ChasNote

I’ve borrowed the above image from Battelle’s recent post at Searchblog. It nicely conveys the point that:

“Google, once the ‘pencil’ of the Internet, has become a newer, more open version of Microsoft, and it has to admit as much both to itself as well as to its public, or it will start to lose credibility with all its constituents.”

Pencil, in this case, is short-hand for a company that does one thing — and only one thing — enormously well. Google = Search. Now Google makes cellphones, browsers, mobile OSes and office productivity applications. Kind of like Microsoft.

Or Apple, but I think Battelle is intentional in calling Google the new Microsoft. Because while Apple makes laptops, mobile and desktop OSes, browsers and cellphones (not to mention music players, ecommerce platforms and retail experiences), it has retained an intense, control-freaky focus on what its brand means. Asked why Google isn’t doing any brand advertising right now, like all its competitors are, Battelle answers:

“Google isn’t doing brand advertising because Google doesn’t know what its brand means…. [And] Until Google figures out what its brand means in a post search world, it won’t be doing any brand advertising. And given who its competing with — Apple, Hulu, Microsoft and Amazon, among many others — I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

It all started on HotWired, the website alter ego of Wired Magazine, 15 years ago today. From SAI:

“On October 27, 1994, HotWired.com hosted ads from Volvo, AT&T, MCI, Club Med, Zima (!) and 1-800-Collect. Frank D’Angelo, founder and partner of CL&S, the ad agency behind a few of the ads, writes on Ad Age today that one of the banners reached an astounding 78% click-through rate.”

Battelle interviews Frank Eliason, the voice of @ComcastCares at Searchblog.

@ComcastCares is a Twitter-based customer service channel that’s part listening beacon — Comcast tracks mentions of their brand by Twitter users — and part real-time help desk. As much as actually helping individuals improve their Comcast experiences, though, @ComcastCares has become an emissary of goodwill across the 5-plus-million member Twitterverse: Taking disgruntled (and influential, well-followed) Comcast customers, make them happy, and have that conversation out in the public, for all Twitter users to see.

“I’ve been following Frank’s work on Twitter for a while, it seemed he was always listening to what folks were saying, and when folks (inevitably) ranted about Comcast service, he jumped in, and almost always seemed to fix the problem. Then it happened to me, in October, my service started acting deeply flaky, and I complained about it.

“I quickly got a response, and when I moved to a new place last month, he helped again. Then just this weekend, my new Internet service started acting flaky again, and in ten minutes, Frank had assessed the problem and helped me fix it, calmly, intelligently, and in the grammar natural to social media….”

That last phrase, to me, is the most important. If your customers are expressing their discontent in social media environments, bid for their forgiveness in those same social media environments, using the language and grammar of social media natives.

To see @ComcastCares in action, here’s how it worked for Guy Kawasaki and his 32,000 followers.

To see what happened to a brand that opted not to engage with disgruntled customers in the social media settings where they made their complaints, check out the Motrin Moms dust up.

UPDATE: I Twittered Battelle’s interview with @ComcastCares:

Six minutes later (on a Saturday afternoon), @ComcastCares Twittered me back:

Chalk up another fan, @ComcastCares! Now I’m off to Twitter all about it.

Battelle, FM’s founder and CEO, announces the news at Searchblog:

“For the better part of a year, we at FM have been working on an innovative new project with Asus and Intel. Today it launched. WePC.com is an experiment in crowdsourcing an entirely new piece of hardware, and I’m very proud of the work we’ve done together.”

According Intel’s release:

“Consumers become product designers at WePC.com, a Web site launched today by Intel Corporation and ASUS. WePC.com is where consumers can collaborate with each other and with Intel and ASUS to design innovative new products. The plan is for the two companies to deliver to market what could be the world’s first community-designed PCs.”

Early reviews are coming in, starting with Mashable and Wise Startup Blog.

Congratulations to Kevin Huang, Wanting Yang, Mike Hoefflinger, Deborah Conrad, Mona Mameesh, David Dechant, John Cooney, Ryan Baker, Jeff Hsueh, Jonathan Schreiber, Jason Ratner, Josh Mattison, Sacha Lien, Liam Boylan and Josh Stivers. Who can identify, at this point, which of them work for ASUS, for Intel or for FM!

