Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

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Perception is reality no matter how odd it may be. Thanks to Daniel Agee for sharing this video with me a whiles back.

I read a ton of business books, but it is rare that one speaks to me in a truly personal way. So when the folks over at Portfolio passed along a copy of Jeff Ryan’s Super Mario, How Nintendo Conquered America (Amazon affiliate link), I was ecstatic to take a look. You see I was born in 1981 and grew up playing Nintendo games. I remember all the awesome codes and tricks to getting a new console when blowing into the game corroded the connection for the game to the console (thanks Toys R Us for the great customer service and my Aunt Sharon for saving the boxes way back when).

Needless to say, the book took me back to my childhood. One thing that I didn’t realize stomping on Koopas and hopping down virtual drainpipes was that as I beat on the control pad, Nintendo was becoming a part of Americana in a way that was really never done before in the toy market. The book also offers a great insight into how the home gaming industry wars that we see today were influenced by Nintendo and thier lack of action and double dealings. Below is my full video review.

This book is perfect for gamers, business students, young executives or a child of the ’80s.

I really love how ESPN gets their commercials hyper local. This one with Dustin Pedroia is especially awesome on two fronts. One he is my hight and is called the laser show and two, Esposito is referenced as the best. A win-win in my book.

Thanks to Nick Gosselin for pointing this out — RELAX.

This post has a video, click here if you can’t view.

Fridays are typically a day where I share the five best articles that I read in a given week. While I would love to continue that tradition this week, I have spent more time changing diapers than sharing and digesting links and articles so I decided to share with you five blogs that you should be reading.

Before you roll your eyes and say sheesh another list post or grumble at adding more real estate and clutter to your RSS reader, take a step back and answer these questions.

1. How many blogs are in your reader?
2. How many of them make you think daily? Note I am not talking the thinking involved with reading.

I am going to guess that the answer to question one is a lot and number two is not too many. This is mainly because a lot of ideas get rehashed and let’s face it with the information overload with number one, you just miss things.

So with that said, take a look at the five blogs below (in no particular order), subscribe to them via email (so they don’t get lost in the shuffle) and see if you find something that stimulates your medulla oblongata.

Personal Cartography - For some reason, I just stumbled on Tamsen McMahon‘s blog after chatting with her for years on Twitter and reading her on Brass Tack Thinking. Her posts are unrelated to most things I read daily, but they are a good swift kick in the pants to get me going.

In Over your Head – You may know Julien Smith as the co-author of Trust Agents, but what you might not know is that he is the author of a kick ass blog. I don’t think I’ve read a post where I can either say that he mailed it in or that I was left without an opinion. The Canadian blogger comes out with piece after piece of mind crack that have you coming back for more.

Geoff Livingston’s Personal Blog – Did you ever have that friend who was never afraid to speak his mind? Well in my online circle, Geoff Livingston is that guy. Now there is a different in speaking opinions and being rude, so I would also suggest checking out how Geoff handles himself with both his opinions, disagreeing commenters and pundits.

{GROW} Blog – This blog from Mark Schaefer is a perfect mix of general social media chatter, business development and personal insight. He is also one of the genuinely nice and helpful folks that I have had the pleasure of meeting on the interwebs.

Danny Brown - Danny Brown is the second Canadian on the list. He blogs on things that touch him on an emotional level and also things that touch on the social industry at large. Danny is also a great conversationalist that extends the shelf life of every post within the comments.

Bonus Blog – Digital Dads – I started checking out this blog/online show when Mrs. Espo found out that we were going to have a baby. I was instantly hooked, but after superstitions, shied away until the baby was born. Well I am happy to say that I am back on the horse and strongly recommend it to any dad or dad in training.

Are you a subscriber to any of these blogs?

Also what are your top blogs that I should be checking out? Please leave them in the comments below.

I also implore you to check out these blogs and let me know what you think at the end of a week.

Image – Student Branding

When you think of target marketing to impressionable audiences or children, what companies come to mind?

Up until a few days ago, I would have easily rattled off a number of tobacco, fast and junk food companies and noted that the practice was pretty damn sleazy as well.

