Gary Milner, who runs interactive advertising at Lenovo, has opened up a blog.
Gary is by far, with no argument, the best digital advertising expert I’ve ever worked with. His insights into metrics, ad ops, optimization, and the hairier details of how to make every cent in a digital campaign be accountable is going to be invaluable.
I use TweetDeck to follow mentions of ThinkPad and Lenovo on Twitter. For the past few weeks a new phenomenon has popped up, one that confuses me to no end.
So we have a user @moon, who tweets, fairly frequently, variations on the following message:
” On Monday Groundhog Day I’m giving away a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 RT @moon 3 times and be the first to RT a selected Tweet on GHD”
Then he posts variations of that promotion by inserting the name of a well known “A-list” blogger or Twitterer — like @chrisbrogan or @scoble.
1. I don’t know what GHD is. [duh: GHD=Ground Hog Day]
2. I have no clue who Paul Mooney is. He has a website http://www.neuronspark.com but I can’t figure out what the business is. There are tons of affiliate marketing links on the right sidebar.
3. Why would he give away a $400 netbook? Is this an example of a grassroots promotion and by running his own contest he hopes to get more attention to his twitter ID and hence more followers?
4. Why is he inserting the names of @twitter celebrities?
It is very effective — @moon has dominated the Lenovo brand name in Twitter for a month, has induced tons of people to “RT” his giveaway, and in the end, got my attention, for I am writing this blog post, and sent him a direct ping asking “what is compelling you to give away the S10” and observing: “moon: Why do you retweet your giveaway to every social media person like chrisheuer, jowyang, etc? Seems like spam at this point”
He replied: “I know chrisheuer and jowyang so I was hoping they would reTweet the giveaway.”
And I said: “moon: just concerned because of Dec. KMART incident with XXXXXX and Izea/Payperpost people. Don’t want lenovo associated with that”
To which he replied he wanted to do the promo with Lenovo.
So here’s the observation. If you manage a brand online, get ready for people to leverage it — both professional and personal — for their own gain.The big question is whether to grease the skids and enable it, stand by and watch it happen, or send in the clowns and get all legal.
The question is this: should I be giving product to bloggers and twitter users to activate this sort of self-managed promotion/contest or am I on shaky legal/ethical ground? I did rip into the “Blog Slut” phenomenon and don’t want to demean the Lenovo brand name by getting into any kind of payola arrangements. That aside, @moon has pounded the word Lenovo and gotten other people to Tweet it far more than the usual organic flow of the conversation would have. So should I shut up and be happy for the free branding?
Brands run into this with affiliate marketing programs all the time. If you give people an incentive to market on your behalf you may not be happy with their techniques they use to do it. This one just has me perplexed.
As one twitter user just said to my ardeht Lenovo promoter: “@moon This is a very clever promotion you’re running. Bet you’ll get lots of new followers and interest in what you do.”
I have a new job at Lenovo and figured since a few partners, customers, and suppliers read this blog, it might be efficient to take a crack here in public at describing what it is that I do.
Some background. Every year the executive ranks at the company are presented to the CEO and senior vice president of human resources in a process known as the “OHRP. ” I don’t know what that acronym means exactly, but it is the one time a year I get asked “what does Dave want to do next?” I get talked about but I am not in the room.
The OHRP form — an Excel template — first gets filled out by me. I first did the onanistic-assessment thing to myself at McKinsey where evaluation and feedback is the backbone of the Firm.
One of the fields on the OHRP is essentially the question I dread: “What do you want to do with your life?” I dunno. This year’s OHRP, with me coming down and back from the Beijing Olympics, I wrote: “Work in China” and “Focus more on blogging and social media marketing.”
I got my wish. Coming into this new year, Lenovo did a reorganization of marketing with the result that I now divide my time pretty much between two things:
I give up a few things and the following things no longer apply but I remain an interested party and bystander to the following former responsibilities:
There it is. I move from the bottom to the top of the marketing “funnel” and I get to do somethingwith people with titles like “Distinguished Engineer” and “Visionary.”
New year, new challenges, some regrets, but a lot of excitement.
My first pate de campagne is in the oven, cooking slowly in a bain marie, assembled per the recipe in my new favorite cookbook, Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. This is basically a French meatloaf, but a really, really, really good meatloaf. Pate has the reputation of being cruel liverwurst because of the iconic cliche of pate de fois gras, but the campagne version is the country version of essentially a big pork sausage without the casing, sliced, and served cold.
I’ve been itching to make one since an unforgotten meal some ten years ago in Paris, with my wife’s godfather, at a little hole in the wall in a neighborhood somewhere on the southwestern side of the city. We sat down and the waiter brought over a terrine — a rectangular earthenware container — with a baguette and knife. I dug in and have been on a crusade to find that experience ever since.
I had to buy a meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid mixer, and I just nuked the kitchen putting the recipe together, but little does my poor wife know what lies in store for I also purchased the sausage stuffing attachment so I can get real serious and start pumping out some andouille and other smoked tubes of goodness. I won’t be doing the salami, dry-cured stuff. Flirting with botulism is not my idea of culinary fun. Now I have to hit up my nephew for use of his mega-smoker that he got for Christmas a few years ago. This book has it all — how to use every part of the pig except for the veritable squeal.
Monday – Cotuit – half-day, some personal stuff in the PM
Tuesday-Wed. : Cotuit
Thursday: possible California quick trip, if not Cotuit
Friday-Sunday: Cotuit
Following week: Seattle