I was quite flattered to be profiled in Business in Vancouver Magazine last week. It was a real hit with the friends and family on my social networks when I posted it. Kidding aside, the timing could not have been better to be honest. We have been working non stop now for quite some time and it feels good to see that we are getting a little visability for it. There is also something very tactile with being in a print magazine. In our digital work space we forget that there is a tangible world of print. I scanned it to make sure that the wrinkles and 150 dpi where not lost on the viewers here on the blog. You can see the entire 'newsprinty' profile by clicking the details link.

The question arose the other night on Twitter, about user @bradinator retiring his personal persona account and focusing more energy on his corporate wine brand's Twitter account @Blackcloudwine. The question put forward was: "Is he committing social capital suicide by doing so and if so why would he do such a thing?". I have been wrestling with the same issue with my agency's @powershifter account vs. my personal @jaypiddy account, so I thought I would wrestle it out here on the PS Blog. Is the personal brand more important than the corporate brand, is it the other way around or do they share equality in the equation? The answer may be clear to those that are born of the web and social media especially who are themselves "the brand". If you are by definition a primarily a blogger then for all intensive purposes that is your "product" That means you engage users at a very personal level in social media and one might say that they are equal to the brand. The personas are the brands and are so intwined with the writing of the blogs and the Twitter posts it's hard to separate the two.

That is not the case for such things as packaged goods and or large service oriented companies. Those that are born brand first as is the case for the vast majority of brands and companies in the social media space must keep the brand first in the minds of it's customers. As much as a personal touch or the collective voice maybe important elements behind the brand touching the consumer in thoughtful and memorable ways, it is important to place the brand 1st and foremost.

Look at the top brands in social media today. Jet Blue, Dell, Starbucks, Whole Foods and WestJet just to name a few. They are all very personable and have clearly communicated as a group of people behind the brand that actually do care, but they do not place themselves before the brand. When I think of Zappos I have no idea what the names of the great people that helped me with customer care issues, and if I was not an in the advertising industry I would not be able to name Tony Hsieh as the CEO. Most of the Zappos customers only know the brand by name.

So back to @bradinator vs @Blackcloudwine for a few minutes here. What are the risks of abandoning the personal brand? As @paulrickett points out that 60% of those who follow @bradinator do not follow @Blackcloudwine so at first glance one might say that is a bad choice to abandon the personal account considering how often @bradinator tweets about his Blackcloud Wine. But that would be a very simplified view of the situation. @bradinator's personal account is very irreverent and has collected a huge following for that very reason. What if those 2030 followers could care less about wine and follow him just for his personal commentary? Then even if he could transfer his social capital over to the @Blackcloudwine account then it would be worthless. If 909 followers of @Blackcloudwine have a higher propensity to love wine and buy more wine and were attracted to that account due to the winecentric tweets in the first place then the smaller more qualified numbers are much more valuable. I will admit that I did not take the time to attempt to measure the quality of the @Blackcloudwine wine followers but I will bet that most are more interested in wine that on his other account.

Social media is just like traditional advertising when it comes to influence. It's not the number of eyeballs that count but rather the quality and relevance of those that follow you and your posts, tweets and feeds. Just because you have a follow count of thousands upon thousands on Twitter, your blog or Facebook page does not mean that you can market just anything to your potentially unqualified followers. Hell if it was a shear numbers game then why not just head over to fiverr.com and pay the five bucks to the literally hundreds of people offering to place your message or ad in their Twitter streams of 10's of thousands of followers. I'll tell you why. Proof that the clickthrough rate on those unqualified posts are incredibly low. All you need to do is pay one of the social media influencers a "fiverr" and then hand them over a message with a bit.ly or ow.ly link and watch your clickthrough rate. I will bet you that you will get fewer then 10 clicks on your highly un-targeted campaign. I am not saying that big numbers of followers don't work but they need to be qualified. Sure we may lead tribes but if I started to push Tampex branded tampons to my Twitter followers I am sure my tribe would not buy what I was selling.

Here is another reason that the personal brand in social media may not be the right way to grow your brand...scaling with grace and authenticity. We have seen what happens when a personal brand does not scale well due to the fact that there is a finite amount of you [personal brand] to go around. Usually when a personal brand takes off there is the need to automate the posts and tweets etc. That is usually done by way of hiring assistants to do the work for the personal brand...that's not very transparent now is it and can blow up quickly. When you choose to support a branded account the ability to authentically scale the brand is much easier to do. Sure it's through the same process of distributing the communication through others like assistants or social brand managers. The difference is that each manager can be identified as an individual behind a brand.

On an account that our agency set up for a customer we have three different people that tweet on behalf of the brand and are demarked by the "^" charachter and their initials. This clearly identifies that there is more than one person managing the account and if need be others can be added with out the feeling that there is any misrepresentation of the branded tweets.

So I ask the question again. Is it social capital suicide or just the death of another Twitter ID? Or is it just the birth of another one that may suit the brand better and in the end move more product and connect with it's customers in a much more authentic way?