If you asked me that same question today, I would say that the practice of marketing to this demographic is actually pretty genius for a number of companies.

Why the shift in my opinion?

Well you see, last week Mrs. Espo and I welcomed our first child into the world – a beautiful baby boy. During our stay in the hospital, I couldn’t help but notice that we were being marketed to from the minute the baby came into our room.

While the scenario is opportunistic and almost vulturistic, it is actually genius for the companies that gave the fine people at Beth Israel “samples” to pass out parents. Some of the major players included Johnson & Johnson, Similac, Pampers and the Boston Red Sox.

As first time parents who were looking for all the help that we could get, some things were just simple things to latch onto. I will admit that we fell into the marketing push of some of these companies. For example, Baby Espo was hooked on his Soothie pacifier (given to him in the nursery) so we went out and purchased two packages of the teal nipples for him to rotate through. We also grabbed some Pampers -well, mostly because we knew that they fit him. And when he turns the ripe old age of five, we’ll take him for a complimentary tour of the 104 year old Fenway Park.

We didn’t take full advantage of the formula sample due to our feeding preferences, but can see how parents who do can fall prey to the companies offering the free samples. Nurses told us that babies get addicted to a particular brand and have trouble changing over, sounds eerily familiar to the tobacco companies I mentioned above.

At the end of the day it is up to the consumer to make the decisions and get options from sources you trust. We asked a lot of questions to experienced parents and hospital staff and used our friend Google to inform our decisions. In some cases we were told, I wouldn’t use X product, we just use it because company X gives it to us from hospital staff.

Those reviews were few and far between, but it does make you wonder how much the “sample” marketing game costs these companies to get in with certain hospitals. This is a very impressionable audience with money to spend on their new baby. How much would you guess these companies spend on these partnerships?

For the past few months, Vistaprint (my employer) has been doing some pretty cool research into the company’s small and micro business customers.  Earlier today, we launched our first Infographic on the latest study that looks at optimism in the small business space. I figured that some of you would find interesting. On top of the graphic, here are some other interesting statistics from the survey respondents:

For more information on the stats, check out the full release here.

Over the past few months, Leroy Stick and the Deepwater Horizon have faded from the limelight of the 24-hour news cycle. While the initial outlook for the Gulf was bleak, the assumptions turned out to be overstated and the region was not as bad off as we thought, and recovery was on its way.

Should be a good story right?

Well I thought so until I heard a commercial on the radio in which a Louisiana business owner was touting BP living up to their promise to be there until the end of the recovery. I wasn’t sure that I heard correctly until I saw a similar commercial on TV.

It would be one thing if bought a commercial to support these local small and micro businesses, but seriously having these business owners say something like:  “BP asked you to keep me informed” and keeping the BP branding was in poor taste.

If it wasn’t for the company’s mismanagement and corner cutting in the Gulf, this incident could have been avoided. To me these commercials are kind of like Bernie Madoff paying for commercials for his victims and adding in “well hey Bernie isn’t all that bad, he helped me get $20 grand back out of the three million I lost.”

I just don’t see how anyone in their right mind could approve of a commercial that capitalizes on a disaster that was created by the advertiser, but I have a habit of overreacting. So I decided to reach out to my friend Justin Goldsborough for his take on the subject. He offers a bunch of great insight in this counter-post. What say you? Was this a good marketing tool or is it just distasteful.

This is a counterpoint article to my post on BP earlier today from my friend Justin Goldsborough. Click here to see the initial post. We’d love to hear what you think.

I think the new BP ads show how slowly companies actually change and how big of a hill the company has to climb. In this case, the combination led to what someone who does marketing for BP probably thought was a genuine, smart advertising campaign. I’m sure smiles, handshakes and maybe even a fist bump or two were exchanged when these ads were first revealed inside BPs walls. But the public is not going to be so quick to smile at or shake hands with the brand that mishandled so many things in the Gulf last year, most notably the disaster itself.

Image - Wikipedia

BP did some things right here. Sure, the commercials are self-serving, but I now know they financially compensated some of the people whose lives and livelihoods they ruined. And BP gave about 10 seconds of each ad to the small business owner they featured in the commercials to promote their brands. That was cool. But there were also things about the ads that weren’t cool – most notably the line in each commercial you alluded to Jeff: “BP asked me to keep you informed.”

