Chiquita becomes a cautionary example when it gets just about everything about social media communications wrong.

I used to work for an ad agency, and I often had animated discussions with my colleagues about the danger of confusing cause marketing with product marketing. I have always maintained that they are separate disciplines that don’t mix, while many of my colleagues disagreed.

As a society, we have become distressingly pious and self-righteous – and as a natural consequence advertisers wish to capitalize on this instinct. Like my erstwhile colleagues, they see this as an easy path to identifying their product with a strong public sentiment. This is such a bad idea that it merits a blog entry of its own, but what lead me to write today was a satisfyingly spectacular self-immolation by a large American brand that managed to make the wrong choice in just about every decision their communications and marketing teams have made over the past few days.

I was pleased to be invited back to speak to Dr. David Wright’s e-business class at the Telfer School of Management. It was a slightly smaller group than last year, but I enjoyed myself nonetheless. I always appreciate the chance to brush up on my public speaking.

I found myself thinking of James Herriot’s description of his first experience in public speaking in which he gave a rather unfortunate talk on veterinary medicine to a church youth group. The students were an incredibly polite group of young people, but they watched me with such solemn attentiveness that I was positively unnerved. My few attempts at humour fell very flat, and after a while I felt obliged to give up the attempt.

I was also very surprised that in an impromptu survey of the class, not one student expressed interest in starting their own business, (though there were a few hands visible when I asked if anyone was working towards an MBA). This was, after all, a business class in one of the country’s leading business schools. I singled out one young fellow, who was wearing a suit, and said that he had the look of an entrepreneur, and then I felt bad about it because I had obviously embarrassed him.

I talked to Dr. Wright after the lecture, and he suggested that there might have been young entrepreneurs in the group who just didn’t want to talk about their business. He added that it’s quite common for students to run start-up ventures while attending school. From my own experience dealing with entrepreneurs, I found it hard to imagine young business owners not wanting to talk about their business ideas.

It wasn’t until I was making my way back to my car, and being passed by young folk who were obviously returning from the “Occupy Ottawa” protests that it struck me that the mood on most university campuses is overwhelmingly anti-business. I had just invited budding capitalists to “out” themselves on campus, and it may be that they felt discretion is the better part of valour just now. If so, I apologize.

My wife and I went to see Kevin O’Leary speak at the Ottawa Writer’s Festival at the National Arts Center. Ordinarily, I try very hard to avoid the sort of lefty-loon, quasi-intellectual bumpf that is the lifeblood of this kind of event, but hey – it was Kevin O’Leary.

There was the usual welcome and introduction from the festival chair, and a further introduction by the CBC “personality” Adrian Harewood, followed by Mr. O’Leary’s presentation.

I regret to report that he uses a Mac, and something that looks suspiciously like PowerPoint, but I enjoyed his talk very much. I drew the ire of some of my neighbours when I agreed to a point Mr. O’Leary was making about our responsibility for personal, rather than corporate charity with a loud “amen”. An “outrageously right-wing perspective” is an acceptable if slightly roué eccentricity when it’s coming from a celebrity billionaire; but in Ottawa one doesn’t tolerate it in the hoi-polloi.

Mr. O’Leary finished his talk and announced that he would take questions from the audience, but he was quickly and smoothly silenced by the organizers, who had arranged for an interview to be conducted onstage by Adrian Harewood.

What followed was a forty-minute harangue interspersed with loaded questions by an obviously hostile socialist drone. I was irritated, but completely unsurprised by the usual leftist talking points about “the growing disparity between the 98% and the 2% elite”, (meaning that Harewood disapproved of O’Leary’s disproportionate wealth), and “the responsibility for ethical investing”, (by which Harewood implied that perhaps O’Leary wasn’t sufficiently aware of how unethical he was). There were several questions obviously intended to bait Mr. O’Leary on the topic of the Occupy Wall Street Protesters.

In an earlier post, I wrote about the curious economics of the spam industry.  Considered as an industry, the numbers initially make spam seem like an attractive proposition, with estimates, (and no figure relating to spam is better than an estimate), of global revenues from spam running as high as $3.2 billion in US dollars in the porn business alone. However, because of the quasi-legal nature of the industry, and the fluidity of the borders between nuisance selling and outright fraud, it’s difficult to really put a number on the value of the industry as a whole.

Put simply, it’s hard to determine how much of spam is selling, and how much is stealing.  The membrane that divides the merely sharp operator selling an iffy MLM scheme from the illegal operators selling unlicensed drugs and software, or from the outright frauds who are trying to find “marks” is continually breaking down as operators exchange personnel, data, and technology.

It also becomes apparent that the actual revenues generated by individual operators aren’t really all that attractive. All too often, spam operators use the methods they do because they’re trying to sell a product that doesn’t really present an attractive value proposition, and wouldn’t perform well enough to be a viable selling proposition if they were obliged to pay to use more orthodox marketing channels.

Eat all the free lunches you can find.

I don’t necessarily mean that literally, (though I always scam free food when I can), but exploit every free service and opportunity you can find. Make use of local entrepreneur’s groups and meet-ups, and make use of free local mentoring programs for start-ups like those offered in Ottawa by OCRI.

Every city will have some kind of similar economic development entity or local incubator.

Since most municipal economic development centers are staffed primarily by public sector employees, it’s tempting to dismiss them as a real resource. However, they’re a good place to start looking for contacts, and the better organizations will host regular symposia and events where business people gather. (Plus there’s usually food.) Sometimes free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it, but free is the only deal where you can get more than you paid for.

I had spent years working on my solution to email spam. It was a good idea, and I had patents. I had had my technology proposals reviewed by network engineers, and they all agreed that it would probably work very well. Sure, it was complex, and would cost a lot to develop, but it would work.

The problem was that no one wanted it. At least, no one wanted it enough to be willing to risk investing the money required to build it. When I spoke with ISPs and IT managers, I encountered wall of inertia.

They pointed to the effort and money they had already invested in their current solutions. They didn’t work perfectly, or even very well, but they worked – sort of. Complaints were down, and their support people were used to the technology; and they’d spent a lot of money putting it in place. Sure, they might change their solution – perhaps in a few years – if other people adopted it first.

There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to sell people on something they don’t really feel they need. You can have the best mouse trap in the world, but no one is going to buy it if they already have a trap that catches mice.

It turns out that launching a product is much harder than launching a service company. If you’re hanging out a shingle as a service company, you can count on generating revenue almost as soon as you start to win contracts. That’s not the case when you build a product. You have to have enough money available to continuously inject revenue into research and development for months or even years before you can generate any revenues.

I had just lost my job, and had very little money of my own. This meant that I would have to convince other people to invest their money in my venture. I decided to ask my former employers for advice. They were kind enough to introduce me to a friend of theirs, a former CEO who was willing to hear out my proposal and give me some practical ideas as to how to proceed.

I hate spam. I mean, everybody hates spam as an intrusion and a minor inconvenience, but I hate it with a passion that can only come from knowing way more about it than anyone rightfully should. This is because I had worked in network support jobs that put me on the front lines in dealing with spam, and I later had to address it in my own small business as an IT consultant.

The economics of spam are interesting. Spammers tend at their best to be completely indifferent to the consequences of the damage they inflict, and at their worst to share in the qualities of narcissistic sociopathy common to professional cons and fraudsters. They are obsessed with outsmarting their opposition, and will be invest tremendous effort in pursuing a relatively tiny profit. They don’t care how marginal their business is provided they “win” by breaking the safeguards set up to stop them. The more damage they do, the happier they are.