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I know this is my second Twitter article today, but I’m amazed at how much I enjoy following a single new story via Twitter.  Election night (after Maran hit the hay) was spent watching global commentary stream across Twitter.  I was amazed at how engaging it was, and how much good information came to me… far more informing than TV news shows that tried to make us think the election was close.

So I’ll be following the #Davos hashtag this weekend while I try to make sense of reporters’ distillations.

Like any team worth its salt, these guys are busy and rarely find time to keep up with the blogosphere, let alone participate.  The problem is that there is an important daily conversation going on within the blogosphere of which they should not only be intimately aware but in which they should be participating.  Since they all seem to sleep five hours a night and traverse the world to meet with a distributed team and far-flung clients, it’s difficult for me to recommend that they start reading a broad set of blogs and participating.  It would be great to have their top folks blogging, but I doubt they would find time for 2-3 posts a week, let alone significant participation.

So, here’s my recommendation: Just do Twitter.

There are extensive conversations about Parallels going on within Twitter right now.  Windows 7 on Parallels is having some issues.  There’s direct feedback from bloggers regarding pricing on the new Parallels upgrade.  People who are forming ideas on VMWare vs. Parallels are hashing out early findings on Twitter.  Subscribing to a set of Twitter folks and following searches using TweetDeck for Parallels, VMWare, other competitors, virtualization terms, cloud computing terms, and other product names would be simple, and would give them a finger on the daily pulse of what’s going on in the world.  Then they could respond in 140 characters or less to the blogger.

Twitter is great for a scoped commitment because:

• People: Most of the thought leaders in this space are on Twitter
• Speed: Posts are quick to scan and read
• Software: Twitter software like TweetDeck seems to beat any rss management tool I’ve used regularly
• Response: You only have 140 characters with which to respond, so you won’t take 15 minutes thinking about your reply.  Read before you submit, but 1 minute and you’re done.
• Breadth: You can converse with more people due to the brevity of your response.

So, if you’re feeling left out and don’t know how to jump in, consider this: Don’t have a blog, have a Twitter.  Don’t comment on blogs, comment on Twitter.

Catch the Frak Up

I get that not every business can pour millions and millions into the perfect structure, but it’s not just the building that they got right.  The staff are knowledgeable without ever being condescending to veritable know-nothings such as myself.  The layout of the store is a path of discovery.  No massive racks of everything.  You wander from place to place to find various experiences.

Then I spend 16 days in Costa Rica with a broken Mac, and I return straight away to the Apple Store.  Seattle’s Apple store recently receive a sorely unneeded face lift, and it was brilliant.  They focus is clearly around service, with a matte aluminum back wall featuring not oversized fruit, but the Genius Bar logo.  Several kiosks are around for 1:1 training.  The openness remains, where one can focus on the beauty that is a Mac. (Hey, how ’bout those new aluminum MacBooks?  Not bad, eh?)  I waiting for an hour while they fixed my mac, and I managed to buy a new keyboard, one of those laptop platform lifts, and a neoprene case for my alleged biking to work (forever forstalled until Seattle stops being freezing). Again, “geniuses” are knowledgable without being condescending.  I wandered the store to discover my items, and enjoyed the open design.  There’s a theme here.

I’m amazed at the excitement and elation at seeing this man put forward as our leader elect.  Watch this video of peaceful, fun-loving young people dancing in the streets of Seattle’s Capitol Hill.  They’re waving flags instead of burning them.  They’re together––black, white, brown, gay, straight–dancing to Journey and reigning in a new era.

I am also elated.

1. We’ll need more YouTube videos
2. Oh, and we’ll need to pay more attention to adding friends on Facebook
3. And would somebody please build me an iPhone app?

Hopefully you’re laughing, because you should be. For the online Obama campaign was more than just a sum of elements combined together to make a magical recipe. It was a campaign that was executed by people who know that a YouTube video gets you nothing, a good YouTube video gets you a little more, and great execution at marketing a YouTube video gets you the White House… or at least a few more votes and hundreds of thousands of plays.

