FourSquare uses a concept of having people check into places they visit, and the one who visits most often is declared the “Mayor” of that facility. The Cactus Club clearly understands the power of talking directly with the people who use that social media environment, sending me the message simply because I was within walking distance of a Cactus Club location. Perfect! I had long been advocating that restaurants use the power of Mayorship for marketing, so I was thrilled to see that the Cactus Club was doing something with this.

The most common argument I hear about using social media is that the audience is relatively small, compared to such things as flyer drops into the community or running an ad. Yes, it’s true that there’s only one Mayor per establishment, and there may only be a few thousand FourSquare members in your city, with only a few hundred potentially in your community. So what? These are highly targeted people. They fight over becoming Mayor! When you lose a Mayorship because someone else passes you in visits, it’s a big deal for FourSquare users. Any business can gain repeat visits, and by definition, additional sales, by using this strategy. I believe that because of the nature of foodservice, restaurants can gain more than most other retail services.

The Cactus Club was offering a free gift card for whoever was mayor on a particular day, at a particular time. That’s extremely powerful, and a brilliant example of using social media marketing. I hope this is only the start of better use of social media.

Other restaurants are also starting to “get it” when it comes to the power of social media.

Morton’s gets it, too

Roger Drake, senior VP of the Morton’s steakhouse chain, explained that they make significant use of social media. One strategy they’ve applied with great success is bringing in celebrity servers for fund raising, then using Twitter to tweet their appearance. Followers on Twitter receive “inside” information that an NBA star or other celebrity will be at Morton’s, creating a buzz about the event.

Morton’s also offers Twitter followers bar bites in the bar. They encourage people to tweet from the event, to create powerful word of mouth awareness. They hold special events called “Burgers for Bloggers” where they serve mini Prime Cheeseburgers. This is great stuff!

They also use Facebook effectively. For Valentine’s Day, they asked guests on Facebook to send photos of their Valentine’s Day experience at Morton’s. “We got more than 50 photos,” said Roger. One couple got engaged in the restaurant, and this was mentioned on their Facebook page, providing powerful emotional appeal and creating a strong connection with fans. For Mother’s Day, they will have people go to the Morton’s Facebook page to post their favorite Mother’s Day Morton’s dinner photos.

It’s about relationships

When using social media, please don’t spam people. Don’t think of it as a way to stream out one-way promotional messages. Use it to create relationships. Seek out the people who post frequently on your Facebook page, and offer them special incentives. You can even make them administrators of your page, an unpaid task that can have huge rewards because these are among your most faithful guests and their voice can serve more effectively than anything you say. With Twitter you can announce special spur-of-the-moment offers, perhaps a discounted appetizer or beverage special. Have your guests mention a phrase you use in a Tweet to get special treatment, and they’ll love you for it, because you’ll be making them feel special and creating that dynamic two-way relationship.

Starbucks applied a FourSquare strategy in which they offered the mayor of any location $1 off any of their new anyway-you-like-it Frappuccino. It was a reasonable strategy in some ways, but the $1 wasn’t a big enough draw, in my view, to be significant. There’s only one mayor of any location at any given time, so it’s not like you’re giving away the keys to the store by making the offer more meaningful. A screen shot of the coupon is shown at right.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter require an ongoing, consistent effort to be successful. That’s another thing often mentioned as a negative. Why would that be that any different from any other daily task, assigned just as you assign a day chef to start your food preparation? Approached with the mindset that this is a long-term process, a consistent effort to connect with people around you, social media will have a strong impact on your sales.

I love how cleverly the Facebook information was used. You see images from the profile dimmed behind the water, and even the use of the person’s name in an obituary. At the end is a posting showing that the position they held at work is now vacant, with the company seeking to have it filled. Really brilliant stuff. Not overplayed or heavy-handed, but just right.

You can see what the experience looked like for one user, Nick O’Neill, right here.

This promotion was dreamed up by Campfire, with the actual code and strategy developed by Your Majesty and The Advanced Guard. Kudos to everyone involved.

