Last week seemed to be awash in news about big changes coming at retail. First I saw my colleague Lowell’s post about the potential re-emergence of internet grocers if Alice.com has any staying power. Then on Friday the Wall Street Journal ran an article on retailers cutting back on the variety of goods they stock. While I really do not care that Walmart is getting rid of 20 tape measure SKUs or that Walgreens is reducing the number of superglues it stocks from 25 to 11, what is going on at Target, Jewel and Kroger caught my attention.

It seems that in order to make more room for value priced house brands and to reduce inventory in a tight credit market, a number of food retailers are cutting back on the number of brands, sizes and flavors they stock. So be prepared to discover that a favorite brand has gone MIA. To you it may be your first choice, something you are passionate about. To the powers that be it may simply be part of “all others” and it’s about to get the thumbs down.

Hey, where’s the Mott’s AM?

I still remember the first time a favorite brand disappeared. As a child I became a passionate consumer of Mott’s AM and Mott’s PM. I was the ideal purchase decision influencer as I constantly badgered my mother to buy it. They were introduced as companion juice drink brands in the 60′s. Mott’s AM was orange-flavored for breakfast while Mott’s PM was a grape juice product for after school snacking. To both I developed a serious addiction. One day they simply disappeared from the shelf of the local Acme store. No warning. No notice. We never found them again. Talk about going cold turkey! It was a horrible thing to do to an eight year old.

Imagine 38 mustard SKUs!

While some retailers are eliminating my choices to make their bottom line stronger, others add choices and win me over for life. I don’t know if you have ever been in a Wegman’s but trust me you haven’t lived until you have. They are a 78 store grocery chain covering the area from Upstate New York to northern Virginia. It’s a family owned operation and shopping in any of their stores is an experience not to be missed. Last weekend I went back to Ithaca and dropped by store #35. They still have 38 SKU’s of mustard including one of my favorites: Kosciusko Spicy Brown. They also have truffles at $600 a pound and a complete candy store. I absolutely love the place and hope they will eventually open in the Midwest. Maybe they will find a way to stock Mott’s AM. At least I can hope.

Right now big food – American agribusiness – is threatened by the same kind of decades-long trend that lead to the Big 3 automakers’ current sorry state. Will the trend to sustainable agriculture and locally-grown foods make Hamburger Helper and Hostess Twinkies go the way of the Hummer?  Will the Snickers bar suffer the same fate as Saturn?

My family became part this trend. Before we ever heard the term “localvore,” we were buying most of our fruits and vegetables from the farmer’s market a few blocks from home. And we joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm south of Chicago; each week we receive an e-mail from the farmer and a big cardboard box full of assorted produce. No cultural or political statement was intended; we did it just because the product was good and the price was right. And we still eat our fair share of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

The trend is growing. U.S. Department of Agriculture data from 2007 reports that 12,549 farms in the United States market products through a community supported agriculture arrangement.  And between 1994 and 2008, the number of U.S. farmers markets increased from 1755 to 4685.

It’s a fragmented movement. Marketing is local, word of mouth and social media. But it all adds up: one family’s purchases can total several thousand dollars a year. Could this be a threat to agribusiness giants like Kraft Foods, Tyson, Nestle, Dole and others?

In the short term, probably not. But in the longer term…maybe:
•    My local supermarket, which used to sell sweet corn that was indistinguishable from feed corn for cattle, now sells really fresh corn at prices lower than the farmers market.
•    Eating Well magazine reports on how a poor rural town in Vermont has become foodie mecca, with a restaurant on Conde Nast Traveler’s 2009 hot list. In Vermont, the localvore trend extends into the mainstream, to the food service operations at local schools. This helps rebut the claim that eating local is a luxury that’s only meaningful and affordable for people with money.
•    And in New York City there’s now a local bottled water brand – Tap’dNY- that comes straight out of the city water system.

There are some signs that big food is responding to the trend. For example:
•    Kraft Salad Dressings ran a recipe contest that incorporated a “secret” locally-grown ingredient.
•    Canadian Pizza, a trade journal for pizzerias, suggested that readers create a featured “Hundred Mile Pizza” product using local ingredients.
•    Campbell’s “Help Grow Your Soup” campaign extends the company’s support for local farms, using ingredients grown within 100 miles of its production facilities.