I had the pleasure of being able to participate in Wolf Blass' 75th birthday celebration last Monday at the Hotel Vancouver. I had intended to write about it on my personal blog but after hearing Wolf speak about his early days of guerilla marketing, I realized the story belonged here instead.

II was not sure what to expect for this around-the-world birthday celebration, which was part PR for Wolf Blass Winery, and part lead-up to the launch of Blass' new book. We tasted wine and ate appetizers for nearly an hour before he and his travelling partner George Samios, from Fosters Wine Estates, hit the stage. In a thick Aussie accent, George introduced him as "Wolfy," and I quickly understood that this was a man who liked to have fun, make great wine, and knew how to sell it in every way.

Born and trained in winemaking and viticulture in what was then East Germany in 1934, Blass immigrated to Australia's Barossa Valley in 1960 with only 100 pounds in his pocket. There, he worked as a sparkling wines manager for Kaiser Stuhl Co-operative. Initially, he had wanted to go to Venezuela because of what he referred to with a wink as more "Cha, cha, cha," but there was a civil war on, so he shifted plans and wound up in Australia. I suspect that things may have been very different in the wine industry had Blass made it to his original destination. After 10 or so years as a technical advisor to many different wineries, he decided to make his own wine, and in 1973 created Wolf Blass Wines International. Wolf said the atmosphere for drinking and understanding wine in Australia was rather rudimentary-after all, this was beer country; thus, wine would have to be positioned and marketed very differently.

First, Blass identified a target group whom he could most easily persuade to drink wine. Wolf recognized that Australian women were typically not included in social drinking, and decided that "bubbly" would convince them otherwise. He then looked around at what was popular at the time, and as he put it, "Australians are mad gamblers and they love their racing and football." He noticed these popular sports featured a bold colour aesthetic on jerseys worn by the athletes. One very popular football team had a bright yellow jersey he particularly favoured, and believed yellow was a colour that the target audience would relate to. So, his now world-famous first line of wines was named Yellow Label and as he stated, "It just took off, and from then on it was going to be colours and not varietals." Inspired by Johnny Walker whiskey and its coloured label approach, Blass' colour choice for the second label in his line was adapted to green for the product's launch in Ireland. Blass' colour-coded system was easy for people to remember, as they could ask for it by Yellow Label first, and varietal second. The system has been so successful, in fact, it is now being used by the French for Cognacs and Bordeaux wines. Hell, the Scottish are even using it for the selling of fine whiskey!

When Blass started, there was very little money for advertising and he needed to think about how to maximize his limited funds. Back then, the football fields were not ringed with end-to-end billboards as they are today. When football matches were being televised, there was only one camera filming the games. Wolf would hand-paint advertisements on bed sheets, and hang them over the fence at the far end of the field. He worked out a side deal with the camera man to exchange a bottle of wine for each frame-up on the branded sheet. Quite often as the action was happening at the other end of the field, the camera would be fixed on Blass' banner, to the puzzlement of viewers. Those were the early days of guerilla marketing; Guy Kawasaki would be proud.

Wolf stated his belief that opportunities start with a conversation, and that is why his conversation is now personally taking him on a worldwide speaking tour to talk with brand loyalists and fans of Wolf Blass Wines. His discussion of the role of technology in the way people and brands are now connecting made me think of the new wine conversationalist from Wine Library TV, Gary Vaynerchuk, Although Gary doesn't make wine, he talks about it passionately and has similarly broken down barriers to entry. Through social media and modern guerilla marketing techniques, he is marketing wine in ways that resonate with real people. It's interesting to see what is old become new again.

From clear and easy to remember packaging systems, to low-fi guerilla tactics involving homemade bed sheets and cases of wine for cameramen, Wolf Blass has made a huge impact on how the world thinks about wine. Not only did he become a master vintner, but unlike so many artists, he knew how to sell it to people that didn't even know they wanted it.

I will be joined by top Vancouver social media experts Shane Gibson and Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega for practical advice on expanding your network and increasing sales through social media marketing. The night will consist of networking, presentations and the three panelists answering questions from both the moderator and the audience.
 
Won't you join us the evening of Monday April 13th at the Harrison Gallery. Where we will answer the question. "How can you get social media working for your business?"

 
More information and tickets here>>

On Saturday we decided to take a trip up to the Apple Store and spend some of the birthday cash that I had received a few days earlier. We live in the West End of the city and decided that a walk up Robson street to the Apple store and get us into the Christmas spirit by immersing ourselves in the sessional throng of holiday shoppers. Well the downtown crowds did not disappoint and it was pretty intense and actually quite difficult to make our way through the busy sidewalks. I thought to myself that maybe Canada is going to be immune from the US recession after all. At least that's what it looked like at first glance. Then I noticed something strange in the sea of Christmas shoppers. There were little to no shopping bags being toted about. I thought maybe it was just a fluke and this would surely change as we made our way into the centre of the shopping district. My count put it at 1 in 10 with a bag and not a big bag at that. Five, ten, then fifteen minutes went by and nothing changed with my count. This was a stunning observation for this time of year.