The +1 convention of voting up a post, recently made popular by Google both in Google Plus and within search results, may seem new and shiny but turns out to be at least 15 years old.

I mentioned today on Twitter that I thought the use of the expression “+1″ was becoming the new universal “Like” or “I ♥”. My friend vruz responded that it originated with the Apache Foundation, and sent me a link to a 1995 document describing Apache voting rules & guidelines which includes the following:

+1 Yes, agree, or the action should be performed. On some issues, this vote must only be given after the voter has tested the action on their own system(s).

It’s all in how you package it. And I stand behind my original observation that the use of +1 as an expression meaning “I like this” or “I approve” has only recently become widespread among non-geeks, but obviously +1ing has been going on for a long time.

Tags: plus one, 1, Google Plus, Apache

Every word matters. Whether you’re writing to persuade, to inform, or entertain, nearly every word choice affects the meaning of your message. This is especially important in today’s foreshortened communications environments like Twitter, Web banners, SMS, and advertising taglines.

A couple years ago I wrote a competitive response for internal use by a client. The first version began, “You’ve probably heard about company X’s campaign…”. I changed it instead to “Many of you might have heard about company X’s campaign…” The change was subtle but intentional. The first version implies that Company X’s campaign was so successful that everyone had of course heard of it. The second version softens its impact to imply that awareness of the campaign was spotty (the message we meant to convey.)

I like to look for examples everywhere of how seemingly small choices of words influence the effectiveness of a message. (For this and other reasons it can be annoying to be around me as I critique every written message I encounter.) For example:

eBay Listing: We didn’t get to be number #1 by deserving poor feedback!! By structuring the sentence this way, the seller recognizes customer feedback is an outcome of the way he does business, not a passive customer activity over which he has no control. Typically, a seller would boast, “look at our positive feedback,” which is passive, and not as powerful as taking ownership of responsibility for customer satisfaction, as this seller has. By tweaking the wording, the meaning has undergone radical change.

Radio Spot: You’ll enjoy the convenient monthly payments! I actually heard that on the radio. Really? I can’t ever recall enjoying payments of any kind unless they were payments made to me.

Lettering on Truck: Delivering Fresh Foodservice Solutions

Why not just “Food”? I see what Ledyard is trying to do with this. It’s clever, but unless you’re a food service insider, it’s potentially redundant and doesn’t make good use of language. Let’s look at each of the four words.

Delivering: This is a double entendre. The company “delivers” products and services by creating and packaging them and the truck physically delivers them to customers. Every food company does these things, so the word tells people little.

Fresh: This is my favorite word here. Delivering stale food is probably a flawed business model, so this is also potentially redundant, but a nice thing about which to remind customers. (Also a double entendre as applied to solutions, implying the company looks at its business in a fresh way.)

Foodservice: Don’t try to use this word in Scrabble. It’s invented.

Solutions: The worst. “Solutions” is a worn out business cliché. And who says a business that needs food delivered has a problem? I like to think of my business as one that is thriving and needs suppliers of goods and services. Why must people insist they are solving my problems?

Airline Tagline: Delta Will Get You There This is a classic from the 1980s. What kind of promise is that? Delta won’t crash? Other airlines won’t get you there? It’s kind of weird.

Taglines are the ultimate in refined word choice. The very best use two or three words to tell a complex brand story. An article last year in Forbes looked at some of the best advertising taglines, and commended BMW (The Ultimate Driving Machine), Nike (Just Do It), and Verizon (Can You Hear Me Now?). Also mentioned is Apple’s “Think Different,” which Grammar Girl says may be grammatically incorrect depending on what you think the slogan means.

Do you have any favorite examples of the power of words, good, bad or ugly? Please leave a comment below!

Tags: words, messages, messagin,, effective communications

Like me, maybe you’ve been reading about clout, Klout or KLOWT. Traditionally the word means influence or power. It now refers to a complex measurement of a person’s or company’s social media influence.

It has been said that one of the nicest things about industry standards is there are so many to choose from. The same would hold true for definitions of clout. Klout, which touts itself as the Standard for Influence, explains its calculations on its web site.

