FUMBLE
Scandal 2.0 Rocks Aussie Liberals

Here’s a bad idea: Team up with one of your co-workers to create a blog which completely and utterly discredits your boss. But that’s exactly what two Liberal campaign staffers did in Australia.

John Osborn and Simon Morgan, paid employees of the Liberal Party, created the blog Ted Baillieu Most Go. The site attacked the Party leader in Victoria, the Australian province that incorporates Melbourne. Not surprisingly, the pair were fired for their lack of loyalty.

They clearly messed up and paid the price. But the real FUMBLE goes to the Liberal Party itself. As Gerry McCusker writes on the PR Disasters blog, the scandal suggests that the Liberal Party was engaged in little or no online monitoring. The blog was created late last year, but it wasn’t until last month that the party figured out who was responsible. McCusker calls it a “complete lack of Liberal e-savvy.”

We tend to agree. The conversations going on about your brand or organization can’t be ignored. Veritas provides Online Reputation Management services and we can help you listen, understand and react to the conversations that are taking place. These conversations can help you improve your products or customer service. They can also alert you to crises of brand confidence before they reach the tipping point. Blogs matter. Smart marketers ignore them at their peril.

Each Friday, we finish up our weekly staff meetings with an inspirational quote. For the first time it was my turn. And I completely forgot.

I was going to use a quote from Bill Bernbach — the “B” in ad agency DDB. I like the guy. I refer to him and his legacy when I’m trying to help clients and prospective clients understand and appreciate the way social media is redefining the entire marketing communications landscape. Bernbach is given credit for helping to launch a creative revolution in advertising around 1960, one that would forever alter the way in which marketers speak to consumers. The impact of social marketing is just as profound. I describe it as the second major revolution in marketing, with Bernbach’s being the first.

Bernbach was also a quote machine. Here are some of his gems:

“A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.”

“Advertising doesn’t create a product advantage. It can only convey it.”

“In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.”

“Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.”

“Our job is to sell our clients’ merchandise… not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.”

Today the quotes are a little dated. They came from an era when the best way to sell stuff was through TV ads. There were only three or three television stations in most markets and people watched shows in groups at predetermined times. The Internet wouldn’t come to people’s homes for another 35 years and digital video recorders were still 45 years away.

But replace the words “advertising” with “social media” in his quotes and they are just as relevant as they were in 1960.