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It’s impossible to avoid hearing about the latest crisis in corporate America. Mattel and other toy makers recalling Chinese-made toys tainted with lead paint. U.S. Airlines and other carriers frustrating travelers with record flight delays and cancellations. Patriots were caught cheating. Whole Foods’ CEO blogging under the disguise of an analyst, allegedly to drive down the stock price of its acquisition target, Wild Oats.

When do you think a company should respond to a crisis?

Upon the news of Mattel’s lead paint problems, if you also import products from China and think that many of your products might also be tainted, do you respond immediately or do you wait as long as it takes to be certain? As a marketer in charge of PR, how would you manage the messaging around a crisis? Let me know what you think!

When I was first developing corporate Web sites in 1994, business managers were asking how they would make any money or get business results from having a Web site. I’ve been in it from the very beginning and I remember the early years required a lot of evangelism to convince them. Case studies about online success from house hold brands began showing up in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. By 1998, we couldn’t build new Web sites quickly enough and there was a major shortage of professionals in the work force to keep up with demand.

In 2000, we were still building them, but the budgets dropped dramatically for Web site design after the tech stocks crashed and the events that followed such as 9/11. In 2001 and the early part of 2003, there were many starved Web design companies.

From mid 2002 to today, I’ve seen the majority of businesses suddenly wanting a total “redesign”. Budgets have been slowly increasing, but this time around companies are focused on using the Web to save money for their business. Content management, contact us forms, site search and other functionality changed from expensive extras to baseline offerings - and charging for premium services such as custom programming were replaced with open-source solutions or off-the-shelf products. Businesses wanted efficiency, automation, and real business results from their Web site with tools to measure success.

Having been through all the industry cycles before, my experience tells me that it will likely be several more years before Social Media is recognized as “mission critical” by a majority of businesses. We are still in early adopter mode. The mad rush for more businesses to “get in the game”, with dramatic increases in budgets and another shortage of specialized professionals to design, develop and manage social media initiatives will likely hit a peak in 2012.

If you’ve ever been to a Red Sox game in Fenway park, you are very likely to hear the fans chanting, “Yankees Suck” at some point during the game. It often doesn’t matter if we’re playing against the Twins, the Jays, the Rays or the NY Chokers themselves, you have a very good chance of hearing this unofficial Beantown mantra.

So, upon seeing the Yankees die in the first round again, I was quite inspired to write (and record) a song.  After getting positive feedback from friends and a few local radio stations, I decided to post it up on YouTube and share it with other Sox fans.

After my video was up and running the votes and comments started to trickle in. That’s when I noticed a link that says, “Try out the NEW (beta) version of this page!”

…click.  Oh okay!

The first change is to the video details and a greater emphasis on the author who created and posted the video.  In the old version, it has a button that says “subscribe”. The problem is that it’s difficult to see what you are actually subscribing to, so they fixed this bad UI, by putting the user’s name again in tiny print under the button. In the new Beta version, the authors name is much larger and the subscribe buttons are both in a separate box which allows the user to see who they are subscribing to.

In the old version they had a 3-tab section for containing “Related videos”, “More from this User” and “Playlists”. In the new version, they are stacked on top of each other.  I found this to be more effective because the user can see everything at once or they could expand or collapse them quite easily.

Another change is a 2nd column on the far right of the screen that offers yet another list of promoted videos, which made the old design look cluttered and messy. The new beta version is cleaner because the promoted videos are at the bottom of the stack and the user can see them pretty easily… especially if there is a string of several comments to scroll through.

Lastly, the rating aspect under the main video has been simplified with larger icons in the new beta design, which leaves more room for the embed code.  I like that they have moved the embed code to this location. Before it used to be under the author’s name which didn’t make sense to me.

In the new Design, you will find the following benefits:
-    Everything pertaining to the user  (subscribe, bio, edit features) is all in one place.
-    Everything for the video is under the video (share, favorite, ratings and embed code)
-    Cleaner overall, does not require as many tiny-font helper text

Good job YouTube (powered by Google)

Originally posted on WeAreSmarter.org. Myles is a guest blogger for the WeAreSmarter project.

Business networking and Social Media leader, LinkedIn added a long-awaited feature where you can add a photo to your LinkedIn profile. It offers the general browse/upload functionality, but one of the coolest features is the ability to resize and crop the photo before loading it into your profile. It also allows you to select who gets to see your photo. The choices are: Everyone, My Network, My Connections, or No one.

My question is: If you select “No one”, and it won’t be visible to anyone except for yourself, then why would you load a photo in the first place? I’m not sure what the thinking would be behind a setting like this. Over all, I love this feature.

The only challenge I had was taking a photo of myself that I could be happy with. Should I wear a suit and neck tie to look more like the President-elect of the AMA? Or maybe I should wear some Redsox swag to show my support for the home team? Well, in the end, I just went with whatever I was wearing at the time… a t-shirt and a hat with the owl from the tootsie-roll pop commercial on the front. Sometimes the best costume is the one that fits.

Technorati Tags: social networkingweb 2.0social networks

The NY Times will take down that annoying “you must login” to view this article. A similar announcement was made by the Wall Street Journal too. I think it’s likely that the rest of the news and magazine industry will follow their example and begin opening their gates for public consumption. Quite honestly, with their content being free and open, their materials are more likely to be referenced in blogs (just like this one) and they should be able to sell much, much, much more advertising.

ReportonBusiness.com says, “The Times figures it can more than replace the $10-million (U.S.) in subscriber revenue it generates each year with ad dollars from the increased traffic. And if the Journal follows, it will be betting that the profit from boosting its audience will exceed the industry-leading subscriber list it has amassed, with close to one million registered users.”

“…Internet advertising has become too powerful and too lucrative to block non-subscribers from your website, executives across the newspaper industry have told analysts and investors.”

Exciting!

In April, at the annual leadership conference for the American Marketing Association held in Chicago, the CEO announced that the association would be changing their logo. They have threatened to go away from the wishbone for many years, but this time they had rough drafts to show us. The new brand was revealed to a house full of marketers and there was a dull roar of mixed response. The new concept was based on a single letter, “M”.

If you were paying attention, you probably heard about the big event they put on called “M Planet“. Well, they want to follow that theme and essentially change the AMA into just “M”. So, in 2008 when I become president of the local chapter in Boston, I guess I will be, “MBristowe, president of MBoston”. It will be interesting to see if the letter “M” can become synonymous with “Marketing” and more specifically with the AMA.

Apparently the AMA is not alone in it’s hunt to own one of 26 letters of the alphabet as their brand. While Oprah Winfrey and Overstock were battling for the letter “O”, QVC has had it’s eye on the letter “Q”.

In fact, on October 1st, QVC will reveal another step in their push for a new brand of their own. On a huge New York bilboard, QVC will continue staking their claim on the letter “Q”. The first set of billboards they put out in early September, in NY, Philly and LA, had the catchphrase, “iQdoU?“. Most people had no idea what it meant, but changing a household name… or acronym in their case into a single letter isn’t the easiest thing to do I suppose.

Take a look at a video of the “QVC” billboard:

This new billboard reveals the answer to those who were wondering what it all means:

Technorati Tags: qvciqdoubrandingmarketing