Update: While Best Buy didn’t share Brian Maupin’s sense of humor, it appears that Paramount Pictures does. Nicely done Brian!

Watch it and let me know what you think.

Happy 4th of July America. Now, let’s hear some rock n’ roll Mr. Vai!

Let’s say you follow your favorite baseball player on Twitter and you’d only want to read about his tweets relating to baseball – Twylah will help you do that by sorting a any Twitter profile by most-tweeted keywords. Cool right?

Maybe you want to create a mini-blog out of your Twitter stream – you can do that too. In fact, I can use my Twylah page to mix in blog posts longer than 140 characters with my existing Twitter updates. Register yourself a domain name and point it to your Twylah page and BOOM – you’ve got yourself a blog.

I recently interviewed Twylah founder Eric Kim for Relevantly Speaking. I think you guys will find this interesting.

Then I see spam like this:

In none of my recent tweets have I talked about home ownership or solar panels. So why single me out with an “@” message that tries to sell me solar panels for my home? I often counsel clients on listening tools they can use to make sure they are part of relevant conversations that are happening on Twitter about their industry or their brand. When done correctly and with genuine intent, it can often lead to a sale – or even better – a long term relationship.

In this particular case Mr. Lester Sheets not only wasted his time by blindly Twitter spamming me, he did actual damage to his brand by harassing me in a very public way with an unwanted tweet. First off, even when I am in the market for solar panels this incident ensures I will never buy from him. Second, I immediately unfollowed him therefore severing any chance he had to build a relationship and market to me in the future.

Social media marketing is a lot like a cocktail party. You wouldn’t walk up to a group of people, interrupt their conversation and start handing out business cards, would you? No, instead, you’d walk up, smile and probably listen for a few minutes to hear what the conversation was about. Then, where appropriate, you’d add a comment or share a common experience that adds value to the group. Maybe after 10 or 15 minutes someone might say to you “hey, what is it that you do?” At that point you can elaborate and if they’re in the market for what you’re offering you have a reasonable chance at building a business relationship. That’s because you took the time to listen and add value before you shared details about yourself. It should be the same mindset on Twitter.

That said, I have a question for @SilverJingles: How often has you vomiting into someone else’s Twitter stream actually brought you a customer?

Tonight I made pasta with Rao’s Homeade Marinara Sauce. It was one of the best pasta dishes I’ve had in a long time. Here’s what I did:

First, I pan-fried an Italian sausage until it was brown. Then I cut it into bit-sized pieces and set it aside. Next, I chopped some red bell peppers and onions and sauteed them in the same pan I had cooked the sausage with a bit of olive oil. When they were just about cooked I added some finely sliced garlic and the sausage I cooked earlier. After browning the garlic and cooking the sausage through, I added the Rao’s Marinara Sauce. I simmered it on low heat for about 10 minutes and served it with bucatini pasta.

For those unaware, Rao’s is a legendary Italian restaurant in Harlem. It’s nearly impossible to get a table. Ever. They’ve since opened another location in Las Vegas at Caesar’s Palace that replicates the New York location almost identically. They’ve become such legend among foodies, they’ve started offering jarred sauce at retail outlets across the country.

Rao’s sauce consists of pretty simple ingredients. It contains only Imported tomatos, olive oil, onions, salt, garlic, basil, black pepper and oregano. This is truly one of the cases where the end-result is greater than the sum of it’s parts.

This is an admittedly unusual entry on my blog. Even though I obsess about food daily, I never write about it here. I am not in any way affiliated with Rao’s and I don’t receive any compensation for writing about their sauce, but this meal was so good I felt compelled to share it with you in the hopes that you might try it.

The sauce is available at most major grocery chains – at least here in Santa Barbara. At $7.00 per jar, it’s not cheap, but you could easily feed 4-6 adults on a single jar of sauce – that’s pretty reasonable.

If any of you actually try the sauce, I’d love to know what you think. Am I smoking crack or is it really that good? For those interested, I paired it with a 2007 Estate Pinot Noir from Melville Winery.

Why is this such big news? Well, that camera retails for under $2700. Normally House is shot on film with cameras and lenses that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Last night’s episode proved that the cost of equipment is no longer a barrier to entry on making broadcast-ready television.