But these responses are mainly me-too lip service:
•    They slap words like “natural” onto their labels, imitating GM’s attempt to market a compact luxury car by slapping a “Cadillac Cimarron” nameplate onto a Chevy Cavalier.
•    Instead of starting to align their mainstream brands with growing consumer preferences, they lock truly natural and/or locally-grown products into niche categories. (One reason why agribusiness is buying smaller organic food processors across the U.S. and around the world.)
•    Most important, big food companies do not seem to have any real business strategy for countering this competitive threat to their brands.  They behave as if customers can be satisfied with marketing tactics alone (like the examples in the previous paragraph), that it’s not necessary to make major changes in food production and distribution.

Over the next few decades, we see a gradual erosion of big food’s share of market.

Could this lead to a government bailout of big food, somewhere around 2029? Or will it be business as usual, as big food’s economies of scale prevail over the natural food and localvore trends?

Warning. This link may be offensive to some viewers – while hilarious to others.

I just received an e-mail from an associate asking if Budweiser has gone too far. He He was referring to a Time magazine article.

In Bud’s YouTube ad, a likeable fellow nervously orders a porn magazine in a convenience store, only to be surprised by a chance encounter with a pretty girl who’s a former classmate. Ultimately, he’s exposed on national TV.

So, is Budweiser exposing itself in a shady light?

Why even ask? Pat Robertson’s flock is offended by beer itself, so theirs and similar views are irrelevant. There’s no nudity and any obscenities are bleeped. And it portrays purchasing porn as something to be embarrassed about – forbidden.

We’re talking about a culture that’s into fart-joke movies, butt tattoos, rap lyrics and Sex In the City reruns, most of which are nothing new – poo-poo cushions, Peyton Place, Redd Foxx and of course porno magazines. In fact, the ad is an old joke. It was a similar scene on Little Miss Sunshine and in the 20’s, Fatty Arbuckle made a silent comedy parallel gag with his Reckless Romeo short.

So where’s the outcry for Paris Hilton washing a car for Carl’s Jr. restaurants? Now, that’s porn!

This promotion is not.

Small businesses are like stray dogs. That’s what Office Depot seems to be saying with the theme of their current promotion: “Adopt A Small Business Contest.” And that’s just the most noticeable of all the marketing mistakes in this dog of a promotion.

Today, many large businesses are targeting small business customers. Some of them make mistakes; it may be because they’re just learning how to approach this market. But as a retailer with a long record of service and a physical presence in local small business communities, you’d think that Office Depot would know better.

Why do we hate this promotion? Let us count the ways:

1. The main theme is insulting, and irrelevant too
Start with the “Adopt A Small Business” theme. Not only is it potentially insulting, it’s irrelevant. Nowhere in the promotion is anyone invited to do anything vaguely like adopting a homeless dog, or a stretch of littered highway, or a small business in need of help.

2. Theme overload is confusing
In addition to “Adopt A Small Business,” the promotion website shouts out “Survival Of The Smartest” and “Small Business Self-Bailout.” Was someone trying to satisfy all the creative factions at Office Depot? Which idea are we supposed to pay attention to? Are these themes supposed to make small businesses feel good, let alone participate in this promotion?

3. The prizes are boring
The contest prizes have powerful appeal for small business people…the ones with insomnia. Each prize is all Office Depot: A $1300 gift card, a year of technical support, and another $110 gift card for copying/printing/shipping. We can hear the snoring starting now. Yes, we know that high value is important in prizes. But excitement is far more important, and these prizes are self-serving, and about as exciting as a ream of copy paper. We detect multiple business units at Office Depot, each trying to be sure they have some “presence” in the promotion.

4. Participation involves way too much work
The idea seems to be that small business people have to work hard. So let’s make them work even harder. To enter the contest, Office Depot tells customers to “upload a 2-minute video that explains the smart things your small business is doing to survive these challenging times, and how Office Depot is helping you get through them.” How much time and effort are small businesses willing to waste, for an off chance to win $2000 in office supplies? The one thing small businesses need most is more time to focus on their business.

