I’m always watching the various design showcase blogs and other sources of information for the latest and greatest in web design and development. It’s a lot of fun to see the newest techniques and showcases of work. It can be quite inspirational.

What I’m having a problem with is the number of sites and resources out there that seem to do little else than grab a bunch of links to various things and then publish that as content.

At first, it’s fun. Ten New Ways to Display Form Fields. Twenty Fresh Web Designs that Work on the iPhone. Forty Marketing Strategies that Attract Young People. Sixty Hot Trends in Clicking on Things.

So what?

Anyone can go out there and find options. I don’t care too much about options. I care about solutions. Don’t tell me the ten ways for doing something and leave it at that. Add some value to it. Tell me about the ten ways, how they are different, and in what circumstance each option might be the best choice. Give me a reason to care about all of these options you are giving me. I want these sites I read and people I follow on Twitter to be editors for me, not just aggregators of every other thing they find on a topic out there.

When you think about this, it makes it clear who has good information and who just appears to have good information. Use your knowledge and expertise to make decisions and select great options for yourself and your clients. If you’re giving people options, clearly explain why there are choices to make, what the differences are between then, and potential trade-offs. Also, offer your rationale for selecting one. This shows you’re paying attention, have expertise to offer, and have done some work.

Without an informed opinion, you’re the Yellow Pages, not a personal recommendation.

“To err is human; to forgive divine.” —  Alexander Pope

The fact is, we all make mistakes. So do brands. And we all learn the hard way that people never listen more closely than when you admit failure. While there are lots of examples, recently we’ve seen two big brands own up to problems and mistakes and publicly apologize. In very different ways.

Friday Tiger Woods’ abject, and very rehearsed, press conference/public apology came off as as a bit insincere to me. It sounded painfully scripted and the fact that he took no questions from the eager reporters who have been specially selected to see him speak made it feel even more stilted. I read a snarky comment somewhere that the same George W. Bush media advisers who gave us Mission Accomplished were hired by Tiger to present the world with Emission Regretted.

Watch full press conference here.

If you’re thinking Tiger is just a man, not a brand, read the transcript of Tiger’s apology and you’ll note he details the specific consequences of his actions: “I hurt my wife, my kids, my mother, my wife’s family, my friends, my foundation, and kids all around the world who admired me.” In case you’re wondering, that last one is code for brand.

As Sally Hogshead said: … the Woods brand “was founded upon prestige, mystique,” she added, “and an aura of elusive untouchability,” but now “we all suddenly know more about his bottom-feeding behavior than we ever cared to.”

And then there’s Toyota. Toyotas have long been considered among the most reliable cars on the road. But it has had major problems the last couple months and its failure to stem its widening safety crisis has stunned consumers and experts who’d come to expect only streamlined efficiency from a company at the pinnacle of the global auto industry. It is now trying to rebuild consumer confidence after a recall that has extended to millions of cars around the world and tarnished the company’s reputation.

First came the apology.

Then the promise to fix it.

Can these brands survive the withering publicity? Will we forgive? Will we trust them again? After all, Toyota has made great cars and until recently was the most popular car brand on Earth. And Tiger Woods is a phenomenal golfer. Only time will tell. But in my humble opinion Toyota seems more sincere in their efforts to earn back our trust.

Fox’s American Idol beat the telecast of the Olympics on Tuesday night, pulling 23.6 million viewers during its two-hour show, compared to the Olympics, which pulled 19.7 million. But the Olympics smashed Idol’s one-hour show on Wednesday.

The Olympics averaged a 5.4 rating in the 18-49 demo on Tuesday, while Idol generated a 9.1.   Tuesday’s airing of American Idol, which unveiled Ellen DeGeneres as a judge, pulled the biggest numbers for a non-finale, non-debut in two years.

But on Wednesday night, the Olympics brought the heat to the singing competition. During the hour that the two shows competed against each other, the Olympics pulled 30.1 million people, while American Idol was seen by 18.4 million. 

I myself am all about the Olympics so I say God Bless the U.S.A!

Unless you’ve been pretty sheltered this week, you’ve probably heard about the Kevin Smith/Southwest Air run in that rang out around the world in media stories and people buzzing with phrases like TTTF (too fat to fly). The director and actor said a pilot ejected him from a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland to Burbank, saying he didn’t fit properly in a single seat. Smith turned to Twitter, then his SModcast and his blog.  Southwest apologizes (sort of). Not good enough. Then Southwest tries again.

Aside from the fact that  the media can’t seem to get enough of another corporation caught short by the outraged tweeting masses, this should be yet another wake up call of the speed by which screw ups travel and escalate today.

As an instant viral publishing tool, Twitter is often the first place we hear a rumble of something big — where news (or rumors) break — so it’s followed closely followed by the mainstream media that then “vets” the info. This summer I was in a store in Tahoe when someone in the store read a tweet that Michael Jackson had died. We all headed for a TV or went to CNN on our phones to verify the info. Not everything trending on Twitter is accurate — remember Goldblum?

Bad personal experiences for people we like at the hands of corporations is David and Goliath stuff. And we consumers love those stories. We love to rant about injustice. We can’t get enough of it.

Twitter is the early warning siren and reaches well beyond those actively engaged on Twitter — it is closely followed by the media and bloggers and it can explode the customer complaint horror stories many times faster than what companies previously suffered just at the hands of a few irate bloggers (remember Dell, Kryptonite) to potentially devastating effect.

Southwest is a company that has been active and strong in the social space. They’ve handled difficult situations well.  But they’re not immune. They just found out what happens when you piss off a guy with a rabid fanbase and a Twitter account with 1.6M followers. Smith has a nimble intellect and savage wit and his tweets and SModcasts are entertaining.  One of his tweets had me laughing out loud:  “You [messed] with the wrong sedentary processed-foods eater!” But chances are Southwest didn’t enjoy this exchange as much as the rest of us.

If the arbitrary nature of this online customer movement seems unfair, too bad.  Get used to it. The genie is not going back in the bottle.

How companies succeed in the future will depend on how they embrace and navigate this new socially-empowered customer culture. The answers don’t lie in merely having a company Twitter account. And they definitely can’t be solved purely through social media monitoring. These are just tools. Tools that let you listen. And respond. The key is what a company learns from the listening, how it applies those learnings and then how it communicates those learnings to its customers that will rescue its reputation and make it a stronger company.

For Smith, the publicity may be a windfall given his new movie “Cop Out,” opens in theaters Feb. 26.

Our marketing industry professionals offer a variety of presentation programs and can tailor or develop special programs for particular audiences. Read More