I bought the Canon 5D in December of 2008. I had never owned a DSLR, but had seen the video that people like Vincent LaForet were getting out of these cameras and I had to try it. I ended up selling that camera and getting the Canon 7D about 8 months later. That camera was almost $1000 less and had more functionality at the time than the 5D. Canon has since remedied that with a firmware upgrade. Now there is a new camera called the T2i that costs $800 that has almost all the functionality of the 5D and 7D. That means there is no barrier to entry. For the price of a home video camera, you can now own the proper tools to help you shoot a film or make a television program.

When I started the American Cliche radio show back in June of 2005, I talked often about the democratization of media. The internet has allowed us to each have a voice and be able to tell whatever story we want. Since I started this show AC has been listened to almost 5 and a half million times. I think that’s pretty powerful.

AC’s success proves that we have the power to take the power away from radio, but television and film has been a tougher nut to crack. Shooting an entire episode of House on a sub-$3000 DSLR camera brought us much closer. If you have a great story and the talent to back it up, there are no excuses anymore. Get out there and do it.

“Anyone get the sense that BP is throwing darts at a dartboard of ideas at this point & going “what the hell, let’s try it.”

This weekend SNL confirmed my theory with their cold open.

Anyhoo, I’m staying at a Larkspur Hotel Property. Apparently they own 23 hotels and 6 restaurants all over California, Washington and Oregon (fun facts I got from their Twitter profile). I was told at check-in that the wi-fi was complimentary using the code that they gave me. I got to my room, signed in and instead of being redirected to the usual corporate site, I was taken to the Larkspur Twitter page.

Nicely played Larkspur Marketing peeps. Instead of doing the obvious and taking me to a page they knew I’d quickly navigate away from (the corporate site), they provided me with an opportunity for engagement. I immediately followed on Twitter. That means that long after my one night stay is over they’ll be able to continue a dialogue with me about their properties.

Would this work at a hotel in Boise? Probably not, but we’re in the heart of Silicon Valley. The hotel that I’m at is crawling with tech people. The odds that many of them use Twitter is pretty strong.

I talk a lot about the things that companies do wrong on this blog, so I occasionally like to point out when I think someone’s done something cool.

As a true sign of the impending apocolypse, even Ashton Kutcher’s account, @aplusk was doomed.

I’m sure Twitter is in the process of resolving this, but Twitter-holics everywhere have got to be squirming in their chairs right now at the thought of, gasp, ZERO followers!

This got me thinking about a larger problem. Should we be putting such a huge amount of our corporate and personal branding in the hands of a third-party? I am absolutely convinced that Twitter is going to be able to restore the temporarily missing data, but what if they couldn’t? Companies now invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, in using Twitter as a marketing tool. Individuals spend hours and hours each week (or day) curating their Twitter profile. What if all that time and effort was for nothing? Could it be wiped out overnight? Should it make us think differently about where we build our brand online?

Something to think about for sure.

Anyway, before we brought Emma to see the animals, we partook in one of the other mandatory activities of going to the fair – carnival food! I mean, how can you be in the land of the Carny without eating corndogs, cotton candy or funnel cakes? While I was waiting for my lunch to be served up I started watching the kettle corn vendor next to me. He was a man in his late fifties or early sixties and he had a wooden paddle submerged into a giant metal pot. Clearly he had this practiced motion and craft that was necessary to produce the hundreds of pounds of kettle corn that he must churn out every day.

It got me thinking about the lack artisanship in the United States. I mean, creating something locally really is a dying breed. We don’t produce anything in the U.S. anymore. I immediately thought of that scene in Say Anything where Lloyd Dobler talks about what he wants to do for a living:

Everything is now outsourced overseas to the lowest bidder. We complain that there isn’t any industry in our country and then we go shop at Walmart. Does that make any sense? Maybe it’s just a vicious cycle. We don’t have any jobs, so therefore we shop at Walmart because it’s cheaper and all we can afford. Yet, the more we shop at Walmart, the more we feed the business practice of sending foreign manufacturing, technology and service jobs overseas.

This is why the kettle corn maker was such a fascinating thing to think about. Here is a guy that has practiced a craft for probably the last 30+ years of his life. He lives on the road churning out a thousand bags of kettle corn for the masses, then packs it up every few days and starts all over again. New town, new people – but the same practiced craft over and over again. How many Fortune 500 CEOs do you think could do what he does? How many of them could make anything themselves?

