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When Marketing Becomes Pointless

EMC taunted NetApp by parking these cars at their HQ. What was the point?

When I was 19, I presented a paper at a conference alongside former (and present) California Governor, Jerry Brown. Being a radical punk, I wore a Dead Kennedys shirt while chatting with him. Somewhere I have a picture. But Jerry didn’t “get” the message I was sending, and I’m not sure why I did it anyway. I actually respected what he said at the event about urban renewal, and his politics were much more to my liking at the time than those of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

I was reminded of this pointless stunt this week on hearing that EMC parked branded cars and power-washed their logo in front of rival NetApp’s headquarters. Aside from the glee of the EMC crew and annoyance from my NetApp contacts, I came away asking “what’s the point?” Was this stunt an effective way of messaging their new products? Would it demoralize the NetApp employees? Would it energize the EMC staff? Would it garner publicity and coverage? Or was it merely a silly and pointless stunt?

What’s the Point?

Marketers should always ask themselves this question when considering new initiatives. Creativity knows no bounds, and Internet and guerilla marketing tactics often turn to tactics ripped from the obnoxious MTV shows, Jackass and Punk’d. But even well-intentioned campaigns can go awry: It is common for technology companies to focus on communicating cool features instead of usability.

Do customers need “record-breaking” performance or easier systems management? EMC themed their entire January 18 announcement on the former, including claims that their new products were 2x, 3x, or even 7x faster than the competition. But, to me, the highlight of this product rollout was “Unisphere”, the simplified management application for their low-end systems. I believe that Unisphere and reseller support will sell more VNXe storage arrays than Xeon multi-core processors or 6 Gb SAS. Don’t worry if you don’t understand the technical references in that last sentence: The intended audience for these products don’t know or care about all that, either.

Making a Splash

“Candy doesn’t have to have a point. That’s what makes it candy.” – Charlie Bucket’s explanation of Willy Wonka

But not all marketing efforts are designed to make a point directly. Many are intended to make a splash, in hopes of attracting attention. Entertaining marketing is much more common and rewarding than dry, factual statements. This explains EMC’s world-record motorcycle jump, Mini Cooper stuffing, and (literal) record breaking on the 18th: They wanted to grab attention.

EMC's "record breaking" stunts raised visibility for a new line of storage products

It worked. EMC drew the attention of the entire industry; even those that refused to participate joined in! This is my second writeup resulting from the event, and will not be my last. And EMC’s share prices rose to a 10-year high in the run-up to the announcement. Clearly much of the effort was executed correctly.

Weigh the Benefits

Although it is easier to count the cost, it is wise to weigh the potential benefits of marketing efforts:

  • Will it increase visibility of my company or product?
  • Will it spread the word about a valuable feature or benefit?
  • Will it cause customers to consider buying from my in the future?
  • Will it reassure current customers that they made the correct choice?
  • Will it help my employees, vendors, and investors to feel motivated and positive?
  • Will it cause my competitors to make a mistake?

If few or none of these outcomes are likely, perhaps it’s time to consider a more-effective strategy.

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RtF1.2: How Can Conventional Applications Access Cloud Storage?

The first episode of Raising the Floor, the enterprise datacenter podcast from Foskett Services, features thought leaders from two key cloud storage-enabling companies:

  1. Josh Goldstein, VP of Marketing, Cirtas
  2. Andres Rodriguez, Founder and CEO, Nasuni

This discussion is moderated by Stephen Foskett, founder of Foskett Services.

We continue our conversation with a discussion of the mechanics of cloud storage. How can real-world applications make use of storage connected over the Internet?

Stephen Foskett: That’s one thing that’s interesting is that the cloud storage is not just conventional storage. There’s actually a very different architecture behind it as you mentioned in terms of how it’s actually constructed. There’s also the fact that the access method is very different. That maybe something we should talk about as well. Andres, do you want to take a moment to talk about object storage and REST?

Andres Rodriguez: Absolutely, and I should say before Nasuni, I actually did a company called Archivas to develop an object store. What we did there is the concept is rather than having block level read/write fast access, you develop a system that’s going to have blob level. That is much larger binaries, typically, at least a few hundred kilobytes in size. The binaries are accessed into the cluster, into the object store in a transactional way. Just like HTTP, in a file transfer way. What you have is this system that exists out there that you can access through essentially HTTP, get, could, and delete which are very gross operations, very high-level operations.