Not exactly. The line should have been written as follows: “BP paid me some money and gave me some free airtime on their commercial if I agreed to try and make them look good and their legal team, which obviously doesn’t have any understanding of public perception, made me say this line like a this-medicine-can-cause-internal-bleeding-and-you-may-even-die-if-you-take-it-but-have-a-nice-weekend line in a pharma commercial.” Of course they couldn’t say it that way in the ad because, well, the ad was only 60 seconds among other things.

In situations like this one, I always like to ask myself the “What would you do?” question. BP might tell you they took a lesson from Dominos and tried to make things right and then do an ad campaign around it. But that’s pizza. This is peoples’ lives. And Dominos dove into the listening and engaging pool head first. BP has not gone that route yet. But I digress…What could BP have done differently? Well, here are some ideas:

• Why not give these small businesses the full 60 seconds during the commercials? Just put your BP logo in the bottom corner; kill the corny music as our friend Shonali Burke said, and let the citizens of the Gulf who had their lives changed by the oil spill tell their stories.
• Forget the commercials and spend the advertising budget organizing community events in the Gulf. Provide the citizens an opportunity to network, tell their stories and help each other. Bring in counselors, educators and entrepreneurs who can share advice on how to rebound your business when you have to start from scratch.
• Crowdsource. When you’ve screwed up royally and then screwed up the apology – and several subsequent apologies – royally, there’s one move you can make that will always be seen as disarming. Ask for help. I don’t care how badly someone screwed up. If they come to you and ask for help, it’s hard to go online and rip them to shreds or do so to their face. What if BP took the Dominos route on social media by building their accounts and saying they were listening? Then, what if they posted that they were setting aside part of their advertising budget for 2011 to help the families affected by the oil spill, but that they wanted some advice on the best way to help that would have the strongest impact and really make a difference?

Change is hard. Always has been, always will be. Egos are involved, people are stubborn, businesses don’t want to make another mistake while they are trying to recover from the first one. But look at the brands that rebound well from crises. Usually they are in one of two situations – 1) The company has already built up goodwill and strong consumer relationships so customers are willing to give the brand a second chance or 2) The company steps way out of its comfort zone, listens to what its customers are saying and realizes the only way to win back some credibility is to change the culture, the way they do business.

BP has taken a step – a SMALL step – in the right direction with these commercials. The brand showed it has a conscious. But so far it’s like the dad who missed his son’s high school graduation and then called to apologize and sent a check to help with tuition.  But BP, like that dad, hasn’t yet decided to change the way it lives its life, or in this case, does business. And without making a wholesale change like that, the brand will never have any kind of meaningful relationship with the public and the Gulf citizens whose lives it disrupted.

Justin joined Fleishman-Hillard Kansas City, where he specializes in digital strategy and education, in 2009. Before that, he was at Sprint for two years where he managed the company’s employee social network, Sprint Space, and led efforts to improve customer outreach via social media, specifically Twitter. He is in his fifth year on the Kansas City IABC board and is serving as president for the 2010-11 board year. Justin is a huge Bon Jovi fan and once won third place in a karaoke contest at Chicago’s John Barleycorn’s with a rousing rendition of Livin’ on a Prayer. He’s also a diehard Kansas City Royals fan, so go easy when talking baseball. Justin blogs here at Justin Case You Were Wondering.

Like many of you, Mrs. Espo and I tuned in to watch the Super Bowl last night. And, while we had no vested interest in either team in the game, we were interested to see what kinds of ads the advertisers threw out there.

Instead of critiquing or waxing poetically on one or the other, we decided on a list of our favorite five commercials while driving home last night.

What were your favorites?

This is a video book review of CC Chapman and Ann Handley’s Content Rules. It is my first read of 2011 and one that anyone serious about building content should check out. It even has a section of things you can steal, legally. What’s better than that?

A few years ago, social media was a niche cocktail party that was populated mostly by people who would categorize themselves as geeks. If companies were aware of the space, it was often from a communications perspective. Fast forward to today and the space is littered with case studies of company X, Y or Z making some serious coin off their community.  Marketers are chomping at the bit to gain ownership or decision rights within the space.