Another attempt to use this approach was the promotion by 20th Century Fox on the rollout of the 10th anniversary edition of the cult classic film “Fight Club.” In this case, Facebook profile information was accessed to produce a trailer. It was ridiculously slow and not nearly as well made.

This brings me to the point of the article. Along with the power of social media to create amazingly effective stuff come several big challenges. These aren’t new, but in the frenzied excitement of trying to push the bleeding edge (sorry) of marketing, many people are forgetting to address these basic foundational issues.

Getting in the front door

Every savvy Internet user is well aware of privacy and guards it well. For any social media tool to play down these concerns would be suicide (and usually illegal), so Facebook asks for permission before an application like these can access your profile.

Obviously, only those who are totally blown away by your creative will be interested in granting such access. But how will they know that it will be good? Most people won’t have a clue what your Facebook Connect app is going to do. As a result, they aren’t going to grant access. Nobody wants to have an application post something stupid or annoying on their public profile!

This creates a whole new element of complexity for those who produce the campaign. It’s no longer enough to simply express excitement and hope people will come along with you. It’s absolutely critical to tell them what they’ll experience ahead of time. You have to show what a typical Facebook wall posting looks like, tell them why your application is worth loading, and find ways to add extra value to the equation.

I think the Discovery Channel promo was quite sensitive. The Facebook postings were smart enough that they wouldn’t serve as an embarrassment to anyone.

Adding value

People will add your app if there is sufficient value for them. If you’re a major coffee company and want people to post their favorite drink to their profile, fine. But what’s the point, really? What’s in it for them? Why not raise the bar by giving them a free beverage each time they do so? Now you’ve got a true partnership and that’s what social media marketing is all about.

I have two iPhone apps which represent opposite sides of this reality. One lets me track my running or cycling workouts using the built-in GPS, and posts the results to my FB profile and wall. It’s very cool because the social media posts it creates are subtle, not too promotional or “pushy” in style. When people click the link in the post they can see the details of my workout, including an actual GPS track and stats. This is useful! My friends can compare their results against mine. These guys get what social media is all about, letting me become a “trust agent” as Chris Brogan calls those who influence through their posts. The other app is nicely designed and lets me design and track my gym workouts. But these guys don’t get social media. The postings the app creates are purely promotional. The links in the posts are only designed to sell the product itself to others, with no “added value” for my friends. They can’t see any further info about my workouts. So what’s the point? I’m embarrassed about what it posts to Facebook and am feeling great pressure to turn that posting feature off. (Update: I did give in to embarrassment and turned off that feature. My desire when I let apps post info is to add value through those posts, not to boast about my workouts)

No matter how creative your promotion, if it’s self-serving and offers no real value to those you’re trying to reach, they won’t bother with it and all your effort will be wasted. So spend time figuring out what will make it useful for those who see the postings.

In the case of Discovery’s Frenzied Waters campaign, the value was inherent in the video production itself.

Load time

Another factor with apps like these is load time. Some, like the Fight Club promo, simply take too long to load. People are busier than ever, trying to fit more stuff into the same 24 hour days we’ve had since the first loin cloth was sewn from fig leaves. If your app doesn’t load in 8 seconds, you’re toast. Women are even more impatient than men when it comes to online activities. Their timeout ratio is 3:1 compared to men, so you better plan on a load time of 3 seconds if you don’t want to lose huge percentages of the female demographic.

The Discovery campaign loaded very quickly, just 3 seconds, while the Fight Club promo took over a minute, rendering it essentially useless.

Regardless of how effectively your creative applies the powerful tools available through social media, you better make sure it meets the real-world people tests or it will fall flat on its Facebook.

Advertising has gone through many transitions during the four decades since the ground breaking creative headline of the “Lemon” ad changed marketing communications forever. There were periods when many ads had no headline at all, and times when headlines were so long they took up more space than the rest of the ad. In an effort to move away from what might be seen as ‘too traditional,’ it seems that many copywriters have forgotten the value of the headline.

