Forgetting Flights: Virgin America

On most flights, Virgin America has it all. Its mission is to make flying good again — with brand new planes, attractive fares, top notch service, and innovative amenities. It's the kind of reinvention that has passengers clamoring to board the plane even if it means waiting 15 minutes or an hour on the tarmac.

Or is it?

While anyone flying out of San Francisco International Airport (SFO) might know that fog or rain frequently set departure times back as it did yesterday, no one anticipated that Virgin America would forget to notify passengers that their flights would be delayed. The first notification came 25 minutes after the scheduled departure time.

Sure, most passengers had a hunch that the flight was delayed, given it had never been assigned a gate. Some learned about it while hovering around the departure screens scattered throughout the terminal, partaking in a surreal event as their scheduled "on time" departure came and went without so much as a gate notification, actual departure time, or service agent update. A few checked the Website on smart phones and laptops. A handful turned to passenger service agents boarding other flights.

"We don't know. Watch the terminal monitors."

It was the most common answer before busy passenger service agents would take off for parts unknown. Less common was asking delayed passengers to empathize with other passengers who were also delayed. Those passengers had to wait an hour, one agent said, pointing to the group he was about to allow to board.

Unfortunately, any empathy for others eventually eroded as it took a full 2 1/2 hours before Virgin America would have any direct communication with passengers again. All the while, British Airlines and JetBlue updated their customers, offering apologies for the briefest of delays, which only seemed to add insult to injury for those left in the dark by Virgin America.

Even after Virgin America finally assigned the flight a gate, it took another half hour before the team provided updates with any sense of clarity. Shortly after, they attempted to infuse fun into the situation by offering free drink vouchers to the passenger who could produce the oldest penny or guess the singer of a song playing over the gate intercom.

While the games did temporarily take the edge off a bad situation, one wonders if Virgin America took too long to find its groove. Are leather seats, in-flight video entertainment, and mood lighting enough to keep passengers coming back for more?

It mostly depends on the unique perspective of each individual passenger and whether previous experiences make the mix-up an exception or the rule. Otherwise, it seems Virgin America learned a valuable lesson. If you don't deliver on your core service, no amount of reinvented amenities, services, or selective apologies can make up for it.

There are, after all, only two core services for every airline. Deliver passengers and their luggage to the destination on time, and communicate with them when you don't. Added values — ranging from comfort to humorous onboard educational videos — only count when the first two services are met.

In this case, Virgin America didn't break guitars. It only broke an opportunity to turn more passengers into advocates or evangelists.

Stacking The Odds: Magazine Publishers

The story may be stale for some, but it's no less relevant. AdvertisingAge published an interesting article last week, revealing that rival magazine companies are discussing the creation of an ad network that would sell targeted ad space across many industry Web sites.

While considered very preliminary, the concept is that each participant could get better ad rates. Owning their own network, these publishers believe, thereby reduces the increasing number of independent ad networks that return pennies on the dollars.

According to the IBM Global Business Services study highlighted earlier, this is the kind of network that many advertising professionals expect in the next three to five years or less.

Will a collaborative magazine ad network work?

According to the article, a magazine publishers' network, if it could achieve the crucial scale required, could offer advertisers behavioral targeting on professionally produced, "well-lit" sites. However, depending on the structure and whether publishers would retain independent account executives, it could also skew sales toward favored publishers.

While it might seem like a prudent move for magazine publishers, they would have to take care not to model such a network after the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, which may have saved some newspapers in the short term, but resulted in near dual-paper monopolies that hindered start-ups.

Generally, most participating newspapers consolidated advertising sales and distribution. In recent years, the number of joint operating agreements has declined considerably. Personally, I wonder sometimes if the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 didn't set the stage for declining print circulations today.

Specifically, had newspapers not grown complacent with little fear of competition, would they have been faster to act in developing a modern distribution model that paid for itself? We may never know.

Tossing Baseballs For Business: Scott Anthony

Last week, Scott Anthony, managing director of Innosight Ventures, applied the wisdom of Boston Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein to explain measurement. Espstein implied that some people focus too much on baseball.

"When you're putting together a winning team, that honestly doesn't matter," said Epstein in reference to J.D. Drew's relatively low number of runs batted. "When you have a player who takes a ton of walks, who doesn't put the ball in play at an above average rate, and is a certain type of hitter, he's not going to drive in a lot of runs. Runs scored, you couldn't be more wrong. If you look at a rate basis, J.D. scores a ton of runs."

