As a marketer and a company, you sometimes have to decide that the data won’t guide you. Today, it’s both easier and harder to take a creative leap.

Testing an idea — creating an ad, buying some targeted placements, measuring the results — is relatively easy. It’s never been easier to produce amazing, compelling stories. It’s easy to test them in a controlled metro area.

However, when you make a really big creative leap, it IS harder than ever to keep them quiet. Especially if you’re a big brand. Social media, YouTube, email, whatever. We’re connected like never before. The new NIKE World Cup video got a few hundred thousand hits on YouTube before NIKE launched any other support for it. People found it and shared it.

There are Two Types of People in the World: Makers and Managers

There are two types of people in your office, Makers and Managers. And scheduling a meeting with Maker can kill that person’s effectiveness for the day, according to Paul Graham.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

Makers Need Uninterrupted Time

Makers do the work — at Pop Art, our Makers are designers, developers, programmers, writers, designers and media planners. These people create the work that ends up online. Here’s how Graham describes the conundrum Makers face.

They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

Managers, however, live and die in increments of an hour. Seeking information, checking in, status updates, reaching consensus, making a decision, delegating are all reasons for managers to call a meeting. Boom!

Interruptions are Relative

If a meeting is advancing the project, it must be a net positive, right? No. Interruptions are relative. An older article on the cost of workplace interruptions (yes, I’m now calling your status update meeting an interruption) qualifies them as such:

• when I interrupt someone (a “good” interruption)
• when someone interrupts me (a “bad” interruption)

Take a look at this list of Top 10 office interruptions: which would be good and which would be bad? When is an interruption really a collaboration?

But Seriously, Your Meetings Are Killing My Productivity

Are the Makers and Creators being overly sensitive? I say no. A News.com article cites “In Praise of Slowness,” saying:

The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.

An even more alarming article from (my favorite) journalist Clive Thompson in The New York Times Magazine cited a UC Irvine study that puts interruptions in stark terms:

Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task.

OMG: I’m Only Working Two Hours a Day?!?

Leon Ho over at Life Hack did the math on an 8-hour work day:

(8 * 60 / (11+25) * 11)

There are only roughly 2 hours on quality project time. Think about this figure verse [sic] the rest of 6 hours.

And a 2005 study from Basex titled “The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity,” puts the cost at more than half a trillion dollars a year.

Unnecessary interruptions consume about 28 percent of the knowledge worker’s day, which translates to 28 billion lost hours to companies in the United States alone. At an average cost per hour of $21 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 2005), that costs U.S. companies $588 billion per annum.

Whoa.

As an Interactive Pro, How Do You Deal with Interruptions?

Makers in an interactive setting face additional pressures — the expectation to participate in interruptive social media like Twitter, instant messaging, Facebook, Yammer, etc.

(Just as I wrote that, for some reason I felt compelled to check Twitter. Weird.)

That pressure requires creative solutions. Microsoft Labs created Scalable Fabric to minimize open windows. Apple created Spaces. A search for the “inbox zero” mantra of “Do it, Delegate it, Delete It” turned up about 1.3 million results.

Beating Interruptions in the Office

Productivity is a huge business in the U.S., and there’s a reason. Productive employees get noticed, get promoted, and retire early to beautiful privately owned islands. I can’t say I’m the master of productivity, but here’s a few tips I’ve been using lately with good success.

1. Turn off IM. This has been a tough one for me, as I thoroughly enjoy chatting about work (and other stuff).
2. Block out work time. If I have to do some serious writing, I put it into my calendar. (I also put my gym time in there.)
3. Go away. People swing by my desk all the time with questions, concerns, ideas, or just to talk. I can minimize these distractions by leaving.
4. Say no. So let’s say I’m working at my desk and have found a groove. Someone drops by and asks, “can I interrupt you?” I’m trying now to say “in an hour?”

My role here is a hybrid manager/maker. Graham’s suggestion of “office hours” seems to me an excellent idea to avoid office interruption, though I have no idea how to make it happen short of blocking out all my time except a few hours a day.

What about you? What are your biggest distractions and interruptions? How do you deal with them?

By doing minimal targeting — regions, for example. Or another variable not expected to influence results — then you could compare the percentage of impressions to the percentage of clicks to tell how varying demographics respond to your messages and offers.

In other words, instead of paying an ad testing company to poll customers, you can use Facebook to extend your campaigns for similar actionable data and yet more impressions. Ad testing can extend your campaign, rather than merely being an added cost.

It’s not the perfect solution. The biggest problem is that you’re only looking at the Facebook population, which biases your data. But since Facebook has grown so insanely fast and is becoming such a ubiquitous presence, I think it’s a decent representative sample.

Visit iStrategyLabs.com for more info on Facebook demographics

This cracks me up to no end.

Hard to believe I’ve been blogging and working at Pop Art for more than two-and-a-half years now. In that time, I’ve tried to write posts that other writers will find useful, and maybe even demonstrate that we know what we’re doing.

Lately, my blogging has fallen off since I’ve taken on our media planning and buying department. But I thought it’d be a good time to look back.

