My unofficial bike team (the Muddy Iguanas) talks on Facebook. A LOT. And since our wives and girlfriends sometimes also see that stuff, we took the conversation into a “group,” and we made it “secret” so that it doesn’t clog up other people’s notifications and emails. But since then, it’s become a little bit of a clubhouse where we can talk about spending stupid amounts of money on hand-made sew-up tires, sharing videos of awful crashes, linking to photos from the previous night’s race, and sharing how-to articles. The Muddy Iguanas are now fully 90% of my Facebook experience.

So it occurs to me that if I needed a company intranet, I would use a “secret” Facebook group. You get all the power of Facebook — it’s in your feed, photos, videos, status updates, links, commenting, updating via email — except it’s kept away from everyone else’s Facebook stream.

I’m sure that someone nefarious could hack it. Or someone wily could figure out what you’re doing by targeting ads at you or something. But is it any less secure than whatever other cloud-based intranet tool you’re using? Plus, it dumps any work posts into your normal Facebook stream, so you see work-stuff while you’re screwing around on Facebook!

I dunno. Seems like the perfect tool to me. And honestly, having used Jive and 37 Signals, they’re pale imitations on the social level. (Basecamp is still awesome for project mgmt, though.)

Thoughts?

I thought to myself, “Odd. I must’ve really fucked up my portfolio if he didn’t pick that up. I mean, that’s a pretty accurate description of me.”

Analytics are cruel because when I looked at the web analytics on my portfolio between when I sent it to him and when I received the rejection email, there was only a slight uptick. Very few pages were viewed for more than 10 seconds. And none of the larger “zoom in here to read” files were viewed. None. So I can surmise that he spent about 90 seconds on my site.

Analytics are cruel because I know that I wasn’t even really considered. Pity, that is.

(Oh, and I stole the title. We had Ze Frank as the emcee for the Webtrends Engage conference a few weeks back. And he had this bit about how “Analytics are Cruel.” It’s good! Watch it below.)

Just click through and read. It pretty much explains itself.

Click to get krunk, meatsack!

Click to laugh. Well, first the image will get bigger, and then you'll read the copy. But then you'll laugh, I promise.

Ironically, I left Pop Art shortly thereafter, and ended up at Webtrends where I was tasked to do the final analysis of the campaign. To be honest, I didn’t agree with doing it. The whole fiasco had died down, and it seemed folly to bring it up.

Since this is my portfolio section, the thing to point out here is that I did all the sentiment analysis and calculations myself. (Yes, I can do math.) And then I wrote up my conclusions for a downloadable PDF.

Our goal was to highlight our online tracking and measurement capabilities measure and analyze the content and sentiment of the resulting online conversation.

In other words, we try to understand what people say and how they feel about the topic. This measurement can be helpful for businesses and organizations who are exploring new ideas, and who want to find out how the ideas will be received, unearth misconceptions, and identify influencers.

Measuring sentiment and opinion is not a new science — public relations firms and politicians have used it for decades through opinion polls and surveys. We apply similar fundamentals and modern tools to digital conversations.

It’s not the most exciting thing in the world — I intentionally wrote it more like a flat research paper so that it wouldn’t inflame the conversation again. But given the way I naturally write (kinda like a smart ass teenager), it’s a good example of my ability to write in a different voice.

It’s also a good example of my ability to hold my nose while I do something I strenuously disagree with, both on a business and personal level.

Situational morality: That’s why I work in marketing!

Click to giganticize the Webtrends Great Data Giveaway screenshot

Early on at Webtrends, we decided to run a Facebook contest. That was pretty much the direction: let’s run a contest to see how it works.

So we wondered: what would make Webtrends’ faithful excited? And I came up with this idea of embracing the data nerd element. “Fly your nerd flag high” was an ad headline I remember.

We got sponsors like Wolfram | Alpha and ReadWriteWeb to give away a bunch of datasets our winners could correlate to their own data.

Anyway — I still love this text:

“Because you collect data the way some people collect unicorn snowglobes. (And get just as many puzzled stares.)”

It was a pretty successful contest. A few days into the project, once someone in management realized it wasn’t going to go down in flames, we picked up a new goal: to increase our “quality fans.” Considering we were giving away .csv files of historical Twitter data, these fans were definitely quality. And we went from 500 fans to about 2500 fans in a month.

