I've heard of people getting attached to local television personalities but this guy may take it to a new level. He's borderline psychotic certainly infatuated. If I was this weatherman I might start making sure the doors are locked at night.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmNb6xvOU2s]

Every marketer you'll ever meet will have a lot of ideas for you (including me.) That's what we do. We provide ideas. We always think they're good ideas. A few may even be great ideas. But some of them will stink. Seriously, some ideas just won't be good, but that's all right. The problem isn't bad ideas. The problem isn't even failing. The problem is failing slowly or failing expensively and then not learning from either (or both.)

Aggressive marketers don't have perfect batting averages. Agressive marketers can't have perfect batting averages. We're too busy trying to push things forward and look for the new things that work and better use the things that are working. Social media marketing fits this aggressive marketing approach today. Though it's considered "unsafe" or "unproven" by many traditional marketers I meet, I would say it's one of the safest things your company can do. Where else can you learn more about what works very quickly with minimal expense?

I'm seeing more and more verification that social media marketing does in fact work. Just this last week I got some great news back from a client about a campaign that spanned through the last several months. It was just the kind of proof we need to help the company take another step forward. It also cost a mere fraction of all the company's other marketing campaigns. I don't have exact numbers, but I can reasonably estimate the total expense of our campaign was less than 1% of their entire marketing budget.

We also learned one thing didn't work as well as we would have liked, but again, its cost was only in the hundreds of dollars. For most companies that's chump change. It was cheap and we know what to do differently for the future.

So, the question then is this: How high is your tolerance for risk and failure? Sure, you're all for success. Who's not for success? But why not support failure too? Failure is a the great educator and with social media marketing it's never been easier to fail quickly and fail cheaply so you can learn how not to fail next time.

I've talked before about answering your social phone. It's the idea that you're paying attention to all the social media channels that may be talking about you and your company, and then engaging the people who are talking about you...whether they're saying something good or bad. I saw an email come in over the weekend that was a correspondence between one of my clients and an upset customer. The customer had a series of very frustrating experiences with my client and chose to Tweet about all of them. Fortunately, the client answers their social phone.

The thing about answering the social phone is that once you decide to answer it, you have some decisions to make about how you'll respond. Will you be defensive? Will you try to appease? Will you provide some kind of response that feels stale and impersonal? If any of those are your planned response, just go ahead and don't answer the social phone to begin with. You need to be ready to engage and respond. Sometimes that means you need to explain things you cannot control. Sometimes it means you need to kindly disagree with the person. Sometimes it means you just need to show that you're genuinely sorry.

That's what the client did in this case...he was sorry...and it was a beautiful thing. Here's part of the email from my client to the customer after an initial Tweet and request for an email explaining the whole situation.

"Hey man. Thanks for taking the time to email me. Let me first just say, "I'm Sorry." I truly am sorry that it is hard to find what you're looking for. I'm sorry that the associates there don't seem to know what's going on. I'm sorry we weren't any help online. I'm sorry for the whole experience. I know how frustrating it is to take time out of your day only to get less than stellar service."

How about that? Isn't that the kind of response you would love from any company that provided an frustrating experience for you? In this case my client apologized and then started resolving the situation by notifying the appropriate people within the company. In fact, the customer's complaint even alerted the company to a product ordering oversight they didn't know about.

If you're wondering whether this meant anything to the customer, then check out a little bit from his response...

I am floored that you picked up my twitter and actually by this whole email exchange! I was curious if I'd hear a response from you. I'm really glad I did! It's removed the bad taste from my mouth of what happened. I appreciate the TIME you've spent following up with a twitter and these emails! I hope YOUR manager knows the difference you're making for [company's] reputation to their customers! I will talk about THIS experience much more than my bad one. I promise!

The power of being genuinely sorry can begin to resolve even some of the worst mistakes and biggest frustrations.

There were several great videos submitted by readers this week for consideration but this one just spoke to me for some reason beyond them all. I can think of all kinds of applications to life here but the one that stands out the most to me is a simple proverb: Pride goes before the fall.

HT to Edwin Crozier for this video suggestion. Here's a link for the feed readers.

Today we have a guest post from none other than my own brother, Mike Seaver...no, not that Mike Seaver...my brother Mike Seaver. Anyway, he's on the pastoral staff at Crossway Community Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, but he sent me the following post because he was an advertising major in college and still gets a burn on about media and marketing from time to time. He's got a take on Visa's Olympic commercials that I thought was worth sharing here. It's not specific about social media...it's more about branding and Visa's campaign in general.

My wife and I love watching the Olympics and even enjoy the creative commercials. Many are funny and some are inspiring. I find myself now exercising with the thought of ìI wonder if I could do that.î The answer is of course, no, but it is fun to wonder.