You’re going to be putting out all these binaries into those systems. What is important to understand those systems, not only do you have the latency’s built into protocols like that that are really designed to be accessed to be used over the Wide Area Network.

But, the semantics at the other end are such that those are protocols that are very good if you want to create a blob, get a blob back, or delete it, but not if you want to modify it.

Now, if we’re talking in terms of trying to make that compatible with file systems, there’s a real leap that you have to take so that you can have something that is read/write very fast coexist with that kind of backend.

Stephen: Yes, and I think that that’s really the next point we need to make. Most conventional applications are not compatible with this HTTP REST interface that most public cloud providers rely on. Now, there are more applications all the time that are compatible with it but does this mean that cloud is off-limits that you can’t use it for conventional applications?

Josh Goldstein: Not at all. I think that the thing is you need a technology and this is exactly that the business that Nasuni sort have gone into. You need a technology to pry in the cloud to make it appear the same way that you would expect your local storage systems to appear. And that is what’s really critical is laying this on top of the object store so that you get the best of both worlds. You are now getting the scalability and the pay as you go pricing that you can get from a number of different public cloud providers but at the same time you are in and out reading with that cloud in a way that is very familiar to you and compatible with your applications.

Stephen: I think that is one of the interesting things about these two companies. And one of the reasons that I picked you guys to talk together is because I see you guys as basically two sides of a coin. You have block storage and you have files storage. Do you want to talk a little bit each of you about what it is exactly that you are doing with public clouds storage?

Andres: Sure thing. So, I’ll start there and I said anything that traditional storage world, we have file based systems. We have block based systems and that is exactly where Cirtas and Nasuni stand. We are the equivalent of say a company named EMC and NetApp for the cloud world. The approaches are complimentary. And they are both trying to solve the same problem. I’ll start on the file side but Josh can take on the block. But on the file level is really, look, if you want to have something that behaves very much like a file server, say like a NetApp box. It means you are going to have a file system, you want to have a protocol to export it locally on so something like CIFS, you are now going to have access to directory integration so that you can have access control. This is what makes a file server useful in the datacenter.

And furthermore, remember what I said about no backups? If you are not… If the cloud is completely reliable right. Then what you need to have on top of the cloud is some kind of system that allows you to version all the changes out to the cloud. And you want to do that for several reasons.

But one of the most important reasons is so you can go back to your file system as it was at any point in time or any specific file or directory at any point of time. And we’ll store it without having to go to back up by just relying on this device. In our case, on our Nasuni file server and the cloud back-end.

In addition to that and I let Josh kind of paint the full picture from the block perspective.

You also want to use this kind of snapshotting technology to make sure that you are only sending to the cloud and storing in the cloud because you are now going to be paying for this for the changes or the minimum amount of information but you can’t. And so you want to do a very good job identifying any kind of duplication of the data.

And then de-duplicate that data, compressing that data and incorporating all of that data before it lands in the cloud. We can talk afterwards about security and encryption but that’s really what makes the bridge. I’m skipping the file system side.


Watch this feed at Foskett Services (or subscribe via email) for the rest of this discussion!

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Digging Deeper: AlterSeekers, myYearbook, Sharethrough, and Spam

This morning I demonstrated an inept marketing “experiment” by AlterSeekers gone awry for EMC. It involved comment spam on some of the best-known enterprise storage industry insider blogs and EMC cut it off quickly. But this analysis turned up something else rather peculiar: An apparent hack on teen chat site myYearbook to spam video links on Twitter and generate views and buzz. Amazingly, EMC are again involved. Is this another face of this morning’s off-the-rails experiment?

Viral or Virulent Videos?

While exploring the fascinating world of link spam, I happened across the Twitter account of @LisaValentineNY (not linked), probably an AlterSeekers employee. I noted that the only thing she had posted recently were spammy @replies to Twitter users advertising Crucial-brand computer memory. Every reply included an odd trademark character (indicating a cut-and-paste job) and used the same bit.ly link, one created with the account of AlterSeekers employee Brent McLean. Clearly, Crucial was involved in the same type of anti-social marketing campaign as EMC.

