What if Foursquare ran its customer service like CitiBank Visa…?

@4sqpimp: I got a call today from Brad, my Foursquare rep. I was really surprised. Since when does a location-based service company call its customers?

Brad: I identified some unusual activity on @4sqpimp’s account. Sometimes these kinds of transactions are perfectly normal. Other times they signal a potential problem with the account.

@4sqpimp: Brad asked me about my recent check-ins. He pointed out that he noticed a rapid increase in check-ins, and what he called “high risk check-in behaviors.”

Brad: Spurious check-ins cost consumers millions of dollars, and worse still, hundreds of thousands of fraudulently obtained mayorships every year, so we watch for certain patterns. I noticed for example every morning around 8:15, @4sqpimp checked in at the Skyview Animal Hospital. At first, I was really worried that @4sqpimp had a sick pet, but after 90 days, I checked his file and found he had no pets.

Brad from Foursquare customer service

@4sqpimp: Brad wanted to make sure that I wasn’t erroneously given credit for check-ins that weren’t mine. He asked how I could check in simultaneously at two different places three miles apart from each other. I explained this often happened since I lived right on the line between two time zones and I have a pretty fast car.

Brad: There were other “red flags” on @4sqpimp’s account. Check-ins at places that had ceased to exist. Questionable locations like “around the corner” and “in the kitchen.” After we reviewed all of @4sqpimp’s check-ins, I thanked him for his time. He seemed to appreciate the interest we took in protecting his account.

@4sqpimp: When we finished the call, I was really happy Brad had gotten in touch with me. It seems like Foursquare really cares about me as an individual. It’s good to know that I can go through my day checking in whenever I feel like it, knowing that the integrity of my account, and each and every check-in, is protected from abuse by the good people at Foursquare.

Tags: foursquare, fraudulent, check-ins, location-based

Now that I have your attention, this isn’t really about Jesus, but he factors in. I was chatting with a friend about the motivations behind the sensationalistic and predictable headlines bloggers use to attract attention.

The simplest explanation is that the system is gamed. People write what they write to draw readers, because they participate in affiliate advertising and get paid for clicks, because they are attention whores who get personal validation and an adrenaline rush from increasing blog traffic, or both.

This leads to a style of writing more akin to that found in advertising than in editorial designed to attract attention, create controversy and improve search engine rankings. I have a presentation called “Fear and Loathing in the Global Village.” It’s about things like affiliate marketing programs, paid endorsements, and other hidden forces in social media that consumers and business/organizational users need to understand. I could have called it “A Guide to Fair and Effective Social Media Campaigns,” but who would attend that talk?

So a certain style of titling blog posts and articles has evolved. Sensationalism and contrariness is popular. Don’t title your post “Why Social Networking Offers a Promising Alternative to Email.” Call it “Email is Dead, Dumbass” or “Only Losers Use Email.” Watch your numbers improve.

Incidentally, the “is dead” meme is still extremely popular after many years of faithful service in the blogosphere. Postulate that anything is dead, lame, irrelevant or worthless and you are on your way to Google Analytics heaven.

Numbered lists are also very effective, and should either be lists of five or of ten items. I know from experience and from chatting with a former Google engineer that Google’s algorithm “likes” numbered lists. They rise in search rankings. People also like odd numbers, particularly threes, fives and sevens. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but when a comedian, for example, is talking about a long line, he/she might say “there were like a hundred and twenty seven people in line,” but would never say “there were like one hundred people in line” or even less likely “there were one hundred and twenty five people in line.”* Odd numbers seem to us chosen by nature and by the order of things while even numbers seem the arbitrary invention of man, so odd numbers are more credible.

Regarding threes, note that the table companions in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper are grouped in threes, an obvious reference to the holy trinity. Have you ever seen a PowerPoint slide with two bullet points? Or four? Three is better. Five is spot on. You’re proibably thinking, “Joel, Leonardo was not actually present at the Last Supper, nor did he know how to use PowerPoint.” True. But I promised to bring the discussion back to my headline.

Given all this, what is the ideal number for a numbered list? Three items feels like too few, seven is too many, so five is the number, and there are roughly 53,617,219 blog posts titled “5 Ways to Improve Engagement,” “Five Plug-Ins You Can’t Live Without,” etc. David Letterman and God/Moses validated the Top 10 List concept, so that one’s good, too, but can be a lot more work than five.

Combine the list-of-five with some controversy and watch what happens. Don’t write about “Five Missing iPad Features.” Try instead “The Five iPad Features Steve Jobs Doesn’t Want You to Have” and you have a winning headline.

There are many other blog post headline writing techniques. These are just a few of the easiest and most popular. Which doesn’t mean I am going to stop using them.

So was this post, and its headline, designed simply to get your attention and drive traffic to my blog? It’s one of those infinitely recursive cycles of thinking that will not end well.