This post was triggered by a question on Quora: “How many types of web content are now affected by social credibility, increasingly known as ‘clout’?” (If you haven’t used Quora, it’s typical for well-meaning people to introduce into evidence facts not yet established by inserting them into the question.)

I was struck by the similarity of approach and sharp contrast in details found in the first two responses. Lee Traupel defines the kinds of content and other factors that contribute to or are affected by clout as:

• Number of Social Connections
• Content Repeats: Likes, RTs, Mentions, Reviews, Criticisms
• Digital Outreach via Blog, Social Accounts
• Measurement of Social Presence (Platforms & Communities)
• Content Creation and Curation Activities (Blog, YouTube, Social Accounts)
• Interconnectivity via Social Stream (not Connections)
• Popularity of Community Content where Content is Published
• Growth Components of Social Presence (Accounts & Communities)

and indicates this will grow and change. Brian Mickley offers this list:

• Certainly, Quora ‘likes’
• Shopping recommendations online
• Links to web sites recommended socially by ‘the crowd’
• YouTube views - going viral
• Emails forwarded virtually around the world in hours
• Forums - MrExcel.com had 906 online when I visited recently
• Microsoft MVPs and similar programs

Today, (no fault of Lee or Brian who have both done a good job helping the rest of us understand this), I see the world of clout calculation:

The idea of clout seems to be an extension of the original extended Twitter influence notion, that influence was not determined simply by how many followers you have, but additionally, by how many followers they have, and how often you are retweeted.

All of the factors Brian and Lee mention will to some degree influence people, but many of these are tautologies. Let’s take content creation. If you write something and post it on your blog, you may end up influencing people. But to say that content creation is a measure of influence is to say that activities that influence people tend to be influential.

The larger problem is that these measurements are being bought and sold, and are being used as the measure of value of a blog, Twitter account or Facebook page. But without a standardized measurement system, the measurements themselves are interesting at best and of no comparative use.

I am just as skeptical about “clout” as I was (and still am) about the original influence idea. If you are in social media for business purposes, influence means you have moved someone to take an action that is strategic to your business. That could be a purchase, a subscription, a membership, a referral, a request to the company for additional information. You could have 20000 Twitter followers and 1 million views of your YouTube video with 275000 retweets, but if no one is buying your product, your influence is ZERO.

Tags: clout, klout, social media influence

Interesting piece in the Baltimore Sun by Garrison Keillor on the death of publishing and intellectualism. The best part of the piece is the title “When everyone’s a writer, no one is.” Keillor simultaneously applauds and mocks (more of the latter I think) the number of people writing online and the freedom with which they can write, and with which readers (implying low attention spans and lack of commitment) can freely skip from place to place.

I don’t completely agree with Keillor, and although it is indisputable that there is a lot of crap writing on blogs and social networks, so it went with web sites, newspapers before that, vellum manuscripts (did you see that s**t Brother Jonathan illuminated yesterday?), and so on.

Keillor takes on the self-publishing movement (as might any author of a “real” book):

“And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a website. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.”

Ironically, his pull as a writer is being used to draw people to the Baltimore Sun web site which is supported by Google contextual ads that supposedly complement the editorial content. Here are the ads that ran alongside Keillor’s piece:

Tags: Garrison Keillor, writing, self-publishing, lulu

Last month I took my daughter to 31-Cent Scoop Night at Baskin Robbins. I was so impressed with how effectively the company used social media to promote 31-Cent Scoop Night, I got in touch with them and did an e-mail interview with one of their PR managers. (The interview is a little later on in this post).

The landing page for 31-Cent Scoop Night breaks an old school Web marketing rule: Keep people on your site. Below the two girls is a link to a Facebook page, and to the right, links to Facebook and Twitter.

How did I find out about 31-Cent Scoop Night? It was all over Twitter and Facebook. And I mean all over. I saw someone tweet about it, and I retweeted it. So it went to all my Twitter followers and then over to FriendFeed and Facebook. With a couple of clicks, I sent Baskin Robbins’ promotion to thousands of people who sent it to thousands of people…

On 31-Cent Scoop Night customers can get up to three scoops of ice cream for just 31 cents a scoop. It’s a brilliant promotion that fills BR stores around the country, but more brilliant still when built on a social media platform.