Research has found that the headline represents 84% of the effectiveness of any communication. 84 out of every 100 people who read an ad, web page or E-mail message will do so only if the headline or subject line does its job. No doubt some people will say, “But what about [insert dramatic exception here]?” Of course there are exceptions. There are no hard rules in advertising. But there are patterns and realities of human behavior. Research is useful for finding out what is most likely to be effective.

I’ve seen many A/B tests where one headline would pull far better than another, when everything else about the message was the same. In one dramatic case, changing a single word in the headline drew four times as many responses. Headlines matter.

So, if the headline is as important as all that, it makes sense that copywriters should spend time on it. Far too many don’t give it enough thought. And far too many clients don’t think they should. In fact, you should actually spend four times as long writing the headline as the rest of the copy!

A great headline is short, concise, and powerful. But it rarely starts that way. It takes time to cut away and edit and painstakingly reshape until you have something that can’t be reduced any further without changing the message.

Carmine Gallo, in his excellent book “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs,” writes that the best headlines need to be short enough to fit into the 140-character limit of a Twitter post (known as a “Tweet”). It’s good advice. Twitter is an excellent tool for copywriters. It forces you to think in short sentences, compelling you to write copy that does the most with the least.

Gallo goes on to illustrate his point with real examples from Apple:

• MacBook Air. The world’s thinnest laptop. (42 characters)
• The iPod. 1,000 songs in your pocket. (37 characters)
• Apple reinvents the phone. (26 characters)
• The industry’s greenest notebooks. (34 characters)
• iPhone 3G. Twice as fast at half the price. (43 characters)

You might think that these apply well to Powerpoint, but won’t prove as creative or effective as the headline of an ad or E-mail message. Not so. Apple actually ran these same headlines in all their communication channels, and even used them in interviews. They appeared on their website as the feature headlines found on the home page, in the subject lines of their E-mail promotions, in press releases and in their magazine ads.

The media found they couldn’t write more effective versions. This meant that editorial coverage on these product announcements ran with exactly the same headlines. When Apple introduced the iPod, the Associated Press ran their story with the headline, “Apple’s new iPod player puts 1,000 songs in your pocket.” When the iPhone was launched, PC World ran the headline that Apple would “Reinvent the Phone,” using language provided by Apple. It doesn’t get any better than that.

In his book, Gallo points out that this rule is equally important in other presentation settings. For example, your pitch about a business concept given to potential investors also needs to meet the “Twitter” rule or it won’t go anywhere. Google pitched its concept using the following headline: “Google provides access to the world’s information in one click.” Gallo mentions that one investor told him, “If you cannot describe what you do in ten words or less, I’m not investing, I’m not buying, I’m not interested. Period.”

If you write copy, create a Twitter account and start using it. You’ll be amazed at how it could improve your headline writing skills.

Since most headlines are short enough to fit within the limits of a Tweet, ask yourself if the headline will actually mean anything if that’s all you saw. When you strip away the graphics and other parts of the message, is it still compelling? How well do your headlines meet the Twitter rule? Will they stand out in the ever-changing stream of a Twitter feed? If not, they won’t stand out in the stream of consciousness that impacts all media.

Have you noticed how textures have become popular? We see this influence in the kind of papers used for brochures and packaging, to interior decorating trends, to the strong textures showing up in clothing styles. I believe this trend is directly related to the growth of Internet communications — a flat, untouchable medium that looks pretty but never offers any real tactile essence.

This isn’t the first time a communications trend has affected us culturally. The growth of television in the late 1950’s had a similar impact, though in those days it was checkered tablecloths, wrinkled chiffon dresses, silk shirts, and corduroy pants.