We simply don’t place enough value on craftsmanship. We say we want high-quality, locally made products, but we’re not willing to pay for them. We say we value the local worker and 15 minutes later we ensuring his demise because we shop at stores that undercut him by having six year olds in Malaysia produce their products.

I’m trying to help in whatever small way I can. I try to buy most of my produce at the farmer’s market from local growers. I buy wine, almost exclusively from local vineyards I’ve visited. I try support local restaurants and stay away from chains. And I never, ever, shop at Walmart. Still, I’m always looking for more that I can do.

What else can we be doing to support the American worker? What would Lloyd Dobler do?

I’ve been a fan of J.R. since I booked his band Dishwalla to play Babson College when I was graduate assistant there in 1996. The song “Counting Blue Cars” was starting to break all over the radio and Dishwalla’s career was taking off. I thought they were going to be the next great American rock story.

Since moving to Santa Barbara nine years ago, I’ve seen them perform a half dozen times around town. They’re a hometown band after all, and they often give their local celebrity freely to play benefits and community events. And even though most of the world is asking “what ever happened to…?”, I’ve seen them get better and better as they continued to release amazing records. In fact “Opaline” is probably in my top 10 favorite albums of all time.

Last year J.R. Richards released his debut solo effort called “A Beautiful End.” Hands down it was my favorite record of 2009. If you listen to my radio show you know that the title song became a way for me to cope with the death of Mia the Wonderdog back in December. When music is at it’s best, I believe it has the power to heal. That song definitely helped me get through a tough time.

Why am I writing all this? Good question.

As a fan of music, I’m tired of seeing Justin Bieber occupy Twitter’s trending topics list for the last three months. I mean, really, besides being a good looking kid with dumb hair, what has he actually done? We seem to have lost sight of the fact that being famous doesn’t make you talented. There are so many amazing performers and songwriters out there trying to make a living and it’s just getting impossible to cut through all this noise and find an audience. I decided it was time for me to do my part to try and shine a light on someone that I dig.

Oh, and today is J.R.’s birthday and people should say nice stuff about you on your birthday.

This is the spot that I saw:

Nope, not a spoof it was for real. At first I questioned what self-respecting woman would use such a product with the obvious sexual overtones. Then, yesterday I was in Bed Bath & Beyond and I saw two women using the Shake Weight in the middle of the store for all to see. And yes, if you’re wondering, it looked just as obscene as it does in the commercial. I started to think about how genius this marketing campaign might actually be.

Every company wants their message to go viral and spread organically, but that seldom happens. The dilemma I face every day as a marketer is how I can be true to the brand message of a product, but still make the creative entertaining enough for people to want to actively link to it, Tweet about it, and add it to their Facebook page. Shake Weight, accidentally or not, has a found a way to do that. In fact, two weeks ago the mother of all validation came – SNL parodied it:

Obviously Shake Weight is riding unbelievable buzz from their highly, err, “engaging” TV spots. I’d be really curious to know how all this “excitement” is translating into actual sales. Sometimes something can be so entertaining or so funny, that people may doubt it’s actually real. Does this fall into that category? Also, ponder this, how would the buzz change if they tried to market this to men by using men instead of women in their commericals? Chew on that for a bit.

I’d love your feedback in the comments below.

Let me back up a second and give you some back story and context. Marko is the guitar player in the band Sugarcult (Full Fanboy disclosure: I’ve been a fan of Sugarcult for 10 years – long before I ever met Marko). This week we happened to be talking about SXSW Interactive and how he was there to DJ an event for our friend Mike Barash.

Conventional wisdom will tell you that Marko should have skipped the Interactive portion of SXSW and intead showed up to hang out during the Music event. After all, he’d fit in much better among his rock n’ roll brethren, right? That’s when Marko dropped that line I noted above on me. He went on to explain that by going to Interactive rather than music, he got to be the only rock n’ roll guy in a sea of tech people. By going to SXSW Interactive he was a rockstar – someone that everyone wanted to see and talk to. If he had gone to Music, he would have been just another person in a band that you may or may not have heard of. Sure, it’s comfortable to be among people that are just like you, but how can you really stand out and make an impact in that situation?