I asked Andrew Mastrangelo, Manager, Public Relations, for Baskin Robbins, a few questions about 31-Cent Scoop Night and social media at the company:

Joel: Who is responsible for Baskin-Robbins’ social media strategy, and what is it?

Andrew: Baskin-Robbins’ social media strategy is a natural build on our traditional media outreach strategy.  We engage consumers through conversation about the brand and products, rather than push out product information.  We converse through many online platforms including Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, but are always looking for new ways to strike up a conversation with our fans.

Joel: Is the network of Baskin-Robbins social media something that was carefully planned, or does it work well because that’s just the way social media works?

Andrew: Honestly, a mix of both.  Social media works because it’s founded on the idea of everyday people talking about everyday things.  People naturally want to share stories about their recent trip to a Baskin-Robbins store and talk with others about their favorite flavors.  We set up a fan page and a Twitter handle so people have ways to speak to their brand and fellow fans about their experiences.  Being a fun and outgoing brand, we can easily fit into that conversation and even suggest new flavors for fans to try.  If social media didn’t work, we’d be talking to ourselves.  And if we didn’t have a strategy, no one would be responding to fans.

Joel: Has social media contributed significantly to the success of 31 Cent Scoop Night?

Andrew: Word of mouth marketing is one of the top trending ways that people get news.  Social media, specifically Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, is a great way to help spread the word about brands and events such as 31 Cent Scoop Night.  We highly attribute our success to tactics such as the Donate Your Status application, Facebook event page, 31 Cent Scoop Night Twitter background, 31 Cent Scoop Night Facebook page, consistent updating and encouraging fans to post pictures during the event.  Facebook users can easily “like” a friend’s status, RSVP to the event, and fan the Facebook page.  Twitter users can @reply the handle or retweet a post at the click of a button.  As a result, Baskin-Robbins 31 Cent Scoop Night as the #1 Hot Search on Google on April 28th (31 Cent Scoop Night) and Baskin-Robbins was one of the top ten trending topics on Twitter in the United States on April 28th and April 29th.

Joel: Do you have any notion of how many mentions 31 Cent Scoop Night had?

Andrew: We received hundreds of @replies throughout the day.  We also encouraged followers to @reply the handle with photos from their local stores so we could retweet them.

Joel: What’s next for BR in social media?  Is there an iPhone app for finding the closest store AND checking the availability of your favorite flavor?  Or voting on flavors?

Andrew: We are always looking for new ways to interact with our fans online.  Over the next few months we will be testing out Mayoral specials on Foursquare in a select few markets.  We love Foursquare’s platform of publicly recognizing people who visit a location more than anyone else.  We are jumping at the chance to reward our most frequent customers.

The Democratization of Ice Cream

There are many reasons this campaign is so successful. The value proposition offered by a 31-cent ice cream cone that is normally many times that much is hard to pass up, and the whole thing is a lot of fun. We went to our local Scotts Valley Baskin Robbins. Lots of people show up in families, and everyone seems to be having a great time.

Second, the company takes advantage of social media sharing (a category I use here to lump together Twitter, Digg, Facebook, ShareThis, TweetMeme, etc.) to use its customers and friends as a high-speed, near zero-cost network. The sharing effect is amplified because people love to share good news or a good deal. Who wouldn’t want to be the one to let his or her friends know about 31-cent ice cream?

Not only is the distribution network free and efficient, each sharing constitutes a consumer endorsement of the company, the product and 31-Cent Scoop Night. There’s much more going on here than I can discuss in a single blog post. Baskin Robbins uses 31-Cent Scoop Night to raise money for the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. Also, once in the store, I was given a handout that explained that I could use my mobile phone to send a text message and join an ice cream club for birthdays, discounts and other promotions.

Baskin Robbins really seems to get social media and online marketing (and the importance of a compelling offline component.)

Tags: Baskin Robbins, sharing, 31-Cent Scoop Night, TweetMeme, ShareThis, Facebook, Twitter