5. Support communications are just plain dumb
There’s a long history of very funny comedy duos: Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Cheech and Chong , Burns and Allen and more. But Office Depot’s Matt and Matt will never be among them. Imagine a couple of fresh-faced, entry level assistant brand manager types pretending to be small business owners, trying to do stand-up comedy. In the online video introducing the program, one Matt recites the contest rules while the other Matt makes dopey remarks. Nice try, but not funny. In another video, Matt and Matt narrate as a female small business owner beats up on a “Recession Aggression” beanbag chair. The point of this video is….who knows?

All this leads to the ultimate question – a modern day, marketing-oriented version of  “Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” To which we answer: “Well, the rotating panoramic in-store display graphics were kind of cool.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t make up for this dog of a promotion being all bark and no bite. Maybe it’s time Office Depot got a bit smarter.

Apologies, to Mick pictured above. He’s too good to be associated with this “promotion”, but he is darn good looking…and a smart dog.

A little more than nine years ago I decided to take one more run at big agency life. I found what I thought would be an interesting gig at the Chicago office of a multi-national working in a strategy group. While there, one of my assignments was as subject matter expert on internet grocery stores. Now you have to remember (if you are old enough) that this was the peak of the dot-com bubble. A time when venture capitalists and anyone else with a few coins tossed them at anything with a dot com after its name. Sock puppets selling pet food were all the rage. And I wound up knowing more about Webvan, HomeGrocer and UrbanFetch than any human being should have been required to know. I like to think of it as an extended marketing penance service.

If you build it, they may not come or they may just glance in your direction as they drive by. Either way, they ain’t buying.

If you know anything about the dot com fallout, you will know why chills swept over me when I read Jack Neff’s piece in Ad Age this morning. Now don’t get me wrong. I think the world of Jack and hope I can count him among my friends. In fact we have had some spirited online conversations on topics such as the half life of social media and I believe they have made me a better marketer if not a better writer. But I digress.

Jack’s article was about the launch of Alice.com … an online purveyor of “household essentials.” My instinctive reaction … Great. Webvan again. But I want to give these folks the benefit of the doubt so I did two things. First I signed up for an Alice.com account on the beta site. My initial reaction: Nice from a technical standpoint and putting P&G products front and center helps lend legitimacy.

My second task was to rummage through the old prize closet and find my dated PowerPoint on internet grocers. What a refresher and, I fear, a crystal ball! CPG people, VC investors and plain old folk may be headed down the same old path. Alice.com sounds a lot like where we have been before and if they’re using the old playbook it may end just as sadly. But maybe they are smarter than that.

Want to buy an online grocery store domain name?

Leafing through the dusty ppt I came across names I have not thought of in years: groceriesplus.com, groceronline.com, pinkdot.com, urbanfetch,netgrocer.com, yourgrocer.com, homegrocer.com and webvan.com. Googling a few of these I found that several still have a pulse. Netgrocer is still alive shipping dry goods via FedEx. They were the Electronic Catalog version of the business plan. Great idea if you didn’t need the toilet tissue like right now.

HomeGrocer is now part of Amazon so you can qualify for free shipping if you buy enough oat meal.

And of course Peapod still struggles along in a few markets. Seems to be doing ok with the business segment who need to keep the kitchen stocked for client meetings.

Hey, here’s one for those of you who were in the Peanut Gallery during the dot com bust: Did you know that Priceline got involved in the grocery business for a few months? Literally, a few months. Seems that few Americans wanted to haggle over shredded cheese.

Can Brian and Mark pull it off?

Sometimes the second trip through the land of magic business plans can actually bears fruit. Smart folks survey the graveyard of broken dreams (and investments.) They pick through the carcasses and find gold. Maybe Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire will with Alice.com. They have a pretty good track record with recasting troubled business models. We’ll be watching.

Oh, by the way, could you guys stock the Xtra detergent with the color safe bleach added? Thanks.

Later.

A recent Wall Street Journal article shows how many Mom and Pop retailers are responding to the recession by going home. By substituting a website run out of the spare bedroom for a traditional bricks and mortar store, they’re eliminating expenses for rent, maintenance and employees.

