$3 Belgians

This is worth knowing: Blue Moon™ Belgian White is available at the Fox & Hounds restaurant, 11470 Westheimer, every Monday afternoon. Price: Three bucks a pint.

It’s what I was drinking at yesterday’s meeting of the “Selling Circle,” with Brian Bearden, Wes Lichtenstein and Joe Fournet. We don’t do it very often, which makes the get-togethers even more enjoyable.

It’s a casual sort of networking; on a pleasantly warm Monday afternoon like yesterday’s, we could talk and watch the home-bound traffic stack up in the westbound lanes.

For $3, Blue Moon is just fine. The name “Belgian White” refers to the beer’s cloudy white, opaque appearance. It’s a style of beer brewed in Belgium for three centuries. The Blue Moon brew is lightly spiced with fresh coriander and orange peel for a pleasurable and complex taste and a smooth finish.

A slice of orange compliments the Blue Moon witbier; it brings out the natural spices and fruit flavor…and makes it taste more like a fruit juice – you know, healthy. It’s unfiltered as well: Protein and yeast remain suspended in the beer and create the cloudy appearance. This all adds to the smoothness of the beer and appears to aid digestion. That is, it goes down easy on a hot day.

The Blue Moon brewery started in Denver, CO, and is now part of Coors in Golden. I think this is what happens to “good beers in neat niches” – they get bought out by giant brewers. And that’s how a pretty good craft-brewed beer gets onto the table in front of me, at three buckos per Belgian. A votre sante!

OTC Precog

Precognition – “precog” – is knowledge in advance of an event, especially by extrasensory perception.

I can’t see much further through a brick wall than the next fella. But last night, at the American Marketing Association Houston second annual pre-Offshore Technology Conference networker, I wondered if anyone could see lightning far off on the watery horizon.

Here’s the price of oil holding at US$115 a barrel and attendance at this Mixer was down compared to last year.

This is no fault of its excellent hosts and sponsors: It was a good time at a good venue. However, to justify this post, I ought to be able to find something reasonably profound to say about all this.

What I learned is that every person I spoke with has had a different business experience through the first quarter of this year. Some people have been struggling and this is in a market that feeds off the Energy Sector, which continues its growth. To be clear, no one I met last night had to testify about his or her “obscene profits” before the US Congress – obviously I am hanging with the wrong crowd.

Here’s the deal about OTC .08: One of the world’s largest trade shows, it opens at Reliant Center here on 5 May. It’s the Houston version of the Texas State Fair, Ringling Brothers Circus and a Bob-the-Builder Convention rolled into one huge event, with more than 70,000 “offshore E&P professionals” and more that 2,000 exhibiting companies.

That lightning you see on the horizon? I sense that’s the sparking of opportunity, precognition of fresh business for marketers. The truth is out there. Get your rear ends down to Reliant Center when the OTC doors open.

All the official OTC hotels are sold out, but if you’re serious, you can stay here with us. And thanks to the hosts and sponsors for last night’s get-together. (The AMA’s Sherri Scott caught me with my enthusiasm showing…again. I have got to be careful around that woman!) Have a great weekend.

Leaving Footprints?

What’s a social networker to do? There’s no doubt that marketers don’t (or no longer ought to) broadcast messages to a massive, passive audience. There’s a reason which the term “opinion leaders” goes back to 1955…but you can contrast this idea to some of the recent Super Bowl XLII – interesting if you have a leading opinion about Dalmatians or Richard Simmons (I was bemused by the Bridgestone commercials, so sue me).

“The Cluetrain Manifesto” was written almost 10 years back and it is now accepted that markets are conversations. I won’t even put that in quotes, it’s becoming a bit tattered.

More and more new mechanisms – like Facebook – are being used for marketing. More social conversations. More prospective marketing interactions. So web marketers are hoping that social networks like Facebook will take Internet advertising into its “fourth phase,” beyond search advertising. Marketers not only want to observe consumers’ conversations (via tracking), they want to participate in those conversations.

Okay – social media is on the right path. One possible challenge, though, is that you may not be able to leave the party once you’ve joined it – I mean like the Communist Party, not the St. Andrew’s Day bash at your local.

Too long a lead? Apparently, you never actually disappear from Facebook. Even if you opt out of sharing information. Even if you deactivate your account. According to a copyrighted story by Maria Aspan in yesterday’s New York Times, “Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.”

As Aspan says, disenchanted users can’t disappear from the site without leaving footprints unless they rigorously delete their data, line by line, and then deactivate. (You can read more, by blogger Steven Mansour, in his own dramatic post here – which is also mentioned in the NYT article…very in-your-face.)

So it’s social interaction vs personal privacy. On the one side, you ought to be responsible enough to realize that your personal stuff is, like, on billboards where everyone can see it, right? Yep, you may very well regret showing off those tattoos (or body parts) at some future point in your life. But there’s no 1984 here, no way to go back most of the time and erase those embarrassing – or even worse – items. So social interaction websites ought to be touched with some human thought…yours.

On the other side, (most) marketers don’t really want to know in detail what you did after leaving the bar with your work buddies Friday night. Marketers normally want “you” in specific portions, not you in particular and personally. Why? Principally, I think, because they don’t have the time for one-to-one selling, though this does occur. I choose not to speak for the government.

I was just invited to join the Only in Houston group on Facebook and since I use the site, I thought, “Why not?” Maybe Ann Iverson will buy me a Martini. I don’t believe any information I have on Facebook will horrify anyone, I don’t care about that. Maybe I’ll have more conversations this way.

But do consider that every participant in a conversation leaves footprints (I know, it’s a mixed metaphor). A talented marketer, advertiser or publicist will follow those footprints and, perhaps, try to engage you in additional conversations. That’s what we’re paid to do, we want to involve you somehow in the brands we represent. The real trick is to make the action – and the conversation – meaningful to both parties in the conversation. How come? The Internet is a two-way street. The person leaving the footprints can easily track yours as well.

If you want to stop leaving footprints altogether, it’s going to you take a lot of work.