I also created, bought, placed, and optimized all the ad campaign for this. It was during this time that we started to notice the 3-day rot for all Facebook ads. What that means is that most Facebook ads do pretty well for the first 3 days. After that, they start to get ignored by users.

So here’s a little media-planning tip: if you’re resourcing for a month-long Facebook campaign, you need 10 fresh ads. (And really, if you just use new images and new headlines, you’re fine.)

Click to embiggen.

Webtrends is best known for their web analytics software. When they came out with an analytics offering for mobile apps and mobile sites, we wanted to inject some personality and life into the launch.

What I love most about this headline is that, in hindsight, it seems completely obvious. The software lets you compare the performance of all your apps — regardless of platform — in one place. It lets you compare mobile to web. It lets you see app usage and adoption, rather than just how many downloads.

Click to enlarge and read.

The “Beyond Wow” section is the sort of thing that I tend to dig up in most projects — the most obvious and plain spoken way to describe the product’s benefit. It never seems to be in the creative brief or messaging direction. It’s my inability to defend and pitch my own work that it always seems to get hidden away, moldering at the bottom of the page. Hell, given the direction that the product team has taken the mobile analytics page today, I’m shocked that the word “wow” ever made it on there at all. Boooring.

Doing my own SEO research and optimization, the page sat at No. 1 for “mobile analytics” for months. I credit the opening paragraph and H1. Keywords, I gotz ‘em. Since the “enhancement,” it’s fallen to No. 3. NOT THAT I’M BITTER OR ANYTHING.

We ran some banner ads, too, which I directed more than I wrote. Killer stuff. I’ll have to dig those up — they totally slayed.

At my company Fight, we call this “the 80% rule.” It goes like this:

When you convey a difficult concept, you’re better off being 80% right and simple, than 100% right and complex.

Put another way, Apple includes “Multitasking” as a key feature of iOS on their website but it was only at their developers conference that Job’s explained the concept of “fast app switching” or as John Gruber put it:

“Apps don’t run in windows, they run on the full screen. So when you leave one app and switch to another in iPhone OS 4, the GUI — the visual interface — is not going to continue updating in the background. What will happen, if the app is updated to support the new OS 4 APIs (which, I expect, all actively-maintained apps will be), is that the app will stay in memory but stop processing. Switch back and it’ll start processing again, right where it left off.”

Yo dawg, we heard you like multitasking.

My sister and I started IM’ing about it, and she pulled out the Bernbach quote:

“The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.”

Steph: “I am busily blowing it up in poster size.”

Thom: “Me, too.”

Steph: “Is yours going in a Constitution Layout under the heading “Bernbach’s Law”? Because that would be creepy evidence that we share the same brain.”

Thom: “I might photoshop it as a tattoo on a half naked model, then blow it up in a close-up window.”

Steph: “Okay, NOT the same brain.”

I wish I could work with my sister. She rocks.

I love that joke because, frankly, most copywriters are all sharp elbows and big egos. They’ve sweated through it, considered the angles, and now you want to change it? Are you crazy?

Writing isn’t easy. Staring at your screen until your fingertips bleed isn’t easy. But after a few days of scribbling and not sleeping,  you arrive at a few headlines that delight the imaginary focus group in your head. Probably a headline that was, as Pulitizer said, short enough they’ll read it, clear enough they’ll appreciate it, picturesque enough it they’ll remember it, and accurate enough that they’ll be guided by its light.

Then some “product expert” comes along and wants to pin a hot-pink starburst ribbon on it that hollers, “Paradigm-Shifting ROI Optimization Solution.”

Your works suffers from then on. Because instead of focusing on clarity and amazingness, you get distracted by gaming your boss. You take your eye off the ball. You start mailing it in because you get worn down from having to explain the obvious: no one knows what the fuck a paradigm-shifting ROI optimization solution is.

I refer to this as “the marketing you deserve.” It’s the marketing your schmucky boss deserves for being a dumbass. And it’s the marketing that I, the now-lazy copywriter, also deserve for allowing myself to get brow-beaten into giving up creativity. And that’s usually when the portfolio gets sharpened up and I start buying former co-workers beers to find a new gig.

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.

“It’s the sweaty socks and dudes hitting on me at the gym that I really love about working out. I mean, it’s great to look nice, but it’s really the EXPERIENCE that I’m after.”

And I pointed out that: “In advertising, it’s never bad to turn a perceived weakness into a positive… Unless your weakness is for Boy Scouts.”