This got me thinking. I remembered seeing some EMC videos tweeted recently, one involving former CHiPS star, Erik Estrada and another with pro golfer, Billy Andrade. They were somewhat amusing, but EMC, being an enterprise IT company, isn’t really a general audience draw. So I wasn’t surprised to see just a few thousand vides. Yet a glance at YouTube this morning shows an amazing 215k and 413k views for these videos. Either EMC’s videos really did go viral or they were wrapped up in this nasty spam business as well.

Aggregate Linkage

It’s easy to see bit.ly links to a given site. I just copied the YouTube URL into bit.ly and clicked on the aggregate link. This was eye-popping. Literally hundreds of tweets linked to the video, each from a different user. Yet every tweet was exactly identical:

CHiPs Erik Estrada in Speeding Ticket FAIL http://bit.ly/ad15nG

Either a hundred random users decided to tweet the exact same message and link to their followers or something fishy was going on here.

Random Tweets?

Two things immediately stuck out in this list:

  1. No one included the EMC name (which is included in the YouTube listing), only the general-audience Erik Estrada and CHiPs references.
  2. The tweeters were not the usual enterprise IT folks one would expect, judging by their cutesy names.

I picked a few at random to see who these EMC fans were (try it yourself!). They appeared to be teens posting teen-speak including quotes, photo ratings, and Q&A. In most cases (that I looked at), the users had never tweeted using any client other than “myYearbook Share” which appears to be a Facebook clone that links to social media accounts, including Twitter.

But each account also included a few exceptionally odd tweets. Along with the myYearbook junk were these spammy links to EMC’s videos. And lo and behold, most also included links the same Crucial Memory video being spammed by Lisa Valentine! What could be going on here?

Breaking and Tweeting?

This is truly weird. If myYearbook was inserting “sponsored” tweets along with their users junk, one would expect it to also come from the “myYearbook Share” client, too. But, without exception, these spam links came from “web”. This was especially notable for the (many) users who had never posted anything from the web client, and it smells like a hack.

It really isn’t credible that these random teens all decided to tweet cut-and-paste links to EMC and Crucial videos. And it really isn’t believable that they all decided to use the web client for the first and only time to do it. Either they were enticed to do it (“win a contest?”) or someone or something is posting “on their behalf”. Either way, this stinks.

Perhaps myYearbook has been hacked and someone is using users’ passwords to post these links. Perhaps the company is in on it, though there seem to be few complaints about them. Or perhaps someone is harvesting Twitter accounts from myYearbook and getting the passwords from somewhere else. Regardless, someone is doing something naughty here!

Who’s Responsible This Time?

Although Crucial and EMC are linked through AlterSeekers, I’m not sure they’re responsible for these tweets. There are a few links found in many of these users’ suspicious tweets, and all were created with the bit.ly account of another company, Sharethrough (not linked). Calling itself “The Leading Social Video Seeding Platform For Top Brands And Agencies”, Sharethrough appears to be some kind of viral marketing machine. But it’s unclear if they’re responsible for all this spam, either.

At the end of the day, responsibility lies with the companies that are benefiting from these shenanigans.

  1. Sharethrough is selling “video seeding” services that are using unsavory means
  2. AlterSeekers is selling “social media marketing” services that are either inept or obnoxious
  3. Their clients (EMC, Crucial, and someone called “Rhett and Link”) are getting page- and YouTube views from clearly inauthentic sources

Each of these companies must investigate upstream to discover what their providers are doing on their behalf. And each should inform all of us about just what is going on!

And it all started with a spam comment on my blog.

Update: Not Hacked But Seeded

I suppose it’s sometimes easier to find trouble when one goes looking for it. I received an email from Dan Greenberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Sharethrough explaining these links. His site “seeds” viral videos to a variety of platforms which invite users to share them with their friends. As Dan says, “When a user clicks Tweet it takes them to Twitter and suggests a pre-defined tweet for them, which the user can edit and then post.  This functionality is similar to what you might see on any blog or video site.”

Assuming he’s being straight with me (which I do) there was no hacking or underhanded chicanery involved in these tweets. The users shared them on their own accord. This explains why they all have identical text and bit.ly links as well as the odd “via web” source. He suggests that TechCrunch, Mashable, and others do the same.