And keep your eyes peeled for the ChasNote Deluxe.

Guy Kawasaki, John Battelle and Mark Frauenfelder have published content (plus bonus videos and other features) from their upcoming books and are distributing them to readers of their blogs as Adobe Acrobat 9 PDF Portfolios. Adobe did not shape or influence the content itself, but it is paying to run ads on all three authors’ sites.

The free “sneak previews,” not surprisingly, are moving like hotcakes — 1600 downloads in a week — and with each download Adobe takes a new prospective customer on a tour of Acrobat 9.

Ads on each site (like this one, running on Guy’s site) not only promote the PDF preview, they also let fans re-post the ad unit on their own sites:

And since circulating these previews benefits the authors too — they are the book-equivalent of movie trailers — Adobe’s campaign is getting extra mileage beyond the paid sponsorship. Here’s a post by Battelle on Searchblog:

(Credits: Steve Weeks and the Adobe Acrobat 9 marketing team; Yiming Roberts, Erica Milanese and Jenny Yumiba at Goodby Silverstein; and Liam Boylan, Nicole Cook, Stephanie Loleng and Lester Lee at FM.)

From Ad Age:

“This weekend, as thousands of people gather and five dozen bands perform over three straight days at the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, tech and media entrepreneur John Battelle hopes to create a different kind of performance, a mash-up of the thousands of camera-phone pictures, hand-held digital-video recordings, blog posts and Twitter “tweets” generated at the event.”

Today, in partnership with Microsoft, FM launched music-oriented social media site CrowdFire.

From MediaWeek:

“In conjunction with the launch CrowdFire, the companies have announced that several kiosks will be placed at the upcoming Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in San Francisco, Calif. on Aug. 22-24, where attendees will be able to produce and upload their own video, audio and text accounts of the events, in what will serve as a mass test run for the new site. During the event, video screens will display a real time ‘mashup’ of the crowd-produced content.”

Last weekend, FM’s executive team tried an experiment: The three of us were not allowed to send any emails to our FM colleagues from 6pm Friday until 6pm Sunday. I didn’t expect much other than a time-shifting of our email problems, a postponement of our inevitable email bankruptcy. I was wrong. It turns out the emails the three of us initiate spawn email threads that multiply like virus cells in a warm petri dish. If we shut up for two days a week, everybody else can dial back, too. And I found that my brain worked better this past week — rested, refreshed and more nimble than usual — after a weekend offline.

More from Battelle.

I wonder what happens if you let your brain have 216 offline hours?? I’m headed off for a wifi-free camping trip with the family. I’ll let you know in a week.

I hope the folks at Cococu are saying nice things!

Marketing Shift weighs in, too:

“…companies are looking for ways to aggregate communities even if it’s not directly tied to their core business. Chris Brogan points out that American Express is doing just that with its OPEN Forum, which aggregates blog and business information in one place and encourages conversation in a sponsored area with the hopes of subtly marketing to people who have an interest in business information (e.g. potential American Express users). When you think about it, the concept is a no-brainer. We trust people more when we don’t feel like they are selling us on something. It’s why we hate ads — and marketing.”

Steven Lewis at Inside the Box, while not exactly speaking a different language, adds his support from Australia.

And if financial jargon qualifies as a foreign language, we can count NetBanker:

“American Express’s OpenForum: As the name suggests, it’s a business forum and resource directory, not unlike Bank of America’s…. American Express has added posts from several prominent bloggers such as John Battelle’s Searchblog and Anita Campbell’s Small Biz Trends, to keep the site fresh. The site has 5,400 members and monthly traffic of about 11,000 unique visitors, up three-fold from a year ago.”

Goes to show you: If your marketing projects are great media with quality content and authentic conversation, not only will you engage your customers more deeply, you’ll benefit from social-media amplification as those customers spread the word across the web.

Here’s more positive coverage of American Express’s OPEN Forum blog, a partnership between American Express and several FM business authors. My favorite line:

“To everyone behind the creation of the OPEN Forum, good job! To anyone who has not checked it out yet, please do!”