The Beijing Olympics have provided a series of commercials from Visa that are both enjoyable and annoying. They're enjoyable because they have the voice of Morgan Freeman and the images of many athletes performing marvelous feats. They're annoying because each of them ends with ìGO WORLD.î

The first time I saw that I said, ìWhat, GO WORLDÖwhat the heck does that mean?î Can we not pull for a team or country enough to say in the United States, ìGO USA.î We have to be so inclusive and non-offensive that we say ìGO WORLD.î If I went to a local Carolina Panthers game and stood up and started saying ìGO NFLÖyou go National Football League players,î everyone would know I was an idiot. You pull for one team or the other, you donít pull for all of the teams equally. Why in the world do we have the Olympics if we are pulling for everyone equally at the same time? That undermines everything the Olympics stands for.

A few years ago I was in Brazil during the World Cup. I appreciated the trash talk from the Brazilians. They were not saying, ìGO USA,î they were telling me how bad we were going to get beat. It was fun. It was sports. HelloÖthis is what competition is all about.

So, if Visa is going to be one of these ìevery player gets a trophyî type of companies and canít have the guts to say ìGO USAî in the USA, I say ìGO AWAY,î but let us keep Morgan FreemanÖhe has a cool voice.

Yesterday I talked about the difference between the two...today I saw this video on the Collide Magazine blog. It's an advertising stunt from Australia that's literally explosion marketing. It sounds like some people were on hand to see what would happen but I wonder how many can remember the company that did this and then used the company's services as a result. It makes a big boom but what did it really do in the end? I think a spark strategy would have been better...but take a look for yourself.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb4yEa6l6I4]

A little over two years ago when I was starting my blog I came up with the idea of calling it "microexplosion" it was all based on the idea that all the new media tools are simply spark creators and that if the goal of marketing/PR/advertising is to create ideas that catch fire, then leveraging the new spark creators would be worth looking into. The funny thing about a spark, is that it doesn't seem like a big deal all by itself. After all, a spark vanishes in an instant. You don't even feel it if it touches your skin...but given the enough time and the right circumstances a spark can turn into a blazing fire.

Traditional marketers don't have time for sparks. They want something that goes boom. It needs to be big and it needs to be loud. They want everyone to know when it ignites. Their entire professional worth is based on the bigness and the loudness of the boom. They get paid to make big booms.

Social media marketers don't need a big boom. They have all these little spark starters. They can go over here and create a spark and then go over there and create a spark and then discover another area and create a spark and in the end they step back and see some of those sparks turn into tiny flames. Those flames can turn into small fires and those fires grow and can go on blazing for a long time.

Think of it like this...explosion fires are quickly put out, but fires that start with sparks aren't. Explosion fires are quickly discovered and dealt with but spark fires go unnoticed at first but when they are noticed they're already spreading rapidly. That's why forest fires are such a big deal. They can take weeks to put out.

If you're marketing with explosions you have to keep making it bigger and louder just to make sure someone notices your explosion among all the other explosion marketers. If you're marketing with sparks, you just have to find the right scenario for your spark to ignite.

You probably haven't heard about this in the Olympic news coverage. Just something to keep in mind as our athletes are in China for another week.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqNaAU2vXlI]

Nathan and I recently covered the basics to get started with podcasting on our New Mediology podcast. You can listen online or subscribe in iTunes. Here are some of the things we covered:

Getting started with podcasting: Equipment

• Internal microphone on your computer (not a great quality audio more than likely, but still an option)
• Handheld microphones (USB mics that plug into your computer are easily found)
• Headset microphones (also plug into your computer via a USB port)

Getting started with podcasting: Software

• Audacity
• Castblaster
• Garage Band

Getting started with podcasting: Hosting

• Libsyn (for any kind of podcast hosting)
• Podpoint (for chuches and ministries)

Tools for audio posts for blogs:

• Utterz
• FreeConferenceCall (allows recording for interviews)
• Skype

Last week I had the opportunity to interview Tony Zito, the CEO for mediaFORGE, a company that "has widgets comin' out their ads." More to the point, mediaFORGE creates widgets as a new means of display advertising. What that means is they don't do online advertising the way most people do. Don't ask them to create a banner ad for you. They won't do it. They'll give you a widget instead...and you'll be glad they did. According to Zito, their widgets perform with a conversion rate that's three to five times higher than standard banner ads. You can see some of their widgets on their showcase page.

Think about that conversion rate over standard banner ads...three to five times more conversions. So if you're getting a 3% conversion rate now, you could be getting 9% or even a 15% conversion rate by simply ditching the ads that people don't like anyway for something they'll engage and act on. Zito thinks this is the next phase of display ads. I happen to agree. We know banner ads don't work. Even stats from four years ago show they haven't been working for a while.

Widgets seemed to really take off last year as more marketers looked to them for sales and promotions. According to Zito, "last year was the year of the widget, but this year is the year of 'how do we monetize the widget?'" For all the interest marketers are showing for new media marketing opportunities, the inevitable question is: "Ok, now what? When does this start making money for us?" That's a question that all social media marketers are dealing with and one that mediaFORGE seems to be providing an answer for.