Chuck Hollis agrees in the comments below, comparing this to the paid advertisements that some blogs (including my own) include. He goes on to suggest that it’s not so bad to pay a company to promote a video online in order to make it go viral, presumably as long as it’s not in “a blog or a focused community.”

Let me be straight: I have no problem with banner ads in general (as long as they’re not misleading) and jumped to the wrong conclusion about Sharethrough. But the core question remains: Why would an enterprise-focused company like EMC to promote their products with viral videos that apparently appeal mainly to teens? The CHiPs video was “liked” 23 times, “disliked” 10 times, and drew 22 comments with almost 250,000 views. The Andrade video has almost 415,000 views but only 25 “likes”, 6 “dislikes”, and 44 bizarre mostly single-word comments.

If these videos really appealed to people, wouldn’t they be commenting more? And if they were really hitting their target, wouldn’t the comments mention something (anything) about EMC or its products? Setting aside the issue of whether or not the method promotion is valid, surely the result isn’t what was desired. I return to my closing statement from the previous article: Isn’t fresh sushi better than canned spam?

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A Lesson In Failed Social Media Marketing

This morning, someone left a comment on a 10 month-old blog post about EMC Corporation’s products over at Gestalt IT. Although the writer, “Brian,” identified himself as “EMC Social Outreach Team”, the short message seemed somewhat spammy, including a bit.ly link to one of that company’s marketing promotions. Further investigation reveals what looks to be an inept social media marketing maneuver by “integrated sales promotions” firm, AlterSeekers. Let’s use it as a case study in how not to do social media marketing.

The saga continues! Read my follow-up, Digging Deeper: AlterSeekers, myYearbook, Sharethrough, and Spam

Social Media Outreach

There aren’t hard and fast rules, but most agree that honesty, credibility, and real human interaction are critical for social media. No one likes talking to a robot, and we hate being spammed by them. But not all robots are mechanical: Many companies are hiring outside firms to spread the word about their products and services with real human agents. Some are laughably inept (like the dozens of poorly-worded comments posted to my blog from “Ugg Boots For Sale” and “Nike Air Force”), while others are probably fantastically well-executed (and thus unavailable as examples).

Skill aside, it is the intent of a comment or other social interaction that determines its quality. Blog comments are intended for discussion of the issues presented in the blog post. Links to other sources are perfectly acceptable if they advance the discussion, and the conversation often takes a turn into unrelated areas. None of this is a problem. Simply put, this is the essence of social media.

Imagine you are having a conversation in a public place and someone stops and joins in. You wouldn’t mid if they were really interested, and would probably be pleased if they had some special insight or suggested you talk to a friend in the business. But what if they stopped by, pretended to be interested, but instead were being paid to interject an advertisement for the sushi place across the street? Even if your conversation centered on sushi from the start, the stranger’s intent makes their intrusion unwelcome.

Hello, Brian

Now let’s turn to the comments by “Brian.” The post at Gestalt IT was written in September, 2009 and is an exploration of EMC’s plans unifying their storage array platform. It was pretty popular last Fall, and one of the authors eventually went to work for EMC. But readership has declined since, and no one had commented in nine months.

Then, along came “Brian” with the following insightful remark:

“Great thoughts on EMC! I’m curious if you’ve heard of EMC’s new 20% capacity advantage guarantee? Check out this paper – and we challenge anyone to beat it! http://bit.ly/ao57rm — Brian, EMC Social Outreach Team”

This short comment is not a contribution to the discussion. “Great thoughts on EMC” can be translated as “this post is about EMC but I have nothing to add to it.” The rest is an advertisement, plain and simple, for a marketing campaign centered around EMC’s “20% capacity advantage guarantee.” The fact that they used bit.ly to shorten the link proves this – they’re tracking clickthroughs with it!

One positive element of the comment is the identification of “Brian” as a member of “EMC Social Outreach Team.” This is much more transparent than most spammy comments, and shows that the perpetrator was more inept than devious. But the fact that the Disqus profile belonging to “Brian” was not filled out was less than transparent.