The trends seem to support them:
•    Vacancies at U.S. malls and shopping centers are at a ten year high.
•    Small businesses have nearly tripled their online marketing spending in the past few years.
•    The value of Amazon – the online retailer – continues to rise.

It’s tempting to predict that this is the future for small retailers. But can “click through” really replace the “walk in” traffic that traditional retailers have always depended on?  Here’s what Mom and Pop have to face:

Marketing. Some traditional Main Street retailers can get away with as little as a sign over the door and a good word-of-mouth reputation.  But as virtual stores they’ve got to learn a whole new kind of traffic-building marketing, one that’s both more complicated and more expensive that running an ad in the local newspaper.

Competition. Many local retailers have only a few real competitors –similar stores in the same trading area. Online they could be competing against hundreds of stores, in an environment that makes comparison shopping easier than ever before. “Close to home” will no longer be relevant as a differentiation.

Customer Relationships. In spite of all the money and effort spent on online “relationship marketing,” it will always be a pale imitation of one-on-one, in person contact between two human beings. Imagine a virtual version of my local hardware store (in business at the same location since 1923). If online chat replaces Roger the clerk, who and how do I ask whether I need a 2 ½ hex head bolt for 19 cents, or a 3 1/2 incher for 22 cents?

What do you think? And where would you rather shop, and why?

The advertising business probably shuddered this week when Advertising Age announced that attendance was down at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. They further lamented that submissions and attendance are down at all the advertising shows and competitions this year. Long term this may be one of the real benefits of the current recession.

And the winner of the gold lion for best performance in business valuation goes to …

It has always struck me as funny that advertising seems to be the only professional field where the practitioners constantly sit in judgment of their competitors’ work and do it publicly. And it’s not just the ad competitions. Just take a look at the critique columns in the trade publications or the letters to the editor. Some of it is just a glad-handing mutual admiration society. Other times you can see some real venom flowing. Now you can even catch it online at Adrants. Do you think accountants do the same thing? Or lawyers? Probably not. Maybe agencies shouldn’t either.

ROMI = (number of little statues) X (budget/quality of wine at awards ceremony)

For decades advertising has had real difficulty justifying its ROMI (return on marketing investment.) Relying on stacks of research measuring awareness, persuasion and intent to purchase, general agencies have watched as budgets drifted to more measurable direct mail and online marketing efforts. And as the recession has deepened the flow has increased. Maybe it’s time to put the pomp and ceremony of ad festivals in exotic locations on hold for a while and focus on the only measure of advertising effectiveness that counts: the client’s sales.

Who am I kidding? Many advertising practitioners believe they are really great film makers with clients as their “backers” for their artistic endeavours. Keep an eye on AB Inbev to see what happens when the backer pulls the purse strings closed to help pay down a mountain of debt. It isn’t going to be pretty.

Later.

Sketch Me is a Facebook app that instantly creates a pencil sketch from the user’s profile photograph.
Another Facebook app, Crappy 80s Gifts, lets you “send your friends totally tubular 80s stuff that is like so lame, dude.”
iBeer, an iPhone and iPod Touch app, fills your screen with virtual beer. When it’s tipped the beer drains.
Bubble Wrap lets you pop away all day on a virtual version of the popular packaging material.
Voodoo! for Palm devices features a voodoo doll and a long pin. You figure what to do, to who.
And the list goes on and on: iFart, the Have2P restroom finder, Deviled Egg Bowl, Medical Poetry and more.

Consider what all this could mean.  Is it a symptom of decadence, a sign of the imminent collapse of our civilization, as rich and privileged people with computers and PDAs waste their money and time on silly applications that hardly ever get used after they’re downloaded?

We think it’s more like a grownup, more expensive version of the old Johnson Smith catalog (now six different catalogs), where preteen boys traditionally spent their allowances on novelties and practical jokes like joy buzzers, whoopee cushions and ice cubes with flies in them.

It’s play, part of the price we pay for creative thinking in any activity. Wise teachers know that play is the work of children, critical to their emotional and cognitive development.

We believe that play is also an essential part of the work of adults. Apple believes play is important in the development of software. And in our agency’s business, marketing communications, a playful attitude assures that the creative is more than just a rehash of the marketing plan. (You should see some of the ideas we don’t present to clients. Or maybe you shouldn’t.)

So the next time you see another silly app for sale, remember that when it comes to creative thinking, playing around eventually pays off.  Do you agree?

PS. Check out my friend Mike Kelly’s new app for iPhone, SwitchWith. It may be weird, but it sure is fun.

Our good buddy Coaster saw an article a couple of weeks ago that caused him to leap into social media with both thumbs. It seems that a bunch of wineries, brewers and spirits producers are jumping on to Twitter to promote their brands. Coaster saw an opportunity and boy has he been disappointed.

Alex, I’ll take Potent Potables for $400.

To understand his disappointment you need to know a little about him. For as long as we have known Coaster, he has always liked a cocktail or two at almost anytime of day. Though he stopped short of getting the “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” tattoo during the Cabo trip, his life-long ambition is to be an answer on Jeopardy! in the Potent Potables category. So when he saw that  half dozen brands including King Estate Winery, Smirnoff and Michelob are active on Twitter, he figured now was the time to join the social media frenzy to score some free adult beverages. He had visions of free samples, coupons and rebtes. Unfortunately a lot of federal, state and city laws are standing in his way. So is the ability of some brand owners to connect the dots.

Ask for Ed at (fill in the name of a local bar) and he’ll buy you a tall cold one one us.

But before I could chalk this up to just another alcohol-induced day dream, I spied an article in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal about upscale food trucks popping up in cities across the country. These are not your typical roach coaches. They deliver gourmet lunches and snacks created by owners who are highly trained chefs. As they roam the city they alert followers on Twitter to upcoming stops. It strikes me that this may be the end game in 140 characters or less. Don’t tell them how you are feeling, tell customers where you are. Sort of like the good eating version of a floating crap game.

The wine, spirit and beer barons might want to take a page from the book of these upscale entreperneurs. Instead of using Twitter to broadcast a brand ad one snippet at a time, use it to tell folks that your sales guy Ed is at a local pub and for the next hour and he’ll buy a shot/mug/goblet of your brand for anyone who asks. It’s legal in a bunch of states. And probably goes a lot further toward building a community and a viral following than tweeting followers that the cabarnet franc in Pope Valley may be developing a touch of mold.

Think about it. We know some nice folks who can help you make it happen.

Hold on a sec. Coaster just shot me a text that he got  a tweet from King Estate that Heather is hosting a wine tasting from 3 to 6 PM today in Homer Glen. Now that’s very social media. Well done King Estate!

Later.

A May 31 New York Times article describes how Darren Herman, president of Varick Media Marketing, tests online advertising:

“From the “Mad Men” era until now, advertising has been about a catchy tagline, an arresting image, the Big Idea. But Mr. Herman and his competitors are bringing some Wall Street-like analysis to Madison Avenue, exploiting the huge amounts of data produced by the Internet to adjust strategy almost instantly.

“It’s putting numbers to an industry that never had numbers before,” says Mr. Herman, 27, who started and sold three media and technology companies before founding Varick last summer. “It’s nice to be able to tell your brand manager or the chief marketing officer which audience is interacting with the unit, what time of day, what day of the week, and what the response is on certain types of offers. Before, nobody could really tell you that.”

Wall Street-like analysis for advertising is a very good thing, but it’s not really all that new. Direct marketers have been doing it for years. Doing it on the Web just allows marketers to test and measure a far greater range of variations and to respond to them far more rapidly.

The real breakthrough opportunity may lie elsewhere, in providing the proof of performance that marketing through social media really needs. Everyone talks about and wants to do “social media.” But so few are sure of exactly why they want to do it…except that they want to look cool, and they don’t want to be left behind. So until now, social media marketing has been measured in terms of traffic, awareness, perception. For the most part, it has not been measured in its ability to directly improve business, in terms of sales leads, transactions and revenue.

Could Herman and his colleagues apply their techniques to business-related measurements of social media? If so, how would they test and measure multiple versions of a Tweet, a Facebook page, a blog post, a YouTube post, etc? It won’t be as simple as ad vs. ad.

And if this can be done, why isn’t someone doing it now? In part because it treads on other people’s turf. Barriers to this positive trend will come from both old fogies and new fogies.
•    From big agency attitudes, even among those who start their own data operations. Evidence: Remember what happened when big agencies started their own sales promotion operations, then treated them as second class citizens.
•    From social media advocates, who may be reluctant to have their babies put to the test, and shown that they’re not so cool anymore.

So the real push may have to come from the client side, insisting that agencies forget about turf battles, forget about “cool” and get back to basics by demonstrating how social media marketing contributes directly to business improvements that the board of directors will understand.

Mike’s post on Frank Eliason, Comcast’s Twitter Man, provided some real food for thought.

A trap into which a lot of marketers fall is viewing any media as a tool to talk at customers. While social media is a communication tool, many seem to forget that communication in a social or community setting is a two-way activity, a conversation. Frank’s true genius may be that he started with the listening part rather than the talking part. Some of the early press accounts of his efforts identify his first step as monitoring (read that listening to) customer feedback on blogs and Twitter. It was kind of like running a focus group from hell with thousands of people, all of whom can listen to everyone else and add their complaints.

Customer Service Took  Nap

Comcast’s customer satisfaction probably hit a low point a couple of years ago with the posting on YouTube of the video entitled “A Comcast Technician Sleeping on My Couch.”  I purposely have not linked to the video because the compassionate side of me believes they have suffered enough. Anyway, Frank’s work was just one part of a company-wide effort to improve service quality perceptions. Comcast and all cable companies have generally gained pretty miserable, and well-deserved customer service reputations. In his book The Ultimate Question, customer loyalty and Net Promoter guru Fred Reichheld summed up the cable industry customer service model with “Customers are rarely enthusiastic when they have limited choice — and anyway, many local cable companies have ratcheted up prices while providing mediocre service.” Sounds like the service model of a few banks and credit card companies we know.

When people say your product’s crap, you can either tell them to shut up or fix the product.

Comcast apparently chose the latter. You can see it on the street: cleaner trucks, cleaner (and more rested) technicians, less reliance on contractors to handle service calls, and even greater use of a little orange cones behind the parked truck. Damn near phone company like.

So while we wouldn’t attribute all of Comcast’s customer satisfaction turnaround to Frank’s tweets, he has played a big part. He listened. And rather than trying to shout down the disgruntled mob, he took the novel approach of engaging them individually and trying to solve their problem. For those he touched it appears to have been a more satisfying and memorable experience than working through an endless automated menu to reach an disinterested call center half way around the world. Frank engaged them in a conversation not a marketing monologue, 140 characters at a time. You might give it a try.

Later.

So after I posted this a couple weeks ago I kept wondering if this could really be true.  How could Comcast really credit Twitter for improving its customer satisfaction by 9% in Q1?  Really?  Seriously?  You gotta be kidding me!

Well you’ll have to excuse me because I didn’t know about this guy.  Frank Eliason, or “Comcast’s Twitter Man” as headlined in this BusinessWeek.com article.

Fascinating stuff about how Comcast is using Twitter to solve customer problems and Frank is a true rockstar and innovator.

But as I read it I kept wondering…is Frank really just the lone guy bailing water relentlessy at the back of the big sinking ship?  Is good Twittering strictly limited to improving customer service only?

Or can companies effectively use social media like Twitter to actually plug those holes?  To fix the processes and mistakes that are causing all of the leaks to begin with? Can they take the information they’re gathering from Twitter and change how they do things?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed by Frank.  But I’ll be really impressed when somebody figures that out.

1.    Link into partners and their social networks. Instead of monetary rewards, give away a partner’s products, and have your partner(s) promote your promotion on their site. You’ll increase cross-traffic, and in the process, get search engine attention. You’ll also save money because while a dollar costs a dollar, a partner’s product can be negotiated.

2.    Don’t over-expose yourself. It’s better to receive full margin than give big discounts. Print delivered coupons let you limit your liability by only offering discounts to select targets – the rest pay in full. A viral marketing discount opens the floodgates for everyone. Fine, if that’s your goal – a store-wide sale so to speak. Weigh the two, and test.

3.    Give your social media sweepstakes a true business objective. Just letting everyone and their friends simply click and enter can be much ado about nothing gained. Social media is your chance for the Internet equivalent of a restaurant’s family night or a hotel’s convention business. But if none of your guests pays up, what’s the point? Make visitors punch in codes to win – available on your product packaging. Have them form teams to compete for the prize. Let them enter for free, but if they include a purchase proof, give them reward points. Deliver a coupon for entering – for a group purchase.

4.    Beware too much YouTube fun. I’ve seen major brands send PR releases boasting the winner of their YouTube video contest from among 150 entrants. 150 entrants for a national brand promotion! The more difficult it is to enter, the less participation.  And there’s the big risk that the image-bashing entry becomes the viral rage.

5.    Make groups go all a twitter about social shopping. Offer an $X discount if 10 order together, And $XX discount for 11 to 29 orders and a $XXX discount for 30 to 50 orders. And consider a prize entry as well for every order – for a social group vacation.

6.    Consider contests instead of a sweepstakes. Sweepstakes require a free alternative entry vehicle. But a bona-fide talent contest can require a purchase to enter, because legally, winning isn’t based on “chance.” But run your rules past a bona-fide legal firm first.

7.    Sample your event. If you’re doing event marketing, entice groups by letting them personally share the experience. Preview the performances, have a chat session with the guest celeb, make a virtual reality version of an event, provide a hand-held video tour of the previous city’s event, and of course, offer group discounts. Don’t forget to provide Twitter, Facebook, RSS and other easy share links. 

8.    Make social groups focus groups. Test your promotions and new product ideas with these avid fan (or non-fan) bases. Instead of ten questionable profiles, you can evaluate bigger, more concise target groups. Let them know that they are your most important and valued knowledge base. Offer them beta tests. And as with focus groups, provide something for their trouble, like a group dining gift certificate.

9.    Have a private but social retail event. A social network with an interest in your product is priceless. Treat them accordingly with an exclusive after-hours in-store event. Not only do you get real face-time, but 40-70% of in-store sales are unplanned purchases. And you’ve got a captive audience!

10. But before anything, establish your criteria for social media promotion success. Surprisingly, most don’t because they’re so enraptured by the fifteen minutes of fame and fun they envision on the social networking scene. What do you want to achieve and how will you measure it? And remember, sales is a legitimate social networking end-objective.

Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner we have the traditional copywriter, for over a century the champion at capturing attention and persuading qualified prospects.

And in this corner we have the search engine optimization challenger, the up and coming SEO copywriter, the expert at repeating the “right” words and phrases to attract the attention of search engines.

Some of the most successful traditional copywriters reject SEO. Bob Bly says: “…by creating copy that’s optimal for attracting search engines, you are, to some degree, weakening that copy’s power to sell … diluting its strength … because you are worrying about two audiences: the reader and the search engines … instead of focusing every word on the customer. And that’s not how to write copy that sells.”

To support their argument, they point out SEO copy that slavishly follows ridiculously rigid formulas. For example: “We sell Rolex Watches at the best prices on the web. Our stocks of Solid Gold and Plated Rolex Watches mean that we can deliver same day. For the best deal in Rolex Watches take a look at our Rolex Watch catalogue by clicking here.”

If I thought that this is what copywriting is coming to, I’d be tempted to abandon all attempts at SEO and ally myself with the traditional copywriters alone. But I also know that thinking this way risks adopting the fatal “this is the way we’ve always done it” attitude. And I know also know that there are many examples of literate, persuasive copy that is search engine optimized. According to Brian Clark: “The key to good on-page SEO copywriting is crafting content that seamlessly integrates keywords in a way that doesn’t offend the reader. In fact, good keyword-rich copy should never even consciously alert the reader that keyword repetition is being employed for any reason other than his or her own benefit.”

Who will win the great copywriting fight? Who should win? Is there a compromise that satisfies both sides, so that copywriters can write for both the customer and the search engine?  I’m not sure. What I’d really like to see is a side-by-side test of traditional vs. SEO copywriting, demonstrating that the latter can both attract the right audience and successfully sell to that audience, as measured by actual sales, not just by hits on the page.  Has anyone ever done such a test?