What I've personally be perplexed by for a while now is that if not banner ads, what do you recommend for mere display ad purposes? I think Zito and mediaFORGE are going down the right road. The widgets provide something that has value to the customer or prospect. It allows a person to engage an ad rather than simply being interrupted. I don't know for sure if widgets are the next wave of display ads, but it sure seems like it's going the right direction.

When I was on vacation last week I read a fascinating story about the rivalry between the two top gadget blogs in the world: Engadget and Gizmodo. It turns out these two blogs are the Hatfields and McCoys of the blogosphere and they're taking aim at each other every day in the form of scooping each other with the best gadget and gear news available.

This blog on blog conflict is great for the readers because they reap the benefits of the rivalry. The dark side of the feud is that it turns personal from time to time. Apparently each blog has accused the other with various accusations and that got me thinking about the rest of us who blog. After all, I personally advocate content that will "outrage" as one of the five categories of good social media content so what if we developed a rival who seemed to have us squarely in his crosshairs on a regular basis? How would you deal with that given you have a public platform with which to fire back? Or maybe you're the aggressor and you're gunning for someone else for some reason. How do you decide what's in play and what's out of bounds? As I've thought about these things I've come to this one statement to sum up how I will act in either case: Accuse slowly and apologize quickly.

The BeautiControl Lesson

The thing about having a publishing house at your fingertips is that you can say (or do) just about anything and send it out to the world only to think better of it only a few hours later. That's part of the power of a blog or online video. You get things published quickly, but once something has been online go ahead and assume it's indexed and cached somewhere (probably by Google) to be found later...which means whatever you publish likely won't disappear forever even if you want it to. I remember a story from a year ago when the company BeautiControl was promoting an online video called "Cars, Money, Friendship, Bling, and Travel" as a sales and motivational tool for potential BeautiControl consultants. The company started catching some heat from their consultants for the video so they pulled it down, but someone else had already captured it and republished it on YouTube. That video has over 10,000 views as of this post. That's 10,000 more views than Beauticontrol wanted, but there it still is, a year later, still getting views.

The lesson here is that just because you can publish something quickly doesn't mean you always should. If you're going to accuse someone of something you should really make sure you know what you're getting into. Do you have all the facts? Do you know another side of the story? If not, why not take a little extra time.

Dear AT&T: I'm Sorry

If you do screw up or there's even a hint of misunderstanding on your blog, be willing to apologize very quickly. You'll be forgiven. You may lose a little credibility, but in the end people will remember you apologized as soon as you realized it was a mistake. Don't delete the mistake either. Unless you've published something that's gotten you into legal hot water leave the accusation up with a link or note to the correction. In the spirit of full disclosure and transparency you need to leave it there for all to see...even if you were a jerk or an idiot.

I had to do this last summer. I accused AT&T of missing the launch of the iPhone on their website the day it launched. I thought I had a big story there...until about an hour later I got a phone call from a friend who told me I was 24 hours early on the iPhone launch. AT&T wasn't late. I was early. I quickly updated the post (leaving the original, incorrect post) and admitted I was an idiot. I think AT&T got over it.

The Bottom Line: The ability to publish quickly is good and bad. You determine which it will be every time you post. Accuse slowly and apologize quickly to stay out of a little less trouble.

It all makes sense now...and for the record, the box for my mother-in-law is not in the basement. I happen to really like my mother-in-law.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoqpjOZxf2M]

I have been on vacation since the end of last week and until about thirty minutes ago I was offline for almost 120 hours (almost five full days.) By offline I don't mean checking mobile email or anything like that. I've been completely off the grid for five days. Tomorrow I'll be back home buthad to was able to get away for a bit this afternoon after discovering a coffee shop with free WiFi just down the road from where we're staying.

It's a funny thing to be offline for so long when my work and many of my non-work connections and communications happen online as well. I'm the kind of guy who checks email 20 times a day so I wasn't sure how I would do. In fact, I don't recall the last time I was completely offline for this long. It's been at least a few years since I did this. Here are my thoughts on being completely offline for five days:

1. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I actually didn't miss it too much. I think there was only one time when I wondered what was going on in the rest of the world...like on Twitter and on some blogs.

2. It was good thinking time. The closest I got to the Internet these last several days were the last six issues of Wired magazine. It's made for some good thinking time. The problem any of us face when we're in our regular routines is that we don't take time to really think thing through. I admire people who carve out time in their days just to think. I used to do that more than I do now. This trip has been a good reminder of the fruit of unhindered thinking time.

3. It was a good reminder of the offline world. When you work and play online you can begin to think that everyone else is there too. This time away has provided a lot of time to observe the offline world and be reminded of how many people aren't even thinking about it.

*Bonus: It was great to find a WiFi connection. I was almost giddy with excitement when I pulled the laptop out and got online a little while ago. I'm reminded of how much I really like what I do and am thankful for the opportunity to do it.

Good marketers can do good things. Bad marketers would give you something like this: Vertical Pizza.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYgDiuRzhP8]