy developed and coordinated 186 customized video responses that contributed to a 107% increase in Old Spice Body Wash sales over the last month, according to Nielsen data from Mike Norton, director of external relations for male grooming at P&G.”

So which is it?

Media Bistro asks us to wait and see.

But the interesting thing is to actually look at the numbers.  The “sales slump” was a 52 week number ended June 13,  PRIOR to the social media blitz.  The 107% figure is a monthly figure for the previous 30 days.  (measured by Symphony IRI in June).  This would include early data AFTER the recent blitz.

So we can assume it “worked,” right?  Well, Ad Age also points out that the campaign was bolstered with a high value coupon.  It also notes that the other P&G body wash in the category, Gillette, rose 277% in the same space in the same time.  And they didn’t have Mr. Mustafa pitching them.  (Granted, they are a smaller player in the space).

Back to Media Bistro, we will have to wait and see.

If … we are defining “worked” by sales register data. And that is the rub here.  Is it all about immediate sales data?  Kevin Green of Digital Influence Group said:

“Doesn’t the increase in connected consumers create significant opportunity to market products? Don’t get me wrong… I agree that more direct integration could have been included, but the value of the connection has to be worth a significant amount and the effort. Does engagement always have to include conversion? I would argue that it does not.”

And here is how I tie it back to Elasticity and a few opinions from our side of the debate.  First, let’s go back to the numbers.  Actually, let’s go to a comment on an NPR story they did on the Old Spice campaign.  A follow up to a popular story read that not everyone is comfortable and liking the “Old Spice Guy.”  One listener complained that Old Spice was the “scent of gentlemen,” and represented countless men for generations prior to ours that were true gentlemen.

Perhaps that is why the brand was on a slide (back to the 7% decline).  Today’s consumers thought of the brand as their grandpa’s brand.  One they didn’t want.  So to hold steady or even gain in a period is a good business outcome.  Even better, to appeal to a broader audience and begin to walk away from that perception is even better.  The business objectives may never be public, but they seem apparent.

When asked by our clients about ROI, we always ask what they are trying to achieve.  It may not always be about conversions.  It may be reputation, it may be perception, it may be search results, or numerous others.  Not all of which are measured by sales.  That said, they are measurable and we can prove results on any objective with true data, relevant and timely.

Second, let’s look at Triangulation. The original Old Spice commercial was slapped up to YouTube after it appeared and garnered a modest amount of hits (a few million I think).  After a traditional media blitz (NPR, Good Morning America, etc.) and social media engagement that linked the 3 pillars of the model, views went over 90 million.  True proof in action.

And finally, to sales.  There is a link from social media to conversion.  It often times appears in overlapping data points to draw the connection.  A client of Elasticity often employs several tactics to push sales campaigns and drives to an online channel.  When taking the social media component out of the mix, there is a trend line that can be drawn that shows a boost in traffic and conversions from the norm.  But when you layer in the social media components of the program in a week later, the trend lines spike and map back to spikes in social media activity.  This has played out multiple times in their conversion charts as well as those of other clients.

So at the end of this lengthy analysis, did the Old Spice Guy work?

I would argue that it, indeed, has.

1. It reached new audiences
2. It brought awareness to a brand that was beginning to slip into obscurity
3. It stopped and began to reverse a negative sales slide
4. It has shown signs (along with coupons) of turning sales into a profitable trend
5. It has shown the value of the oft-misunderstood social media “channel” (for those that think it a channel)
6. And it showed that slapping a video on YouTube won’t cut it.  You need the additional “topspin” of a well-thought out campaign with multiple parts that feed on each other.  It’s Triangulation and the highest visible example of its power yet.