This got me thinking about business and how we approach marketing. A great example of this outside the box thinking that I saw in Austin was Chevy. I’m sure the easiest thing for them to do would be to “check the box” and attend every auto show to peddle their latest cars. But how bold of them was it to exhibit and show off their new vehicles at SXSW Interactive? At first glance it may not make much sense, but then you realize that they essentially got a monopoly on eyeballs because they were the only car company living and breathing in the tech space at that event.

This also applies to standing out on an individual level. When I attend SXSW each year I’m just another technology social media guy. There are thousands of those. But, if I were to attend something like a national hotel owners conference, I’d probably really stand out and be able to bring in a lot of business for myself. At a social media conference I’m just another guy in a band. But, by stepping outside that box as the lone red dot, I can be a rockstar.

Do you have a situation like this where you’ve had some success? I’d love to hear about it.

First, when I read the entertainment section of a website I expect to read about who died, who OD’d or who’s sleeping with whom. I don’t, under any circumstances, want to be reading spoilers about your own network’s TV shows. I mean, really?

Think about it this way – if I care even the slightest bit about a television program, I either watched it when it aired or I’ve DVR’d it. If I’ve watched it, then I obviously don’t need your play by play of what happened. If I’ve DVR’d it and you spilled the beans on the show, well, now you’ve just pissed me off. That’s exactly what happened this morning with the Apprentice. I woke to the headline of “*** Gets the Boot on Apprentice.” Notice how I blanked out the name? That’s because, unlike MSNBC, I care enough about my readers to not spoil TV shows for you.

Now, I realize that some of you are saying “but Scott, if you DVR’d the show NBC doesn’t really care if you watch it later or not since you’ll forward through the commercials and that’s all they really care about.” Ahhh yes, good point astute reader, but if you’ve ever watched an episode of the Apprentice you know that each episode is basically a commercial in and of itself. Trump and Mark Burnett have been geniuses in integrating brands into the challenges and tasks on the show for years. So while, yes, I may skip the commercials, what about the company that ponied up big bucks for a giant two-hour spot? Ask Kodak, Lifelock or Norton if they’d be pissed about that.

And let’s be clear here, it’s not just Apprentice using integrated sponsorship in programs. Show likes FX’s “Damages” and Fox’s “24″ have been using American car brands front and center for years. Like it or not, this is the new reality of television advertising and when you print spoilers hours after a show airs, you’re screwing the pooch on your ad sales.

Finally, let’s talk about my real beef with all of this “coverage.” It’s lazy, lazy lazy. How can you watch a TV show on your own network, write a four paragraph rundown of the episode (complete with spoilers) and call yourself a journalist? Where’s the analysis of why *** was fired? Where’s the gripping piece about the rise and fall in ratings of The Apprentice? Why did NBC decide to make this season’s Apprentice run a two-hour weekly program instead of the usual one hour? Journalism should be about covering a real event – politics, sports, human interest etc – not shortening the transcript of a show into four paragraphs.

I don’t know what’s more lame – the fact that I actually watch the Apprentice or that MSNBC thinks that this even remotely qualifies as insightful news.

Severel of you have written to me asking where this week’s show is. I had every intention of recording one on Wednesday, but there are still some details being worked out on the Q2 advertising buy. While I love doing the show for you guys each week, it doesn’t make much sense to rush out an episode before I get the funding in place for the next couple of months. I hope to get it squared away this weekend and be on track for next week.

To those that celebrate it, Happy Easter. I hope you have a great weekend with your family and friends. Emma will be attending an Easter egg hunt tomorrow here in Santa Barbara – her first. The kid loves to run around and find hidden things, so it should be a hoot.

Talk next week.

In David Lee Roth’s book “Crazy From the Heat” he talked about how that clause was meant to protect the band:

“The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. When I would walk backstage, if I saw brown M&Ms in that bowl…well, line-check the entire production.”

This was not a star tanrum at all. Instead, it was the only way that Van Halen knew that the venue had read their contract throroughly and followed it to the letter. This got me thinking about attention to detail in business.

Because I’m looking for a new gig, I’ve had to dust off my resume and make sure it’s polished and up-to-date. That means I need to be really careful about typos and grammar. After all, that sort of careless error sends a message to potential employers or consulting clients that I don’t pay attention to details. If I can’t be bothered to check and double-check my resume, what kind of things will fall through the cracks once they hire me? See what I’m saying here?