Anthony goes on to tie in business management to his article at Harvard Business Publishing, saying that business managers can learn a lot from how baseball general managers build and manage their talent portfolio. How do you really know if you are focusing on the right metrics?

Communication works much the same way. Sure, I frequently write about the importance of communication measurement. It's important. Unmeasured communication is non-communication.

However, that is not to say that all measures have to dictate the course of communication, especially with social media where people have a propensity to add too much weight to the wrong metrics. For example, I know one company that wanted to drop its Twitter account and focus on Facebook based upon the number of members alone.

In this particular situation, it turned out that the positive impact of their communication was reliant on a certain percentage of people who were engaged both on Facebook and on Twitter. Specifically, those who were engaged on both networks tended to be evangelists who considered the Twitter account their personal connection whereas they viewed Facebook as a group for everyone. Contrary, the Facebook group consisted of participants, advocates, and evangelists.

Much like J.D. Drew's relatively low number of runs batted, separating the network into mere count columns does not always lead to the right conclusions. And in this regard, Anthony's observations for innovation might apply to communication. It would require a robust categorization scheme for classifying the type of communication, the reach of the communication, the engagement level of the audiences, and market circumstances (especially a competitive analysis).

Whereas Anthony said better metrics give Epstein a competitive advantage over his rivals, I might say that a better interpretation of metrics will often deliver a competitive advantage. It also ensures Advertising Rule 9 receives due diligence.

Attracting Attention: Who Will Stand For Veterans

Veterans Day might be a little less than a month away, but I'm not always certain we need to wait for a national holiday to think about veterans. After all, our servicemen and women do not confine their sacrifices to once or twice a year. The various organizations that support them don't either.

It's one of the reasons I signed on to assist the producers of Who Will Stand to host an event at BloggersUnite.org on Veterans Day, Nov. 11. The online event, Veterans Day: Who Will Stand features five nonprofit organizations that could use some additional support this year. All of them were included in the film.


In addition to covering the plight of physically and/or psychologically wounded soldiers after they have returned from war, the independent documentary highlights why veterans' programs and nonprofit organizations are so vital to supporting the services provided by government. Having learned more about them, I can safely add U.S. Vets and Soldiers' Angels, which I've written about before, here and here.

Five Nonprofit Organizations Featured In Who Will Stand

• The Soldierʼs Project helps provide free counseling and support to military service members who have served or who expect to serve in the Iraq and/or Afghanistan conflicts and to veterans of those conflicts. The services are completely confidential and are not reported to any government agencies.

• Defending Freedom raises awareness and support for servicemen and women with their Defending Freedom wristbands. One hundred percent of the proceeds go to military charities to support the troops and their families. More than 673,000 wristbands have been sent overseas.

• Canines for Combat Wounded provides service dogs for servicemen and women injured in combat. Beyond providing companionship, the dogs are specially trained to work with the soldiers according to their needs, helping them live longer, happier, more rewarding lives.

• Blue Star Mothers provides support for active duty service personnel, assists veterans organizations, and is available to assist in homeland volunteer efforts. The organization consists of mothers who have or have had children honorably serving in the military.

• Wounded Warrior Project raises awareness and enlists the aid of the public in meeting the needs of severely injured servicemen and women by providing direct services that honor and empower wounded warriors. They also advocate for legislation to provide critically-needed services to family caregivers of severely wounded warriors.

At the helm of this event, which includes a special showing in Las Vegas, is director/producer Phil Valentine. Valentine, who began his career as a television scriptwriter in 2000, is a seasoned filmmaker, having produced films that include Gags, Siren, and The Las Vegas Abductions.

Changing Environments: 2010 Ford Taurus Outdoor

Digital billboards are hardly new, but there seems to be some potential in the way Western New York Ford dealers will use them. When it starts to rain, the message changes. When there is a full moon, the message changes. When any number of 50 situations occur, the message changes to pinpoint the situation and deliver a situational message.

"The boards allow us to talk to people about relevant local events, news and weather, while having some fun introducing the vehicle's features," said Chuck Basil, representative of the Ford Dealers of Western New York. "The new Ford Taurus is a very unexpected vehicle so we wanted our advertising to follow suit."

That is what the campaign is about: It will introduce people to the new 2010 Ford Taurus, with western New York Ford dealers hoping to drive home the message that the car, along with the billboard messages, are "unexpected." While the creative thread is thin, the application has potential for both Ford and the future of advertising.

