The US Primaries are upon us and most Canadians look on with a combination of horror and amazement. For me, one of the biggest lessons is how not to be “Santorumized”. For a quick backgrounder on what that means, read this column from Saturday’s G&M.

Mr. Santorum has contentious and to many of us offensive views. While spreading his venom in the real world he neglected the cyber world – at his peril. Gay activist Dan Savage (who also started the inspired campaign “It Gets Better” and has a strong presence in the digital world) decided the best way to fight Mr. Santorum’s views were to give his surname a new meaning linked to something he opposes. At the same time Mr. Santorum was neglecting the digital world – an inactive website, no blogging, no social. He only recently has established a real web presence and has madly been playing a losing game of catch-up. The result? Try googling “Santorum” as many US Primary voters do and you get this redefinition.

Now his campaign team have asked Google to take down the offensive definition. Google’s response?

“Google’s search results are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the web. Users who want content removed from the Internet should contact the webmaster of the page directly,” the spokesperson said. “Once the webmaster takes the page down from the web, it will be removed from Google’s search results through our usual crawling process.”

Because Savage’s new definition of Santorum is linked to this candidate’s own anti views it is a legitimate search term.

The lesson for future candidates, companies and brands? Make sure you maintain a strong digital footprint so that you own your relevant search terms when googled. Otherwise you can be hijacked by a brilliant activist.

Some Principles that can help you Move Up in Google Rankings
While their algorithm is a black box and frequently updated to prevent “gaming”, these principles help.

Create Great Fresh Content
Great content gets shared more and that moves you in the ranking.

You can’t Separate Search from Social
Twitter and Facebook influence search – you can’t ignore them anymore.

Keep it Relevant & Keep it Popular
The more you stick to your chosen subject the easier it will be to find you. How many in and outlinks does your blog have? Linking to other blogs and popular sites like youtube increase your popularity ranking.

Everybody I know, of my generation, who went to art school learned their photographic ropes using a battered and student-abused Pentax K-1000. The K-1000 was the undisputed workhorse of the photographic world, so successful that Pentax only discontinued the model in 1997.

I just bought two of them, in great condition, with the stock f/2.0 50mm lens. What struck me immediately is just how heavy and well built these cameras are. The shutter clacks with the same satisfying solidity the door on a Mercedes Benz closes, everything is precise…and mechanical. The only electronic part is the light meter, returning an evaluative average of the entire frame. In other words, in order to use one of them you need to know your stuff.

I’ll be using them to teach our team, especially the younger members, how cameras actually work, how light behaves when it travels through a lens and meets a light sensitive surface, be that film or an electronic sensor.

Time to use a camera that doesn’t have a “scene” setting, facial recognition or anything auto at all and start by understanding the basics. Nobody has ever become a great photographer by relying on the auto setting.

Here’s a confession: I’ve always hated music CDs. Not for some imagined sound quality issue, I just don’t like the way they look. They try and mimic the design of a traditional vinyl album, but always without success. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever cracked the challenge to create a CD design that breaks truly new ground.

So when mp3 players first came out, I jumped ship immediately. CDs were banished to the basement and 90% of the time the music I listened to lived as a file on a drive. But I always kept my records and when I had time to truly listen to music, it was almost always done on the turntable. Even though it looked at the time that vinyl was finally dead.

Then something amazing happened. Bands started to release albums as records again, in heavy duty vinyl that sounded fantastic. Even more amazingly, they started to include a download code to the digital file with the record. Now I had access to a beautifully designed analogue copy and the convenience of a digital file for my iPod. Heaven.

Sadly, this model hasn’t translated into books. I am an avid reader and I love having all my books with me on my iPad. I use the Kindle, Kobo and iBooks apps with equal enthusiasm. But I still love books, real books, made from paper. I love standing in front of our bookshelves, deciding on a book to read for the evening. Come next year, we’ll be remodelling one room in our house to be a library. Empty shelves with an Pad or Kindle on display just aren’t the same.

Today, if I want to own both a paper and an electronic copy of a book, to read while travelling, commuting, waiting in line, I have to pay twice, something very few people are prepared to do. I get that the publishing industry needs to make a profit, but I don’t get why for a nominal extra payment, say $1.00, I can’t download an electronic copy of a book when buying the paper version. The ebook version exists anyway, and this would create easy extra income for the publishers.

At fisheye we often talk to our clients about the need to Seed, Feed and Weed.