Alex and I see this a lot with our clients. They tell us “oh, don’t worry about YouTube. We have a YouTube page.” We look at a YouTube profile with 20 videos and a sum total of 200 plays, mostly by their staff. “Oh, well, we have a Facebook Page, so let’s concentrate on something else.” We go to the Facebook page and proudly join as the 100th supporter. Great execution means doing the little things right, pushing to make something good great, and then focusing on pushing something toward virality. We took the client listed above and gave them a single YouTube video that made it into the Top 5 and had hundreds of thousands of plays in 10 days.

So don’t rest on your laurels saying “Oh, don’t worry, we’ve got it.” Whether you “got it” has little to do with your success. You need to put it to work.

As you navigate around, you’ll quickly find that everything autoplays.  New book: Boom! chapter 1 starts.  Iron Man on BluRay?  Here’s the trailer.  The UX is fun, and the performance is great (possibly because I’m the only guy using it).

Here’s what I don’t like: It is actually an Org Chart imprinted on a product.  Here are the organizations that flow into the digital team, and everyone gets a smattering.  It reminds me of a lecture back in school where the speaker noted that if you take apart a DEC computer, it actually had the company org built into the design.  Too much segmentation and fiefdoms.

Now, I haven’t seen the fiefdoms in Amazon’s digital group, but I do see this cool product as being better applied if some new product categories were included.  Hopefully once the tires get kicked a bit, we can get toys in there for Christmas.  This dad will need to buy some new kick scooters and other hot toys.  This could be just the ticket.  Age and gender across the top.  Amazon videos of toys in action in each box.

Looking forward to more cool stuff from this team.

I have not realized that Almond Roca is owned by a private northwest company Brown & Haley.  The founders created the confection in 1923, and selected its current packaging with the pink tin and Sicilian coat of arms in 1927, and built their business through the fat times of the 20s, the depression in the 30s, the war in the 40s, and the rise of the Roca-chomping middle class in the 50s.  This explains why it’s so popular with the 80-something crowd.

So, what can we learn here?  First we need to decide if their attention to channel is good execution or over focus.  I’ve never noticed Almond Roca for sale at grocery stores, in snack bags at 7-11, at airport shops, in super stores like Fred Meyer or Target, or online.  Now, I imagine that they take up their 2 or 3 linear feet of shelf space in some of those channels, but they’re not on the end caps.  So, they’re not spending co-op to get on the end caps in these channels for a few reasons: cost of competing in a grocery store or super store, relative return of the co-op spent.  When I head into a drug store, I’m typically in a more casual mood.  I’m usually picking up just a few things, I don’t have to wander the 8-foot-high aisles finding fifty items.  Many people are trapped in the drug store waiting for… well… drugs.  Those make great casual shoppers as well.

My thoughts? Almond Roca is making short-term decisions that will eventually kill the company.  They are serving their multi-decade customers well by finding them where they frequent, but with a tasty treat, they should be expanding their market.  Their brick-and-mortar co-op spend is a short-term optimization that will kill this centenarian institution.  Unless they spend for the future and break out of those drugstore end caps, they will never reach the generation that hits the drug store 3 times a year.  In the end my children will probably never know that crunchy butterscotch goodness, except as leprechaun bait.

“Mah inglish skillz, lolcats b0rkedem.”
“We has too webbyz? Kthxbai!!1!.”

For those of you who are not bilingual, in lolcats, these read:

“My English Skills, Lolcats broke them”, and
“We have two Webbys? OK.  Thanks.  Bye!!!!”

ICanHasCheezburger.com is the popular site where you can upload a cute picture of a kitty cat and make it say funny things.  For whatever reason, the lolcats talk like a 13-year-old’s text message.

From the difficult-to-spell URL to the silly instructions on the site, this company never relents on their attention to brand.  And their community of LolCat creators would never be as fiercely loyal if it were any other way.