"Advertisers are now able to change their messages as often as they want, set up their ads to run up-to-the-minute weather forecasts or even link to a Twitter or Facebook account updating the board's message almost instantly," says Todd Schaefer of Lamar Advertising. "The creative options are endless."

Why Situational Communication Will Work In The Future

While marketers are borrowing from their public relations, advertising, and corporate communication budgets to cobble together social media funding, social media is not replacing them. Situational communication is replacing it.

We already know that the course of most communication is to steadily increase the impact of proximity (location) and demographics (population characteristics) thereby increasing the connection with the consumer. But what hasn't been fully explored, since the individual targeting featured in the film Minority Report changed too frequently to be scalable, is how technology could put us on the right path.

Could you, perhaps, read this post on the bus stop shelter poster or duratran signage at the airport? And if not this post, then why not The New York Times, with a certain percentage of space saved for the content sponsor? And while e-reader technology is still not cheap enough to mass distribute devices today, we might ask why print publications haven't been exploring such options to deliver the distribution devices for pennies on the dollar and thereby eliminate distribution and printing costs.

Right. For all the buzz from some publishers about consumers paying for subscriptions, most of them have forgotten that consumers never really paid for the paper. Advertisers did. Subscription prices barely covered the price for home delivery.

So how does the 2010 Ford Taurus campaign fit into the picture? Digital publications could deliver digital advertising as situational as Lamar Advertising's outdoor concept, e.g., allowing an investment firm to deliver messages based upon the fluctuations of the stock market but only for those readers that meet a certain demographic profile.

All it requires is for modern advertising creatives to stop writing for each other and return to their golden era roots, where copywriters once wrote as if they were writing to a single consumer (much like some social media pros do today). In fact, in our playbook, digital distribution would not only make this possible, but it would also make it a necessity. Leap forward already.

Shining Starters: 10 Tips For Blogger-People Relations

While there are many top ten lists for bloggers, most seasoned bloggers — independent and organizational alike — will tell you that writing content is only part of the equation for sustainable success. Virtually every successful blog does more than offer good content. Many establish a sense of connection and sometimes community despite a presentation-like format.

The ability to infuse engagement, outreach, and relations into any social media program is the difference between having a successful program vs. one that doesn't seem to work. After all, if anyone can write a post and be successful, then every blog would have better than 200 readers. Most don't.

A few months ago, we performed an evaluation on an internal blog for a government agency. Despite the opportunity to employ it as a strong internal communication tool, the apparent lack of engagement and occasional adversarial tone from employees had left the communicators at a loss. What were they doing wrong?

In addition to providing six primary recommendations and 14 steps to realign the blog to meet its original objectives, there were some additional concepts missing from the program that had nothing to do with the nuts and bolts and writing posts. They had everything to do with people-to-people relations and organizational values. Here are ten tips.

Ten Common Sense Blogging Tips Beyond The Post

• Treat others with respect, even when you disagree with them, and they will respect you.
• Listen to what others have to say, and understand their point of view before being heard.
• Never be afraid of holding a less popular opinion, and people will add more value to your opinions.
• Keep your promises, even if it means making fewer promises, and people will know they can trust you.
• Allow others to share in your work from time to time and they will take responsibility for it.
• When others see justice used in solving problems, it reaffirms their sense of right and wrong.
• Invest one-on-one time with people, answering their questions and joining discussions, and they'll know you value them.
• If you expose yourself to diverse viewpoints and ideas, you'll benefit from improved critical thinking skills.
• Praise efforts, but never be afraid to improve, expand upon, or correct them, and the recognition means more.
• Lead a balanced life because the best posts and stories don't originate from online content.

From time to time, you'll find some of the best read and/or social media experts stumble on these points too, either slipping into diatribe or extending niceties to the point of pushing forward concepts laced with problems. It's okay. We're all human.

More to the point, however, is that observing those ten tips makes all the rest more manageable. Here are some of the better ones that we've collected. Enjoy.

Five More Blogging Tips From Around The Web

• 10 Simple Productivity Tips for Bloggers>Daily Blogging Tips from DailyBlogTips

• 10 Tips For Writing Blog Posts That Shine from Top Ten Blog Tips

• Build Upon Your Strengths As A Blogger from ProBlogger

• Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers from Wired

• 10 Tips for Becoming a Great Corporate Blogger from Scout