We find that the most successful client initiatives have a real world experience (Seed) that is then amplified via appropriate communication channels, often utilizing social media as well as earned media (Feed). Once that seed is planted and fed you then need to monitor and curate the conversation (Weed).

Our happy experience has been that when you build a healthy and vibrant online community they end up self-regulating so when someone makes a negative and false comment you and your client can take a deep breath, count to 100 and the community comes to your defense, correcting the mistruth.

I noticed a great seasonal example of seeding the other day with ebay’s popup Christmas Boutique in London. Companies like ebay and Amazon are using pop up (temporary) retail space to create a real world seed to fuel their online shoppers’ imaginations.

Items like foosball tables and designer purses are featured in the pop-up store with a QR code attached that the shopper can scan with their smartphone. They are then linked to a selection of foosball tables on ebay that they can purchase.

Clever!

The BBC has just released the iPlayer app for iPad here in Canada. Just under $9.00 a month buys you unlimited access to a vast and growing library of BBC created content, from drama to soap operas to documentaries and current affairs. Commercial free. Time shifted to your schedule.

At my house, we cut cable three years ago. That morning we’d received our monthly bill for just over $120.00, in the evening we were watching a movie. Towards the finale, commercial breaks interrupted the experience with ever increasing frequency. Finally, we got so frustrated that we switched off the TV and went out for dinner instead.

The next morning I called our cable provider and cancelled the service. We connected a Mac Mini to the TV, subscribed to netflix, used iTunes and other legal services to watch what we wanted to watch when we wanted to watch it, uninterrupted. As time passed, more and more stations added streaming services, the BBC being the latest addition with the just redesigned YouTube waiting in the wings.

Cable penetration is still high, at over 83%, but the question is how long that will last in the face of iPads, internet video and the upcoming Apple TV. While the older generation grew up with cable, Gen Y grew up with streaming video instead, has never paid for cable and doesn’t see the value in it.

To illustrate how fast technologies can become obsolete, all we have to do is look at telephone landlines, where the collapse in usage took just five years. In 2005, over 93% of households had a landline installed. In 2011, that number has dropped to just over 70%. How many of these lines are actually being used, rather than just installed as part of a bundle, is currently unknown.

For the cable industry, the number of cord-cutters like myself might be fairly small at the moment. The scary new demographic, that is coming up rapidly, is made up of cord-nevers, young people who never paid for TV and don;t see any reason to start now.

Credit Suisse analyst Stefan Anninger wrote in a recent report on TV media:

“They are growing up in an Internet-based video culture in which the mantras of ‘why would I pay for TV?,’ ‘pay TV is a rip-off’ and, ‘I can find that for free on the web’ are getting louder. We fear that some of these consumers will find pay TV far less relevant to their lives than do today’s adults.”

We’re hosting Paul Rosen at a fisheye Wisdom Event on Tuesday December 6th and you’re invited.

Paul is the Gold Medalist from the Torino Olympic Games, leading the Canadian Sledge Hockey team as the number one goaltender in the world.

As we go into the Holiday Season and start forming those personal and business resolutions for 2012 we thought it would be helpful and inspirational to have Paul share his story of achievement. We at fisheye are planning to write our resolutions on the chalkboard and take a photo with Paul so we can track our progress and stay inspired throughout the year. Drinks and nibbles at 4 pm. Inspiration from Paul at 5 pm.

rsvp jo-ann.mcarthur@fisheyecorp.com

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I often get this question from clients and prospective clients. And yes, fisheye does “do branding” work. We’ve been privileged to create new brands like Chatr for Rogers and rebrands for clients like ABC Life Literacy Canada.

However, I don’t believe that “Branding” should be thought of as a separate service offering. Just as Everything is Marketing, so does every customer experience ladder up to create your brand. The physical expression of that brand is important, but it cannot be considered in isolation to everything else the organization is doing.

Too often we meet clients who think a rebranding will be the panacea to all their problems. Alas, it is no quick fix. Great brands are the sum of the consumer experience. If your Customer Service rep has a bad day and responds poorly to that consumer’s complaint, you have just negated all of that time, money and effort you put into not only your rebranding exercise but also all of that marketing spend. Handle it well and that customer shares brand love with their increasingly powerful network.

Branding should be the cherry on top of that brand experience sundae. So yes, we “Do Branding”, but as part of that exercise we recommend looking at every consumer touchpoint. That’s how true brands are created.

