So last night I dusted off one of my favorite movies, the 1973 classic martial arts film Enter The Dragon. While watching it I began to see some great marketing wisdom in the dialog and found it be extremely timely and quite relevant concerning a current project I am engage in. I thought I would share with you the highlights of Enter The Dragon: Competitive Marketing.

“Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory”

Too often we have tight timelines, many moving parts, multiple contributors, and general the general chaos and distraction of life surrounding us while we are getting our go to market plans ready.It is very easy to focus solely on the tasks at hand with out stepping back and looking at the big picture. Often that picture is pretty fantastic, even while the current project you are working on may be a pain in the ass. Don’t forget that you are part of a team, and a business unit, and company all striving for the same thing - success in business and a great quality of life, however that is defined by both your industry, your company, and your family. Look up from your desk, take a walk, talk with a colleague and acknowledge the goodness in your efforts.

“Boards don’t hit back”

Practice. Practice. Practice. and then practice some more. Run your presentation by a group of peers before the keynote. Double check that persona one more time before running the scenario. Go back through notes, your email, your gut checks. Because there comes a time when you will be faced with real competition and must respond in real-time, to real threats, and must fight real battles in your market space, or at a closing meeting with a new client, or with the CMO of your company about how you think that a solution based positioning isn’t really an advantage for the market pentetration of the product and wont differentiate it in an already over crowded…. anyway. I digress.

Han: “Your style is unorthodox”
WIlliams: “But effective”

Many times we have to look deeper than our established bag of tricks, especially in a market that is fast moving, constantly changing, and that requires creativity, confidence and stamina to win. And not just win once, but to win repeatedly. I have always considered myself to be a bright guy, and the smartest thing that I do is to surround myself with people smarter than me. (or is it I. Smarter than I.. have to call my wife on that.)

Anyway, the point that Williams was making is that one should strive to be effective no matter what the method of action may require. I call on those around me to shake up my snow globe of ideas and see if they find patterns or data or insights that I may have missed. The way we finally get to a result may be a little odd, but those results are not.

“Never take your eyes off your opponent, even when you bow”

You never know the exact moment of opportunity and must be ready to either strike or defend in real-time. Defensibility in the market space is a one of the primary reasons certain startups don’t get handed their lunch by the fourth week of school. Great companies are constantly looking to defend and strengthen their position at every opportunity. And its not so much the “best offense is a good defense” mentality. It’s more to the point of be aware of your surroundings. If you are looking to gain a position in the market, you are damn certain your competition is looking to do the same. Just be sure not to get caught looking. Be prepared to act.

“Provide your customers with products they need and, uh, charge a little bit to stimulate your market and before you know it customers come to depend on you, I mean really need you. “

Ok, so in the flick they were talking about drug smuggling and corruption, but its the classic case of creating a need in the market, fanning it with desire, and capturing the trust of your clients. During my storied career as a tech sales guy I never really sold the product (which might be why I eventually was fired.) What I did sell though was need - need for the product or service that we could provide. And I would compare that to my competition, noble warriors all, but just not quite as good as what we had to offer. And then I would show them how they could trust me, and that I had our mutual best interest in hand. Oh, and if they bought now I would take off an additional 12% on signing. Need + desire + dependency. Its not just for romance novels anymore.

“You must attend the morning ritual in uniform.”

Come prepared. Most reasons we miss that window of opportunity is that we don’t recognize it as it is coming toward us, see it only as its passing by, or see it early but just cant get ready to anything about it. Come to work ready to work. Go to a house party ready to party. Be present and appropriate and provide both context and content for whatever you are doing. And that goes for your marketing plan as well. A key word here is ritual. Practice, reverence, and habit can be key to developing a winning marketing strategy.

Enter The Dragon is only one of many examples of films that provide nuggets of introspection and learning within the dialog. Now its up to you. I would love to hear about your movie insights and how they align with your industry. Post them in the comments. If they are especially good, I’ll send you the movie of your choice as a “thank you”.

Bonus points if you can define Market Readiness from The Big Lebowski. Have fun.

[Updated - Want a private beta invite code? Read on and see how]

So I was watching the roll out of Twitterfone the other day via Twhirl and tossed out a request for an invite to the private beta. Within moments, I received a direct message from @patphelan, one of the creators of Twitterfone, with an invite code, and my promise to write about the service.

What Twitterfone does is allow me to dial into a unique phone number and speak my tweets. This is extremely important to me as I tend to be on the road often, and will be great when I want to tweet out to my peeps about a event, a meeting or just a shout out where hands free is required (driving) or when the 140 character limit of Twitter isn’t reasonable to capture what I want to say.

After the prompt, I speak my tweet, hang up and in typically less than a minute my message appears in my Twitter stream with a TinyUrl that links back to the original message. This link is beneficial in many ways. I can see using this to capture an idea that i need to archive and share, which as a designer happens frequently. Sometimes I feel like Bill Blazejowski from Night Shift: “What if you mix the mayonnaise in the can, WITH the tunafish? Or… hold it! Chuck! I got it! Take LIVE tuna fish, and FEED ‘em mayonnaise! Oh this is great.” [speaks into tape recorder Twitterfone ] “Call Starkist!”

One of the coolest things to me about Twitterfone is that it is all tech driven, as pointed out by Socialized, a social media PR consultancy. The call into Twitterfone is handled by sophisticated AI that transcribes my message into text and posting to my Twitter account. Below is the another Tweet with Twitterfone. It properly transcribed Pomeranians, even knowing to capitalize it, yet choked on the word Guinness (which to me is sort of comical as he is from Cork, Ireland.)

This morning, I called in again to create a Tweet for this article, but was met with mixed results. It could be that a.) Madonna’s new record is on repeat in the studio here, or that b.) the service is still in private beta and the kinks are getting worked out. I would image that the folks at Twitterfone have been working night and day to tweak the intelligence. Just don’t forget what happens when the perfect AI is running the ship.

My call can be heard here, and what I was saying was “I heart Twitterfone and I would say that even if I was paid to.”

But these small items aside, I would say it has been a very successful launch for Twitterfone, and I intend to use it more often in my bag of social media tools and services as I can see the value, both today and in the future as Twitterfone continues to evolve. Congrats goes out to the whole team, who I understand built this application as a “side gig” while running other companies.

I am going to talk with Twitterfone today and see if we can’t wrangle up some hard to find and much sought after Twitterfone Beta invites.

[UPDATED: Shortly after posting, Pat from Twitterfone sent us a couple of invite codes to the private beta. We will pass the codes on to whom ever posts the most insightful comments on any blog posting here at Relevantly Speaking. We will monitor the comments throughout the day, and Scott and I will choose at close of business today (well, since its Friday, we will review it over a happy hour beer or two. Good luck, and we look forward to reading your comments.]

I read Brian Oberkirch’s blog LikeItMatters. Yesterday he brought up a point that I have been pondering for quite a while, and it has stuck with me to the point that I felt I should continue the conversation.

Where is Apple in the social web game, and why isn’t .Mac the hub of all things Apple? As Brian points out, to the Mac faithful they have everything already: my phone, my music players, my calendar, my music, my email, my photos, my TV habits…hell, with a little attention recording they have all my browsing habits as well. And yet none of this is tied up in a neat package supporting or enabling my social web.

Of course I have many accounts at many places for many services, and some have even become my best of breed service or social aggregators, but so far I am still required to cast a wide net to establish my ID, my services and my social web. And yet Apple is the big missing piece in the “Hub of my digital life.”

The saddest part of all of this is that I would happily provide my digital life to Apple as a key demographic influencer and help them create that “Hub” for their entry into the social web in a fashion that could be disruptive and, as is typical of Apple, fairly successful. But without a social media presence I don’t even know who to talk to about this. Could you imagine the increase in loyalty and product penetration Apple could gain if they had a social media following the likes of Zappos? I am not suggesting that Steve take time to send Twitter invites to cocktails with Apple fans, similar to the invite I received yesterday from Zappos, but I do know that if I have an idea or a comment I can get to someone at Zappos through their giant footprint of Zappos employees on Twitter - including Tony, the Zappos CEO.

As an aside, I own the domain whatsonyouriPod (dot) com. I purchased it before iTunes had the ability to create shared playlists or iMixes. I spent months trying to speak with someone at Apple about buying the domain from me. All I wanted was some new equipment and the ability to go “yeah, I gave that to Apple.” After months of emails, phone calls and the like, I gave up. I still own the domain btw if anyone wants to contact me about it.

Anyway, back to the point I was trying to make. Apple, where are you? When are you coming to the party? Fashionably late is one thing, but it feels like a party that was tailor-made for you. And if you are throwing your own party, send my invite to csmith at mediatrust dot com. I would love to bend your ear a tick.

I ran across this video that is making the rounds on the interwebs this morning. Moserious, the “Poetic Prophet” of SEO is a marketing specialist from Pop Labs. He has taken the time to lay down a track about conversion closing. It will be interesting to follow this across the affiliate marketing social networks to see how quickly the prophet (profit?) expands his reach.

“Money don’t grow on trees, at least not it my yard.” Word.

ad:techSF is just around the corner and we will be there again this year after successful events with adtech SF and NYC last year. MediaTrust VP of Social Media, Scott Parent and I will be conducting interviews from the show floor with many of the companies and industry leaders during April 15-17. We also wanted to give you the opportunity to speak with us about your company or your perspective regarding the state of Digital Marketing. We are interested in where you think the  media and advertising industry is heading.  We would love to know what trends interest you in the emerging tech sector and how you think it will impact online marketing. And as SnoopDogg would say, come spit your rhyme about the impact social media is having on your brand.

ad:techSF will be held at The Moscone Center, SF from April 15-17. This years theme is brand strategy and the expanding world of digital marketing. I am looking forward to the keynote with George Klaivkoff, of NBC Universal. He has a pretty cool title, Chief Digital Officer, and oversees digital products across a large variety of media channels.

If you are interested in speaking with us and get your point of view or product featured on this blog, please contact me at csmith at mediatrust dot com. Here is an interview from last years ad:tech with Joseph Giraldi, Director of Marketing for HBO, as he discusses HBO’s podcast strategy with our Chief Marketing Officer Trip Foster.

SOAP? XML? WSDL? Acronyms abound in the world of technology, and the layers of the programming onion continue to get peel back so that individual marketers are required to have at least a high level understanding of what “AJAX” means, and how “web services” impact their success in online advertising.

Internet marketing consultant Carsten Cumbrowski has republished an older collection of resources for affiliates marketers who are interested in understanding the latest developments in internet development topics to include some of the newer methods and technologies that may impact their industry.

You can read his article here. 

While I would love to think that when Matt Galligan, the C-E-OH! of socialthing! read my posting yesterday, and fired up his team to get the “post” functionality on-board the beta offering of socialthing!, it was obviously in the works all along. This morning he let us know that indeed, post functionality to Twitter and Pownce are working, and in the immediate future is the facebook and Jaiku integrations.

He has also provided us with 100 invite codes for you to join the closed beta. First come, first served. The code is “mediatrust”. Enjoy. We would also love your insight into what you think of socialthing!. This now raises the bar for Ping.fm. Are they planning to include a “lifestream” view such as socialthing!? Time will tell. We’ll keep you posted.

I received beta codes for both socialthing! and Ping.fm through the social web, yet both experiences couldn’t have been more different, and yet so similar at the same, again proving that the social web is about interactions that are platform agnostic in intention, but directly tied to the platform or forum that becomes the channel. We met Matt Galligan, founder and C-E-Oh! of socialthing! at SXSW for an interview about the launch of the beta, and how they see themselves in the social media space. After the interview, he gave us a few beta invite codes as well as an invitation to the socialthing! party later that next evening (which we greatly enjoy Matt, thanks!). I received my invite code to Ping.fm from reading my twitter feeds, and although I wasn’t fast enough to get the codes that @chrisbrogan provided, Sean at Ping.fm was kind enough to shoot me off one and I am stoked that he did.

After only a couple of days on both, I am really excited about what I see. To me this is the closest combination to my killer social app that I have used. It is the Pushmi-Pullyu of the social web.

Ping.fm was very easy to hook up. After acquiring my credentials, It was a very simple process to associate my variety of “channels” into my Ping account. I am especially happy that they have added an AIM component as well, so that I can use iChat as my broadcaster. Ping.fm solves attempts to solve the problem of multiple social applications by allowing me to “ping” all of them from one interface, and an interface of my choice. I can text or email into my ping account and have it distributed to my many social footprints.

socialthing! approaches the problem from the other direction. After signing into socialthing! one of the first things i notices was the clever UI that they have used to associate my Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts. Once connected, socialthing! provides for me a Lifestream, an aggregated view of the services I have identified, and allows for a display order that is either time based or user based. A side benefit of socialthing! was that I quickly saw how many “friends” I had collected on Flickr that now, unintentionally, were clogging up my Lifestream. A quick run through of my Flickr friends will clean out those that no longer participated in an active conversation with me, or were no longer of particular interest.

I was recently having a conversation with Brooke, a banker friend of ours, and explaining to her  my perspective on social media applications like socialthing! and Ping.fm. The combination of these two applications fit neatly into her “moment of clarity” when she proclaimed social applications to be a social GPS of sorts. The push distribution of Ping.fm and the pull of socialthing! combined with the triangulation of the content and context of the messages provide for a time, a place, and a perspective based on your knowledge of the author. It tells you exactly “where they are” in a near real-time fashion.

I am clearly going to continue using these services, and will speak with both companies to see if we can acquire a group of invite codes for our readers. Are you using either platform? What are your thoughts? We would love to read your comments. 

As the Creative Director at MediaTrust I am often asked to participate in meetings that will define the impact of the user experience in our ads, campaigns, and interfaces. In fact, later today I have been invited to review the impact of a few changes to data acquisition screens for one of our platforms. Kudos to the engineering team for having the insight to include another perspective before coding changes begin. So often in our industry we see companies focusing on the system, and not the experience of the customer. Which brings me to the story of United Airlines Flight 7326 from Austin to Santa Barbara, connecting through Denver.

If you have been following the blog, you know that Scott and I recently went to Austin for SXSWi. Final day for us there required, of course, that we fly home. We arrived at the airport early,  bought last minute t-shirts from the Waterloo Records outpost, and some snacks and water for the flight. Boarding was typical, with no surprises. And then we sat, waiting at the gate for no apparent reason. And sat. And sat. And sat. It wasn’t until about 30 minutes into the wait that other passengers began to power back up cell phones and make changes to their Denver connections, as most of were going someplace other than the Mile High City. The man behind me loudly proclaimed “They aren’t telling us anything” as he asked his assistant to secure him a later flight back to Seattle.

Why is this important to a blog about media and advertising and community? Over the next 30-40 minutes, we learned that there was an equipment failure. The repair would take about 10 minutes and we would be underway. 15 minutes later we were told that indeed it was an equipment failure and that it would take another 10 minutes to locate the appropriate part, but that they would repair it and get us on the way. Another 10 minutes go by and another status report that the part had been fixed, but it would take another 10-15 minutes to file paperwork regarding the repair. Again, so why is this important to discuss here?

Clear and concise information delivered to the customer as soon as possible and as inclusive as possible would have driven an entirely different brand experience for United Airlines. Passengers were vocal about their complaints of the situation, and began to tell stories of similar experiences with United. That punctuated those bad stories with the good experiences from other carriers. I even overheard passengers changing their already missed connections to other airlines due to the recommendation of disgruntled passengers.

Back to the story. Scott and I landed in Denver, certain that our flight was already gone, and concerned that we would not get into Santa Barbara that night (there tends to be limited fights in and out of the airport there). Lucky for us our connecting flight was delayed due to equipment failure. A part of the landing gear system was being replaced and the plane was being test flown to insure our safety. So we breathed a sigh of relief, sat back, charged our laptops and phones, and ate a quick burrito, again listening to the incremental updates as to when we would board. And true to form United never gave us an inclusive time window for take off. Once we were on the plane, we were again delayed for paperwork reasons, instead of being allowed to wait in the lobby until paperwork was finalized and the plane then boarded. And again, the bashing of United Airlines was the primary conversation in the surrounding seats.

I am a big believer in conversational marketing, and the impact of social media on brands and the branded experience, and certainly UA was getting its share of bad press on Twitter, via email, and on overheard phone calls. We all agreed that we felt relieved that safety was a very big concern from UA, and was actually surprised that they informed us of repair status as it progressed. But their handling of the messaging and the impact of the delays to travelers left much to be desired. We were not greeted by the mythical “gate agent” to inform us as to the status of our connecting flights, instead having to dash down the terminal to find a check-in counter that was a.) manned and b.) without a line of passengers before we understood that our flight was delayed. A broadcast of connecting flight status while we taxied up to Denver would have been helpful. A clear honest evaluation of the time of delay would have also allowed us to plan our wait time much better, and given us a chance to make calls, eat without rushing, or just relax while the mechanics did their thing. Again, a simple exercise in managing the customers expectation would have gone a long way to making a return to the “friendly skies” of United Airlines.

I would love to stop here, and tell you that all was well as we landed in Santa Barbara. We were tired, but grateful that Scott would not miss another night away from his newborn daughter, and that I would be able to make the 90 mile road trip home before midnight. But, it seems that no one notified the baggage crew that our flight from DEN was delayed, and they re-directed our bags to SFO, with the intention of shipping them down to SBA on the first flight in the morning. When we approached to lost baggage counter, the CSR there already knew the status of the misdirected bags and it did not take her long to let us know that we would have the bags no later than one hour after the first plane from SFO had been serviced in SBA. Well, everyone but me of course. 

The following day, at 1 pm, the exact time that I was informed that my bags should have been delivered to my door, I spend the next 40 minutes on hold with the UA lost baggage line, being informed that they did indeed have my bags in SFO and would be sent to me on the next flight. They also told me I could track the bags online from the UA website, which by the way, never showed an update of my bag status during the next 24 hours that it took for me to get my bag to my home.

Repeated calls into the lost baggage service we answered with the same identical transcript. I was meet with the same disinterested inflection from the CSR that they have identified my bag, that it is somewhere in the system and that they are uncertain if it is being delivered by car or if it is still at the airport. Mind you that it is now my wife’s birthday, and her present is securely safe in my bag somewhere in the UA infrastructure, yet they have no way of telling me where, or when I will get to it. I ended up being the guy at the party without the gift from Austin for his wife.

I finally ended up with my bag early Saturday afternoon, the day after my wife’s birthday. I had arrived in SBA Thursday evening. During that time my experience with UA continued to rely on the “status reports” from a set of systems that never seemed to detail current data, that did not take into account my needs or concerns as a traveller, nor was able to provide a timely resolution to the problem. Never once did I demand anything from United Airlines except timely delivery of my luggage. I never once asked for free flights, apologies or drink coupons. I was only thanked for my patience, and told that I should check back in a few hours to see if there is any more information regarding my luggage. I was never offered a solution, a pair of tickets to anywhere in the continental U.S. or a phone call from a department supervisor.

Managing the customer expectation of your brand is one of the most important things any company can do today. This includes what happens after the ticket is sold, at every touchpoint in the value chain of a brand’s customer experience lifecycle at every interaction, whether online, offline or on the phone.

A member of the cabin crew made an announcement shortly after we arrived in Santa Barbara. They said that they recognize that I had choices in my selection of an air travel partner and thanked me for choosing United.

Personally, I felt like I chose wrong.

Just wanted to provide a quick update on Day 3 of SXSWi. Earlier today I spoke with David Merkoski,the creative director of the SF office of frog design. David invited us over to the Austin offices where we spoke about the impact that design and the design process has on  the future of social media.

What really impressed me was that even though David had an open forum to plug his company, his focus of the conversation was all about the strategic thinking regarding products and services, and about the opportunities in the space that using a design language can reveal. His company obviously gets it. It is bright people like David, who are engaged in the design of the future of social media, whether it is integrated at a industrial design level, or in the development of a tag line for an emerging technology that continues to drive innovation in the this space. Look for this interview shortly, and for more insight into the convergent design philosophy of frog, visit the frogblog.