* Good catch by @philkirby who wisely points out that 125 is an odd number. My thinking here was that in the decimal-based counting of people (and money), numbers that end in zero and five seem too tidy to be random.

Earlier this week I found myself in a room full of executives debating the proper pronunciation of the word “innovative.” This was a fairly global group, with a couple of people from the U.K., one from Germany, a couple from the U.S. and so on. The discussion soon strayed to other words like advertisement and negotiate.

This took me back to a time 25 years ago when I sat in a pub in London with five guys talking about word meanings and origins. Having come up through British schools, these guys all had an education in Latin which really helped all of us understand so many word roots. Even though we were many pints into the evening, we had a great time exploring language, very enthusiastically, very contentiously, and very loudly.

That night took me back even a bit further to college, when I would sit with friends in a cafe, wired on too much coffee (mind altering substances always play a role it seems), talking about language, politics, art, and music.

Social media can go a long way to recreating these kinds of lively discussions, but not all the way. There is nothing like a freewheeling discussion, in person, with a boisterous group of people who respect each other and have something to say. I plan on continuing to have those kinds of discussions whenever I can.

From a communications standpoint, BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward’s statements today on BBC television were absolutely perfect. This is an amazing PR case study and one thousands of communications professionals can learn from. To see it as such in no way diminishes the horror BP has unleashed in the Gulf, or the role that Hayward may have played in letting that happen.

Hayward said he won’t step down over the spill, although many sources believe he may be forced to.

According to the AP, he said:

“We are going to stop the leak. We’re going to clean up the oil, we’re going to remediate any environmental damage and we are going to return the Gulf coast to the position it was in prior to this event. That’s an absolute commitment, we will be there long after the media has gone, making good on our promises.”

This is, in my mind, a masterful statement. First, it goes as far as any public company reasonably could at this point in a crisis. It would be nice to hear how much money was committed to the effort. It would also be nice to hear something like “we’re sorry,” but that’s just not going to happen. But he has certainly outlined a roadmap that’s pretty darn strong compared with others announced by executives and public officials in similar situations. Did we hear anything like this from FEMA officials in the days immediately after Katrina?

He’s also made his leadership position clear. He’s implying responsibility for the spill by clearly articulating a commitment to the cleanup. He’s said he isn’t going to step down, and I wouldn’t either. To do so would obviously be an admission of failure, but it would also be a failure to accept responsibility for his and the company’s mistakes. He is saying, in essence, I helped screw it up, I’m going to stay (as long as I can) and try to make things right. Finally, and this is a very interesting bit and perhaps the most controversial of his statement, he takes a not-so-subtle shot at journalists, saying “we will be there long after the media is gone.”

There are almost as many predictions as commitments in Hayward’s statement. It will be interesting to look back on this six months from now.

Tags: BP, Tony Hayward, FEMA, Katrina, Gulf Oil Spill, cleanup

That seems to be the basic premise of a recent post by Leroy Stick, the creator of the wildly popular Twitter account @BPGlobalPR, a biting satire of British Petroleum’s feeble PR (and clean-up) efforts in one of the worst toxic incidents in world history.

Stick is an awesome writer, and @BPGlobalPR is a superlative bit of parody that is actually doing some good.

But I think he doesn’t grasp the modern meaning of “brand” when he writes:

“FORGET YOUR BRAND. You don’t own it because it is literally nothing.  You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion, but ultimately, that’s up to the public, now isn’t it?”

This is a non-sequitur. I think nearly every smart PR person would agree with the second part, that the public isn’t greatly influenced by “manufactured” opinion. But nearly every smart PR person also recognizes what a tiny portion of “the brand” comes from PR. The brand, by a modern definition, is EVERYTHING. For some companies, it’s all they have.

David Ogilvy, the “father of advertising,” defined a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.” (Italics mine.) He was in the advertising business, and he put five brand attributes ahead of advertising in his definition.

I define a brand as “the sum total of our experiences with a company, its products, services and employees, and the way those experiences shape our perception of the company.”

American Girl is not a brand of doll. It is a brand experience. The dolls, the clothes, the tea parties, the experiences mothers and daughters have at the American Girl store are all part of a very carefully designed and managed experience. This experience and the American Girl brand are one in the same. It’s what allows the company to sell a doll for $135 that would sell for $25 anywhere else on the planet. Do you think they’re going to forget their brand? (For more on this read Joe Pine and James Gilmore’s excellent The Experience Economy.)

Brand equity is measurable. Many Fortune 500 companies have brands that are independently valued in the billions of dollars.

I agree with Stick when he writes:

“You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand?  Have a respectable brand.  Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions.”

Yes! Those are the attributes of a great brand. And no amount of good or bad PR, marketing, advertising, or social media can change the essential nature of a company.

Tags: BP, gulf oil spill, brand, branding, @BPGlobalPR, Leroy Stick, David Ogilvy