I just removed myself from klout.com. For those of you who don’t know, Klout claims to be “The Standard for Influence” for individuals in social media. Klout claims to measure your social influence by applying a proprietary algorithm to your public activity on various social networks, such as twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and google+.

Unfortunately, both the idea and the execution are deeply flawed.

1. Klout doesn’t take into account offline influence

Klout only measures what it measures, but those parameters are telling only a very small part of the story. Warren Buffet, for example, is a hugely influential man. He doesn’t give a monkey’s backside who he follows or doesn’t follow on twitter, or how often he tweets. As a result, his Klout score is low, a huge distortion of the Buffet’s position in real life.

2. Klout begs to be manipulated

Tony Hsieh, Zappo’s CEO, tweeted it perfectly:

Too many marketers concentrate on building buzz. I can tell you that my mom has zero buzz, but when she says something, I listen.

One of the problems with Klout is that it rewards conformism. Tweet about what everybody else is tweeting, retweet trending topics, run with the pack and your score will most likely go up.

This point was recently very effectively illustrated by Neil Kodner, who created tens of twitter bots (based on Seinfeld, The Big Lebowski, and more recently Sarah Palin), some of which have attained Klout scores as high as 74.

When bots get higher influence scores than one of the richest men on the planet, you’ve got a problem.

3. Klout makes people lazy

People have been failing college exams because of low Klout scores. Others have been passed over for jobs.

Here’s what I think: If you’re an employer who uses a candidate’s Klout score as a metric to decide on a candidate’s employability, then you don’t deserve to be a hiring manager.

People, and the skills they bring to the table, are far more multi-faceted than what a Klout score can possibly reflect. Using a Klout score to make a hiring decision is like using research as a lamp post to lean against, rather than for illumination.

4. Influence needs to be relevant

Klout assigns one catch all number to an individual’s influence, but that’s not how things work. If you want to connect with Mennonites, a twitter account won’t do anything for you. Sponsoring barn dances just might, despite the fact that they come without a Klout score.

5. Klout is opt-out, rather than opt-in

Klout claims to only publish publicly available information, but there’s been recent concern about publishing information that was never meant to be public. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the New York Times:

In the days just before Halloween, Ms. McGary got the fright of her life when she checked her Klout profile. Hovering above her score were the faces and names of those over whom she had influence, as calculated by Klout. They included her 13-year-old son, Matthew.

The boy had never set up a Klout page for himself; he was only her Facebook “friend,” so she could monitor his interactions there. Klout had automatically created a page for him and assigned him a score. Then Ms. McGary’s 15-year-old daughter Mimi popped up on her Klout page — this time not with a Klout score of her own, just a nudge to Ms. McGary to invite Mimi to join.

“It freaked me out because these are my kids,” said Ms. McGary, 43, who lives in a suburb of Washington and handles social media for an association of health care professionals. “It’s wrong. They shouldn’t be marketing to children.”

Klout has since deactivated that functionality, but still automatically creates profiles for anybody with a twitter account, whether it has your permission or not. To check your own score just type in klout.com/yourtwitterusername.

Klout has, finally and grudgingly, given in to public pressure and now allows people to opt out of their service.

6. How to opt out of Klout

This might sound counter-intuitive, but to opt out of Klout, and to remove your details, you will first need to open a Klout account. Sign in with your twitter credentials, then navigate to the bottom of the privacy page where you’ll find an opt-out link. Follow the instructions and your information should be removed within a couple of hours.

About 15 years ago, when I first started buying computers, specs meant everything. Processor speed, amount of RAM, size of the hard drive; all were important product markers and differentiators. Similarly, when our dads went out to purchase a new car 20 or 30 years back, available horsepower was important.

Today, I have no idea how fast the processor inside my iPad is. I think it comes with 1GB of Ram, but I might well be mistaken. I simply don’t care enough to look it up. The experience the product provides is far more important to me than knowing what happens underneath the hood. I also haven’t got a clue how much power my car produces, or how fast our washer’s spin circle is or what kind of processor powers our TV. All I know is that they work to my satisfaction.

Amazon’s recent entry into the tablet market, the Fire, is under-specced when compared to its main competitor, the B&H Nook. Yet every single reviewer rates the user experience of the Fire higher, in part because Amazon, like Apple has done with Siri, decided to take some of the heavy lifting away from the device and perform it in the cloud instead. Doing so allowed them to create a superior user experience with lower-specced, read cheaper to produce, hardware.

The spec war is over. The human experience war, started by Apple, has just began.