People have had enough experience with the internet and interactive presentations by now. The excitement that characterized the 90’s is fading. The internet is now an everyday tool. Meanwhile, people are getting tired of the pretty pictures behind glass. They are yearning to touch something real. They want to feel blind embossing and corrugated cardboard. They want to watch the shadows interplay from die-cut openings and edges. They want to run their fingers along unusual bindings and shapes of annual reports that look more like packaging than business documents.

Advertisers who wish to maximize the psychological impact of this trend should combine their internet strategy with extra effort on production of collateral materials. The most effective strategies will probably involve the use of highly tactile print communications combined with highly interactive and informative online communications. Especially if one requires or supports the other to complete the message.

Watch as social media continues the transition in our expectations. We now want our brands to interact with us, not to talk to us in a one-way message, but to demand a two-way dialog. Ignore these developments at your own peril.

We try too hard. Far too often, marketing professionals use brute strength in an attempt to force ideas and products onto consumers instead of relating to the core needs and attitudes of their target audience. The greatest marketing successes tapped into emotional realities that already existed: Volkswagen. Apple. Nike. Molson. They saw what people were already thinking and touched it. Cultural sensitivity has never been more important for marketing than it is today when we’re at the leading edge of a whole new era of change.

One of the best ways to understand tomorrow’s consumer is to study today’s teenager. Fortunately, I have three teens at home to observe and talk with daily. Each one has been using computers since the age of two. They’re comfortable with technology. All three are building Web sites and one manages a busy online forum. I view them as a focus group for culture. It’s been enlightening and a bit scary. They’ve taught me that marketing isn’t really more difficult than before, just more intimate. Let me share some observations.

Watch a teen use communication tools and you begin to grasp one obvious reality — tools are not converging. Observing teens has convinced me that convergence isn’t a driving passion in their lives. They use the telephone when it makes sense to use the phone, they use e-mail for specific kinds of messages, and they use the Web to get facts and to place orders. All three tools are used to interact with brands, but each one has a unique role to play and teens instinctively know what that role is.

Teens recognize the telephone as a medium ideal for communicating emotion. Where previous generations used it as their primary messaging tool, tomorrow’s consumers use it for emotional impact. They laugh on the phone. They use it to communicate feelings in ways no other technology can match. Smart marketers can tap into this reality with “conference call” focus groups or live announcements where participants can express themselves freely.

While older generations are still trying to figure out how e-mail works, young adults know exactly when and why to use it. Forget about unsolicited sales messages. This is an unwelcome intrusion into their personal space, and they hate it. They crave e-mail, but only when it comes from sources they agreed to, from brands they have already granted permission to build a relationship. E-mail is used most often to communicate information-rich messages.

A cool new URL to look at gets sent to a whole group of friends in a second. News about a team, band or favourite brand is hot, and gets passed along quickly. Once they’ve “opted in” to receive mail from your brand, they welcome your messages as long as they aren’t self-serving. Marketers who involve their subscribers as a genuine community and recognize the value of these brand loyalists will win big, while those afraid of tapping into this dialogue process will lose ground. Yes, it’s scary to allow open public discussion of your brand. What teens seem to understand better than most executives is that this dialogue is already taking place anyway.

The Web is used for brand information. Smart marketers will respond to the way tomorrow’s consumers use the Web today. Offer up relevant content on every page. Make it fast and meaningful, or they change brand loyalty. Make it easy. Promotions that combine digital media with analog communications are also effective.

Best of all, there are whole worlds of culturally relevant marketing opportunities we haven’t even thought of yet.

One of my daughters is seriously into a CD-ROM game called The Sims. After setting parameters for computer-generated individuals, you can watch your simulated people interact with each other, get jobs and find romance. Not long ago, she breathlessly announced that one of her Sim women had proposed to a man, he accepted, and they got married.

“Did the ring have an Ekati (Canadian) diamond?” I asked.

“There are no brands in The Sims, Daddy,” she replied.

Interesting. “Would you like to have brand choices?” I probed. She needed no time to think about it. “Of course,” was all she said.

The opportunities are right in front of us all the time, in the midst of today’s teen culture. We merely have to see them. Just like always.