In many cases, these overtures may turn into hostile takeovers from a marketer with no intimate knowledge of the space (I have had friends have this happen to them). The marketer gets wind of  an agency known to work wonders and he’s eager to jump at the opportunity  without taking advice from the communications people who have been managing the company’s presence.

Social media is something that no one can truly own.  It should be managed like a ship with a captain and  crew.  Since the channel is generally social and conversational in nature, the captain’s role should be played by someone with a communications background who will not hit the panic (read sell, sell, sell) button when the money isn’t flowing in. The crew varies by organization but typically will encompass the functions of marketing, CRM, research, product teams, legal folks, etc.

With the conversational aspect out of the way, marketers can really do what they do best – market. The major networks offer the ability to insert marketing messages into the mix. So with some education on the space, their expertise in things like direct response can really blow out a social campaign. Don’t believe me? Think about these three examples:

Turning online to offline – Conversations are great in principle, but if they don’t translate to sales companies are going to lose interest. So if you have a great online presence in the social space, augmenting it with an “asses to the seats” mentality makes it an overall corporate win. Boston’s Boloco does a great job of this using Twitter and foursquare.  They interact with everyone on Twitter plus they offer a “Mayor’s Special”- free products to the mayor and two friends on Mondays. The community is drawn in to try to get a freebie for connecting with the brand while giving Boloco the ability to track the effectiveness of their campaign.

Building an empire – Sure conversation is king, but marketing owns the masses. By incorporating social media into marketing campaigns and collateral, companies are able to increase awareness of their social profiles to existing customers (a good example is Planters Peanuts). By connecting them with the company, potential customers gain more of a personal relationship and brand affinity.

Measurement – Marketing folks are much better than us communications pros at running numbers and measuring things. It’s true in my case at least.  At the end of the day, social media is nothing more than a novelty if you can’t measure anything.  People in marketing tend to be numbers driven so it’s a good idea to tap into their knowledge bank to see if there is anything that you can utilize in terms of measuring success. You may be surprised at what you find out.

What do you think about marketing in the social space?  Should they be leaders, followers, shiftmen or out of the picture?

I have made my love, or lack thereof, of the YellowBook (and here) well noted on this blog in the past, but it is not my most hated form of unsolicited advertising.That loathing is reserved for fliers placed on my windshield. I received this one at least three times over the past month and every time, I throw them away.

While I admire the effort that it took to get eyeballs on these fliers, I will never purchase based on one of these ads. They reek of shadiness and doing anything to make a buck, thus making me question the establishment. Typos and cross outs also don’t help your cause.

Am I the only one that this bothers or does they irritate you as well?

Puma has made some awesome videos of late and this one is perfect for describing the post-college and early career demographic.

Driving home from New Jersey a few weeks ago, I was left with little options for food unless I ventured off the highway. So like many a wary traveler, I found solace underneath the golden arches.  While waiting for my ever-so nutritious sustenance, I came across Fun Times magazine.

Now while the picture on the cover (above) was pretty disturbing, the leaflet is actually a great marketing tool from the fast-food giant.

Through cute cartoons and child-friendly games, the fast food giant is able to do what Joe Camel did back in the day – hook ‘em young.

Parents probably don’t mind picking up the free magazine which can keep children entertained quietly on extended drives. And kids get some entertainment and things to keep their mind off of visiting Aunt Edna if only for another 30 minutes.

Despite this win-win for the families, the magazine also opts the children into McDonald’s marketing and value set. Since McDonald’s has a corner on rest stop, where do you think the kids will lean towards on future car trips?

While the clown and cartoons creep me out, I say bravo to you McDonald’s. What do you think?

Every week, I come across countless presentations and blogs that are really neat. Instead of hitting the X in the top of my browser, I decided to share these three with you.

The first is from Richard Edelman and looks at public engagement in a number of ways, while the second is on how brands evolve with social media. The final presentation is aptly dubbed steal our playbook. They are quick studies and hopefully you can pull some useful nuggets from them.