1. The fake layout above comes from one of the funniest jokes ever made at Pop Art. Well, it was funny to me, anyway.
2. At some early point at Pop Art, we moved a lot of the SEO responsibility over to editorial. Here’s why.
3. What good will those brand workshops do if your writing doesn’t reflect it?
4. Viral ideas need support to get them to pandemic mode and beyond the sniffles. One way to do that is to study how wildfires grow.
5. I actually had a client say that they wanted to market their small travel agency to everyone. Bad idea. But here’s a good idea: figure out different elements of your company and let them appeal to different people. Targeting online is a great way to do that.
6. In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a recession on. Here’s what I’ve learned about managing people and balancing work demands during lean times.
7. When we set out to re-do the Pop Art site, one concept we considered bringing forward was the people. I did some quick and dirty research into our team. Very interesting.
8. How do you measure creative? Perceived ad spending.
9. Call it the Tiger Effect; it says in the face of a dominant force, people play for second place.
10. When I look back on hiring my most recent intern, Kevin, I’ll remember the experience not so much for finding him, but for having to say “no” to three other insanely qualified people. One continues to work for Babywit.com, and we correspond every so often about interactive marketing. Here’s an interesting conversation about e-commerce and email.
11. Social media and transparency. Duh.
12. Last, but the first blog post I wrote at Pop Art: The nine-point copywriting checklist.

My Two Favorite Slides from WebVisions

1. First day, @bikehugger’s slide about how to be interesting online: “Do Epic Shit.”
2. Each one of @erictpeterson’s slides had his twitter handle and the (wrong) hash tag in the footer. Super convenient.

I’ll keep reading the #wv09 hashtag comments and see what other interesting tidbits I can pull out. I know @texagonian (Kevin Platt) had some good comments and nuggets, as well as at least one laugh-out-loud putdown. As you might expect if you know him.

Marketing clients will respond well to the idea that customer service doubles as PR to a degree — clients broadcast each customer service conversation.

The difficulty for many clients is overcoming the fear that something they say will be taken out of context. But rather, using social media for customer service actually provides more context. By using social media, a company will have so many examples of great service that the dreaded slip-up matters less.

Integrating Twitter Into Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Using social media for customer service is great in theory. But how do we put it into practice?

I did a little digging, and found this sweet little hack to hook up a Twitter account with a customer’s account in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It seems like a no-brainer to integrate that.

The hack doesn’t let you tweet back to them, and you have to manually search for things like your company or product name.

To digitally create your company’s “ambient awareness” of your customers’ needs, your customer service team should create and update searches. That list would create alerts for customer service reps to follow up on. Pretty cool.

P.S. I swear that I’ll start writing about writing again soon. I do enjoy researching these little diversions…

Visit Qwest at http://socialmedia.qwest.com

Start Social Media Small, and Learn from It

For a large company like Qwest, starting with a small dedicated group with a motto of “Be Smart” will allow them to find what works and what doesn’t.

For example, what’s the best way to transfer a problem to the right person at Qwest? Perhaps when the social media team is small, transferring a customer to another department or to the normal customer service group makes sense. But once everyone in customer service has social media access, transfers should follow the normal problem resolution processes.

Use Your Social Media Team to Teach and Build

Starting small will also allow the social media team at Qwest to help develop the processes and technologies needed to integrate this technology to the Qwest CRM systems (the holy grail of customer service and social media).

The team will also be able to train other customer service reps in the ins-and-outs of Twitter as a medium (in the same way that the phone has ins-and-outs, and email has ins-and-outs, etc).

Social Media is Broadcast Customer Service

In a normal customer service situation, typically your conversation is relatively private (it’s recorded, but no one’s really going to use it unless things go COMPLETELY WRONG). But with social media, every customer interaction is out there in the open. You’re broadcasting your customer service.

Transparency good. Whining bad.

Thus, if I could make one suggestion to Qwest: tweets that say, “10 minutes until we go home for the night!” make a bad impression. Transparency is great. Whining is not.

Have you seen other examples? Is your company considering it? What questions or concerns do you have?

I’d love to hear other case studies of using social media for customer service.

Twitter and Customer Service

Sometimes, I gotta write a blog post for the job. So today the focus was on how smart companies are using social media for customer service. I’d met with Martha Brooke from Interaction Metrics in the morning, and she dropped an interesting point: Her company helps businesses get the most out of their customer interactions, and social media is just another venue for those interactions. “Yes,” I thought. “Someone else who gets it.”

Her company has a great experience understanding and planning interactions for multiple customer personas. So why not just provide the customer service folks a few more simple, more trackable technologies? Why not evaluate the quality of customer service interactions usings social media tools?

Update: I posted a case study about Qwest using social media for customer service.

• http://www.coneinc.com/content1182
• http://www.churchofthecustomer.com/blog/2008/09/social-media-as.html

September, 2008: Sixty percent of Americans use social media, and of those, 59 percent interact with companies on social media Web sites. One in four interacts more than once per week. These are among the findings of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study.

Social Media and Customer Service Case Study: HP

• http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/39468

As HP’s experience shows, social media is changing the way we must think about customer service. The cost of poor service, once measured in single consumers, can now have an immediate impact far and wide.

Social Media Implications on Operations, PR, Marketing, HR, Customer Relations

• http://www.experiencetheblog.com/2008/05/social-media-disasters-or-how-not.html

Just like that point in time in the Internet’s infancy, social media has not yet been understood or embraced by most organizations and brands. Even if the ROI is hard to calculate today, it would be wise to consider the harm done by NOT having an organized approach to social media.

Social Media Case Studies

• http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/05/02/a-chonology-of-brands-that-got-punkd-by-social-media/

A list of companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant.