Of course he’s smiling - he’s about to get a free watch!

So our team was notified today that Barack Obama wants his very own Obama watch! That’s right, the senator from Illinois had his people call us to see if we could meet with him in the near future to present him with his very own Obama watch.

Obviously we’re all very excited, and have scheduled a trip down to Philadelphia on Friday to meet with the candidate. The viral campaign we put together wasn’t the best I’ve seen, but we wanted something that involved watches. More importantly, it’s starting to generate a bunch of press, and a ton of word of mouth traffic.

After all, the watches are already in the Smithsonian, and they’re going to be in Obama’s hands on Friday. That’s not too shabby for a marketing budget of about $250.

This is my favorite of the five watches, and it’s now officially part of the Smithsonian collection!

I’ve been getting emails all morning asking me if the rumors of the Obama watches getting inducted into the Smithsonian collection are true, and yes, they are.

On Thursday, May 22nd, three of the Obama watches were inducted into the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American History. I’m not sure if this is the first viral marketing campaign to be inducted into the Smithsonian, but they are officially there.

Obviously I’m very excited to have been a part of this effort! I was very excited by the news, and it’s nice to see my name getting thrown around on some of the bigger blogs, such as this one today on the Huffington Post.

Just another fine example of how viral marketing is a very powerful option when used properly.

Seach engine results and SEO are important to most marketing, but not always.

I’m involved with a viral marketing campaign right now for ObamaWatches.com, an effort to help Barack Obama get elected President of the United States. During the process, others on the team keep asking how we can increase our search engine results.

My answer is always, “Who cares?”

When you’re putting together a viral effort, the first thing you have to stop worrying about is search engine results for one simple reason: if the viral works, SEO planning won’t matter because people will spread it on their own. And if the viral doesn’t work, even being first on a search isn’t going to help.

For example, who is going to search for “Obama Watches” unless they know about the viral effort?  If the viral worked, the odds are that the person already has the link to the web site.  As it is, a Google search already returns ObamaWatches.com as the #1 search result.  And why wouldn’t it?  The site is named the search term, and there really isn’t that much competition for those key words.

This campaign is designed to be shared primarily over the web, which means people will be forwarding the URL.  The second concern was a literal Word of Mouth (WOM) effort, where people would physically be talking about it — and the success on that has more to do with the ease of remembering the domain name (ObamaWatches.com) than with being easy to find on a Google search.

So in the end, if we have to choose to spending some of our limited resources on a new targeting online effort, or in increasing our search engine results, there’s no question that SEO efforts will not even be considered.

Less attention should be spent on boob commercials while more attention is spent on good IA and efforts to increase the bottom line.  Bob can (and should) pick up on these once the IA is improved.

Information architecture is absolutely crucial to any campaign, not just interactive ones. When a key element is a web site, however, a significant investment in IA, both in terms of time and money, must be made. More importantly, it must be done well ahead of any other work, including design and promotions. Mapping out your services, user flows (and reverse flows), transaction processes, and interface elements are just some of the many key elements to good information architecture.

For example, long before anybody at GoDaddy was talking about their Superbowl commercials, they should have measured their web site and services twice before developing them. *Any* online business should go through an exhaustive IA process before any kind of designs are discussed. If there is a design comp being presented before the IA phase is finished, the process is already a failure.

To see a lack of thorough IA work, simply take a look at GoDaddy’s web hosting services. For $6.99 a month, you can buy the Deluxe hosting plan which gives you 100 gigabytes of space, 1000 email addresses, and UNLIMITED web sites. Such a plan is perfect for a web designer who has many small business clients (such as a restaurant up the street, and a local hardware store). The problem is that all of these UNLIMITED web sites can’t have their own domain email addresses. The 1000 advertised email addresses only work for one domain. The web sites are actually limited by the email.

In order to have customized email for each domain, they will each have to pay to buy additional email plans. In the end, 999 of the 1000 included email addresses cannot be used, and each business has to buy 100 additional email addresses.

Another example of terrible IA comes in the form of the way GoDaddy supports its customers. GoDaddy’s internal IA presumes that every customer using their services points his or her domain name(s) to the GoDaddy web servers. If they don’t point their domain names to the GoDaddy servers, some services don’t work properly. This is important because good web developers use development servers to build sites before they go live. If I were to open an account with GoDaddy to build a new site for a current client, many of the features GoDaddy offers (such as statistics) won’t function properly unless the domain name is pointed to that server.

This poses a problem because the developer cannot use the tools he or she is paying for. If the developer does point the domain name, customers are no longer looking at the official live site, but rather a construction zone.

Are these big deals? Absolutely. Have you tried to use the GoDaddy site? It’s confusing enough as it is. Even though they offer some of the coolest services around, they’re incredibly inflexible, and require you to jump through hoops. They’ve probably got the best customer service staff in the world, but the best customer service is when your customers don’t need to call for help.

I like Bob Parsons, and I think he’s doing a great job. I wouldn’t have written all this if I didn’t think he had the ability to fix everything and make GoDaddy even bigger than it is today. Still, current success is no excuse for the bush league mistakes GoDaddy has made, and continues to ignore. For the record, I wrote GoDaddy about this over a year ago, and these have yet to be fixed.

Former spam king Vardan Kushnir (shown here with a friend) loves OMMA and the IAB.

I just find this hysterical.

The Online Media, Marketing & Advertising (OMMA) folks send out so much email it’s beyond annoying. I tend to ignore them now, but it seems that every day they’re emailing me to attend some conference, seminar, or awards show. How many of these things do they throw, anyway?

What’s ironic and funny about this is the folks at OMMA are supposed to be teaching us proper and responsible online marketing, yet they’re spamming almost as much as the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Victory from the Ford Challenge is not this sweet.

An archipelago is a group of islands. Examples of archipelagos include Indonesia, the Philippines, and the many walled-off sections of the Ford Motor Company marketing department.

After not being able to figure out what the Ford Challenge was (see my post from yesterday on the issue), I decided to call Ford’s Customer Relationship Center. My call was handled by Penny, arguably the nicest and most helpful customer service person with whom I have ever had the pleasure of speaking.

She told me she worked in the marketing department, and after I asked what the Ford Challenge was, she quickly told me that she had absolutely no idea!

I can’t make this stuff up!

Penny had to call her supervisor over, and the two of them flipped through the Ford web site, and called a few other marketing people over to help them out. That’s right, the customer-facing marketing department at Ford had no idea what their own company was doing. Mind you, this isn’t something that was just cooked up. The Ford Challenge campaign has been going on for at least two months.

According to Penny, the Ford Challenge is that Ford is challenging you to go on a test drive. She says you don’t win anything if you complete the challenge, and that there is no difference between their standard test drives, and Ford Challenge test drives.

She wasn’t 100% sure, as it was a different marketing department that came up with that, but that was her best guess. I kid you not.

This may be the Ford Challenge.

Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

I decided to visit the web site for the Ford Motor Company today. I made may way over to the Ford brand, and was bombarded with language telling me to take the Ford Challenge. There was just one problem:

Nowhere on the site does Ford tell you clearly what the Ford Challenge is. Go ahead and visit www.fordchallenge.com — click on the Mustang like I did. You won’t see anything telling you what the challenge actually is! Is it a pie eating contest? What’s the prize if you win?

To get some more information, I filled out the online form signing up for the challenge. I also unchecked the box for the email opt-in, thusly opting out of any emails from Ford.

About ten minutes later, I got my first email from Ford! Obviously they are having trouble communicating, so I read the email, and sure enough on the bottom was a line saying that if I had any comments on the service, I should write to wecare@fordmotorcompany.com. I clicked on the link and sent them an email.

And the email bounced. The address isn’t set up at Ford.

Can you see where I’m going with this? These aren’t just some small oversights in the online marketing department. This is the tip of the spear of their new effort, and it’s completely blunted by shoddy work, and a complete lack of detail and quality assurance.

Obviously quality is no longer job #1, and they haven’t made any bold moves. Does Ford even know who they are?

Bells and whistles can often cause more confusion than value, as this illustration by Neil Swaab so clearly shows.

Salesforce.com and Google have announced that they are in talks about creating a partnership. Salesforce.com is a leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

Obviously this agreement is good news to anybody holding Salesforce stock, but is it really going to be a boon to their customers? What is Google offering that makes the experience better than it already is?

The two companies have two big things in common: both hate Microsoft, and both offer their products as online applications. Google is probably salivating that they could offer CRM software online as part of this agreement, but once again, how does this benefit a current Salesforce customer?

On the surface it looks like it could help increase customers for Salesforce. But are there any professional sales folks out there that still don’t know what CRM is, or that Salesforce is an option? I’m wondering if the partnership isn’t going to be more change for change’s sake in the eyes of current Salesforce customers, and if it “Adobe Photoshops” the current online application — whereby they add so much Google stuff to the application that it has too many bells and whistles (ala Adobe Photoshop to the average professional).

Clowns cause problems at all levels, and some companies, like ABC, even hire them for the executive board.

Senior staff at both ABC and ESPN announced recently that they absolutely loathe their jobs, and would like to be fired. The announcement came at the tail end of an announcement that the Disney-owned companies had reached a deal with Cox to inhibit the fast forwarding option on VOD programming for the two networks.

Mike Shaw, the president of advertising sales at ABC, has been fighting to disable fast forwarding for digital video recorders (DVR) for years. “When I was younger, a clown once attacked me while I was fast forwarding through a scene of The Warriors,” explained Shaw. “Now, when I see anybody fast forwarding, or juggling while in makeup, I have flashbacks.”

Because this move flies in the face of the entire purpose of DVR consumer sales, industry insiders see it as further proof the ABC and ESPN senior staff are serious about their desire to be fired.

“We’ve known for years that the television execs are overpaid morons completely out of touch with society,” explained BMW North America marketing boss Jack Pitney. “Both VOD and DVR systems bring a whole new set of creative options to us to create positive user experiences. Let’s face it, we created BMW Films on the Web before there was a MySpace or a YouTube. We don’t need, nor want, television commercials rammed down the throats of our customers.”

Cable companies like Cox have been using the fast forwarding option as a huge selling point for their DVR service for years. This new agreement opens up a new chapter of bait-and-switch sales tactics for Cox.

“We’re thinking about next automatically downgrading our high-speed Internet connections to dial-up levels,” said Cox Chief People Officer Mae A. Douglas. “Let’s face it, our job isn’t to provide the services we claim. Our job is to make money. So if I need to call myself the Chief People Officer, and then screw the people over, so be it.”

Remember when measurement devices were really simple?

Experiential marketing genius Erik Hauser from Swivel Media published a study recently to help framework what marketers are doing these days in regards to experiential marketing. One of the aspects of this really interesting publication is the use of the term Cost Per Touch, which means the amount of money it costs to get a potential customer to experience a specific brand or product.

Although the term very regularly means the customer if literally touching the product, that isn’t always neccessary to get a positive brand experience.

I wonder if this new term is brilliant or confusing. I see many positive values, in that being able to prove how many people physically interact with your product is a huge selling point. Salespeople have known for years that getting the customer to sit in the car, or hold a product is a huge step towards getting them to buy something. Likewise, smart marketers are aware of this, and a metric that can show how they are achieving this can be very helpful in managing marketing and advertising dollars.

On the other hand, are all of the “Cost Per” metrics useful in the long run? The most important one, Cost Per Acquisition, is the only one that measures actual sales. What good is a Cost Per Eyeball of five dollars or a Cost Per Touch of eight dollars if neither converts into a customer opening his or her wallet?

Right now, Cost Per Touch seems like a smart short-term way to help the experiential marketing guys pull the wool from the eyes of marketers who don’t see the gigantic value in experiential tactics. In the long-term, though, I think the war is going to be won by the agencies and shops that do away with metricky garbly gook, and have one measurement: how much money they helped their clients bring in.