I see misspellings on corporate websites and marketing materials all the time and I wonder how it gets through. If a company can’t take the time to make their marketing copy perfect, what other corners are they cutting when a client is paying them? The same kind of company that allows, or worse – doesn’t notice that kind of carelessness, may make serious mistakes with your business that could cost you lots of money.

It’s hard enough in this economy to land a job or a consulting gig. Send the right message by paying attention to details. Before you send that proposal or apply for that job, check to make sure you’ve removed all the brown M&Ms from the bowl.

Landing a job

The bag pictured to the left was the one I was issued at SES NY. I don’t want to single them out or pick on them and, actually, theirs is one of the better crappy ones I’ve received. SXSW Interactive had one that was far worse.

In case you’re unfamiliar with what I’m talking about, allow me to explain. At nearly every conference I’ve ever been to, they hand you a bag upon registration. 99.99% of the time that bag is full of a bunch of useless crap that sponsors paid to stuff in there. That crap either ends up in the trash right away, or it’s left for hotel housekeeping staff to toss en masse once the throngs of tech geeks leave town.

Look, I work in, errr… worked in marketing for many years. I get that this is how the game is played. If you pony up a lot of money you get to have your schwag placed in the attendee bag. If you pony up a really outrageous silly amount of money you get your name printed on the side of the tote bag. OK, fair enough. This is all fine and dandy and the marketing folks get to check the box on event sponsorship.

Can we at least make a couple of rules here?

Rule #1: Why does the bag have to be a silly canvas grocery bag? Sure, people could take them on the plane with them and use them at their local market, but most won’t. The vast majority of them end up in the trash or in the hotel room. Why can’t you spend a bit of extra cash and provide a backpack or a messenger bag? Add the name of the conference and a sponsor’s logo in a small tasteful way and LOTS of people would continue to reuse that bag. Tech geeks love free stuff, especially cool laptop bags. By spending more money on a good quality bag, you guarantee that the bag will be used and the sponsors brand seen long after the event ends. That means you get to charge sponsors more for their name on the bag. Everybody wins.

Rule #2: Sponsors can only put cool stuff in the bags. Stop it with the leaflets and flyers and blah blah blah. Honestly, have you ever read through that stuff at a conference? Instead, give me something functional – a pen, a cool pad to jot down ideas, an iPhone case, a t-shirt etc. Again, you might spend a bit more for that, but at least you have some hope that your branded item won’t end up in the garbage 10 seconds after the bag is picked up.

In short, I’m appealing to conference planners on two fronts. First, this practice is a big F U to the environment. Thouands of bags and leaflets are wasted after every event. Let’s think smarter about promotional opportunities. Second, help marketers make better choices with their dollars. Help them realize true ROI by creating promotional products that are useful to your average attendee.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to empty my hotel room trash as it’s suddenly filled up with junk.

This week that adventure ends. I’m not going to go too deep into the hows and whys, except to say that sometimes when new leadership is brought on board they make decisions about what is valuable and what is less valuable. Several people and departments didn’t sit as high in that value chain as we once did. That’s life. That’s business.

I am extremely grateful to my boss in marketing, Trip Foster and MediaTrust CEO, Peter Bordes for being given the keys to the social media kingdom for so long. They trusted me to be the face and the voice of MediaTrust and trusted my vision for the brand. Additionally there were many other people at MT that I enjoyed working with and respect immensely. It’s a time in my professional life that I will always remember fondly.

That said, it’s time for a new adventure in my career. I am, at once, excited and scared. On one hand, I am confident in the skills that I’ve developed and I know they will be of value to the right company. On the other, the unknown is always a bit scary.

I’ve started talking to several companies in the last few days about options ranging from part-time consulting gigs to full-blown salaried positions. Some have found me on LinkedIn and several have been sent my way by friends and colleagues. I have never used this blog to solicit work before, but I feel like you guys would be OK with it.

Over the next few days/weeks, keep your eyes and ears open. If you hear of any forward thinking companies that might be a good fit for the social media strategy work I do, please drop me a line. Or, if you happen to be a decision maker at such a company, I’d love to hear from you as well.

Thank you for all the support you have shown me over the last 5 years. American Cliche has evolved a bit since then, but the connection I feel to all of you hasn’t changed. Let’s see what this new adventure has in store, shall we?