Dissecting Brian

So who is Brian and what is the EMC Social Outreach Team? A quick check on his (unclaimed) Disqus profile reveals that “Brian” made similar comments on seven industry blogs. All but the one on Gestalt IT contained unique human-written and readable commentary, but none was in any way insightful or related to the discussion at hand. And all included that same bit.ly link. This, and the fact that “Brian” hadn’t commented anywhere else, is clear proof that this was advertising and nothing more.

Happily, bit.ly link statistics are open to the public. A quick run over to the tracking page for that link (http://bit.ly/ao57rm+) reveals that “Brian” got 35 clickthroughs in his short career as a comment spammer. Not great. It also reveals a tracking parameter in the URL, “SOC-UNIFIEDGUARANTEE-Social”. Finally, it shows that “Brian” used a bit.ly login belonging to “amberbragas” – now we’re getting somewhere!

“Amber Bragas” is a fairly unusual name (see Google), and LinkedIn contains just one person by that name. She works for a company called “AlterSeekers”. A quick search reveals the Twitter page for @AlterSeekers (not linked), which calls itself “an integrated sales promotions firm” and claims “We get marketing and we get results.”

Jump over to the AlterSeekers web site (not linked) and one is greeted with a flash header featuring a photo of none other than Amber Bragas! Considering the mission of AlterSeekers, the connection to IT industry companies, and the bit.ly connection, I feel safe in assuming that “Brian” is actually a spam bot employed by this company to drive traffic to EMC’s guarantee. He could even be AlterSeekers employee, Brian De La Torre.

I’m going to guess that this was a “proof of concept” pitch by AlterSeekers to win EMC’s business. There is one click from July 16 (perhaps a demo), then more clicks and comments starting on July 19. Similar comments were posted by “Marlon” (De Jesus?) and “Justin“.

It would appear for the offending party searched Google for “emc unified storage systems -oracle“, an amusing construct that reveals the intent of the perpetrator. Why exclude Oracle? They left a comment as “Brian” or “Marlon” on just about every blog post that search returns. The visitor came from Port Washington, New York (home of AlterSeekers) and the IP address traces as “alter seekers inc.” I guess we can be pretty certain who the guilty party is!

Bye, Brian

Whoever Brian is, he’s not part of some “EMC Social Outreach Team”, nor is he “making authentic connections with your customers.” He’s spamming blogs with tracked marketing links. And he’s also apparently out of a job.

EMC Marketing CTO, Chuck Hollis (who I will link to) responded this morning with two tweets that speak for themselves:

We found out about it yesterday morning, and quickly shut it down. Somebody’s bad idea, quickly fixed. (1)

and

Someone thought it would be clever to go to an external “social service”. Imagine our collective horror …(2)

‘Nuff said, Chuck. EMC is really astonishingly good at real social outreach. They don’t need this pathetic and spammy “social outreach” by a third party. Chuck quickly took responsibility and shut it down, demonstrating the correct approach to this sort of thing.

Lessons Learned

Social media is about being genuine and, well, social. You can’t hire an outsider to do this for you. Your customers will see through inept attempts to “join the conversation.” As AlterSeekers own web site notes, one has to make “authentic connections” not post transparent blog comment spam.

This is the core problem facing so many “social media marketing” firms. They employ people who aren’t part of the conversation, use inappropriate metrics, and try to entice non-genuine behavior. Regardless of whether you sell flowers, cars, or IT equipment, you cannot outsource the conversation. You must rely on genuinely engaged and authentic commentators.

One must also consider the goals of this sort of campaign. Clearly, AlterSeekers was trying to entice people to click through to that one link. When social media goals focus too narrowly on a single specific action, they tend to look like spam and go off the rails. Goals should be broader, guiding the conversation and spreading the message rather than just taking a single (albeit measurable) action like clicking a link.

Returning to our example of the street corner conversation, what if the sushi restaurant encouraged sushi lovers to spread the word about their love of sashimi? They would undoubtedly encourage more sushi eating! And what if they offered discounts or supported a sushi club? They would drive real traffic and, more importantly, a devoted audience. Fresh sushi sure beats canned spam!

The saga continues! Read my follow-up, Digging Deeper: AlterSeekers, myYearbook, Sharethrough, and Spam