Boston Delight #4: Harpoon Beer Makes “Local” Look Great, Wherever You’re From.

Howdy from Boston. Harpoon Brewery may not be a beer leviathan yet but it’s already part of a whale of a tale.  Despite the fact that locally brewed beer – craft beer – is trendy like crazy today, Boston has already had at least one great beer era with great brands now faded into a vague past. In the early 1900s, with a total of 31 breweries, Boston had the highest number of breweries per capita in the US. Twenty-four of them were located so close together (within a mile-and-a-half circle) that the fragrant aroma of slowly cooking grains, smoke from wood and coal, and horse sweat from the delivery wagons defined the neighborhood by smell alone.

Vienna Old Time Lager. Rockland Ale. Burkhardt’s Old Stock Porter and India Pale Ale, Elbana Irish Ale – all these brands and more suffered death by Volstead Act. They’re called “Boston’s Lost Breweries.”

What once was lost is now found: the new craft beers that have burgeoned across America. Today, when you think Boston beers, you’re probably imagining the makers of the many varieties of the Sam Adams brand. But I have to confess: I planned pretty carefully to visit the Harpoon Brewery, 306 Northern Avenue, Boston, MA. That this beer-ventureland is near the original, 94-year-old “No-Name” Restaurant on Fish Pier is icing on the crab cake (or a full growler of Harpoon Chocolate Stout, take your pick).

Before I go further, then, learning about Harpoon and unfiltered-label UFO beers and how they go to market started with Chris Derr, Harpoon’s Area Sales Manager for Texas and Louisiana. He introduced me to the Harpoon IPA in Houston last year; he made certain the visit to Harpoon in Boston had more planning to it than a glass or two in the tasting room. The Visitor Center (brilliant) is managed by Aaron Bishop and most of the tasting spiel was courtesy of Cassandra Tice – great time. Then Tice introduced me to Amanda Fakhreddine, who’s Harpoon’s Online Content Manager – between the two of them, they then toured me and Barbara Nytes-Baron through an exceptional brewery. Thank you right now to everyone there on Northern Avenue.

The brand, with Harpoon IPA and UFO Hefeweizen* beers leading the way, has become increasingly popular and increasingly available through a combination of social media marketing and distribution. (Classic advertising is rarely involved in locavore beer marketing because it’s wasteful of precious capital to target urban or even regional craft-drinking populations.)

Distribution is most important as the beers achieve new retail venues. Tom Pirko, president of food-and-beverage consultancy Bevmark was just quoted in a Convenience Store Decisions article proposing that craft beers give C-store owners (a huge market usually dominated by the national brewers) a chance to build a new profit center: “They are the future. There will be more of them, and they will be better. As time goes by, prices will modify so that they are a little bit more affordable. You’ll have great variety, with the category of beer once again becoming exciting. These are all good things.” I suspect Chris Derr was assigned here in Texas and Louisiana to grow the market for Harpoon products through more focused distribution efforts.

Whereas the role of online marketing – Amanda Fakhreddine’s assignment – is being even more strongly developed because Harpoon, like Great Divide (Denver) and St Arnold (Houston) and SweetWater (Atlanta), among others, recognize an absolute need to build and maintain community ties. Which means more tours, more events, more charitable participation, more Facebook and Twitter time on the local level.

Local. Local. Was it Rainier Beer that used to say it’s all about “the beer here?” So Boston’s Harpoon has successfully refocused on participating in and with its communities. Just like in the days of the now-lost German lager breweries, you create your products for what the neighbors want; and create a market for your neighbors. What more can I say than “Try these beers?”

*Of these, the Raspberry Hefeweizen is fresh and tasty - RLB.

“CMO’s Guide To The Social Media Landscape” a Primer for Site Choices.

I wish I’d gone to this year’s Houston edition of the Online Marketing Summit. I have attended OMS each of the past four years, had to miss this one. The event has become such a magnet for marketing professionals and here I am in the “absent” column.

Brian Bearden of Upstream Marketing has been there all day. One of his texts says, “I’m surprised by the caliber of the speakers – and I know only a handful of…attendees. Attendance is very low.” The first part is great news: past years’ OMS speakers have been outstanding. Though there was some concern expressed over this year’s slate, OMS has definitely delivered the mail today on this score.

The event has been promoted heavily by AMAHouston, the BMA chapter of which Bearden is outgoing president, Energy People Connect and many others. But there are a surprising number of people who’ve told me that they couldn’t get away from the office today – I’m one of those. Everyone’s busy. (So this is actually good news too.)

For you and you and me – the ones who didn’t make it, take a look at this great chart from CMO.com – 10 social network choices with green-yellow-red choice points. Sites from Facebook to Digg are graded in four areas – Customer Communication, Brand Exposure, Traffic to your Site and SEO value.

Read this Guide. Print a copy for yourself. Use it to impress your colleagues...and your bosses. Best for the weekend.

Socially Byzantine

Speaking of the Associated Press, another AP story reported that ...Alicia Istanbul recently had her Facebook account temporarily canceled because of her unusual surname.

To avoid any concern whatsoever about “fake names,” the Marietta, GA, jewelry designer is re-registering on Facebook with a new name: Alicia Constantinople.

AP Photo: John Bazemore

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.