The Cult of Personality (Part 2)

Recently Fame Foundry had the opportunity to talk with Eliza Metz, the "Violet" half of Lime & Violet. What began as a late-night conversation between friends led to a podcast for the yarn-obsessed that struck a chord with fellow fanatics. The secret to their success is equal parts serendipity and savvy, as they have carefully grown and nurtured their legion of dedicated followers into a full-fledged knitting empire. Below Eliza shares some of the lessons she's learned along the way. FAME FOUNDRY: Thank you for sharing this time with us. ELIZA METZ: My pleasure. Did someone mention an open bar? (kidding, kidding...) FAME FOUNDRY: You're known as Violet to your audience and most of the world. What's the origin of this name? ELIZA METZ: Lime & Violet was born from late-night hysteria, actually. Miss Lime and I were driving to a fiber festival in Colorado about nine hours or so from where we live. We'd left late, and were having a few way-way-way-too-much-coffee moments, since it was 2 a.m. and neither of us were very coherent. At one point, she misheard something I said, thinking I'd answered "lime and violet." The whole weekend, any time we didn't understand something, we'd just look at each other, say "lime-n-violet," and laugh at our own joke. We still do that even now. On the way home, I told her we should start a podcast. There were only two knitting-related podcasts at the time (versus the 100+ there are now), and after explaining what a podcast was, she agreed that it'd be a fun little project for our spare time. The name came from the inside joke, and since she really wanted to stay anonymous to avoid the crazies that proliferate on the Internet, we decided I'd be Violet and she could be Lime. We had no idea that neither of us would ever have spare time again, or that random strangers would know us better by our "anonymous" names than our real ones. (Not that that's a bad thing, either, really.) FAME FOUNDRY: So the podcast, which evolved into this massive business, was purely and spontaneously created out of your own interest in knitting and putting on a show for the fun of it? ELIZA METZ: Simplistically speaking, yes, that was the genesis of the thing. It's not to say we didn't have a plan, however. I'm one of those people who writes business plans for fun, so we had a pretty good idea before we ever put voice to mic where we wanted it to go. The problem, we found, was that we didn't dream big enough or fast enough, really. It took on a life of its own pretty quickly and started branching out pretty organically from there. But, yes. It was just for the fun of it at the time. FAME FOUNDRY: Sounds like you were expecting this from the beginning. ELIZA METZ: We were. I think we didn't know the whole extent of just how big it would be, or what it would spawn, but we knew it had the potential to be big. Or maybe we just didn't know how big "big" really was at the time, which is probably a good thing. If we'd known about all the work, we may have given up and decided to take up macrame instead. FAME FOUNDRY: What was the first sign that let you know this was big. ELIZA METZ: Oh, man. That's an easy one. A couple of months after we started the show, we had quite a few (we thought at the time) online "fans." The community was starting to form, and podcasts in general were becoming a bit more well-known in yarncrafting. It wasn't uncommon to get e-mails with offers of yarn or undying love, and we were okay with that. It was all kind of remote and surreal. Then one night we were in a local yarn shop in Nebraska, and a customer -- a complete stranger -- stopped her transaction and asked if I was Miss Violet. blinkblink She recognized me by my voice, which I hadn't really expected. So we made a huge joke about it all, started calling ourselves rock stars and carried well-publicized purple and green Sharpies in our purses so we could sign boobs at yarn stores. No, really. (And, yes, we've signed them.) FAME FOUNDRY: And thus began 'The Empire'? ELIZA METZ: Of a sort. There was a fair bit of work from there, but it was the first time we realized that we had a little bit of sway with the knitters, and it sort of drove home the fact that we had this fabulous base of customers who were listening to us, for sure. Empires aren't built in a day. FAME FOUNDRY: And the Empire seems to even refer to itself as 'The Empire." Quite a stunt there. ELIZA METZ: Of course it does. Luckily, we're benevolent rulers. FAME FOUNDRY: So everything -- the blog, the store -- evolved out of the podcast? ELIZA METZ: In a sense, yes. All of it sort of grew organically around the podcast's evolution. It's a little hard to explain, really. See, while a lot of the places that the podcast has grown into are completely random and unexpected (happy accidents, of a sort), we sort of knew where we wanted it to go from the beginning. We had this ridiculous business plan before we even put down the first tracks -- more of a wish list of activities than an actual business plan, per se. We had it structured so that growth would be based on the number of listeners because we truly thought that it would give us quite a bit of time to do things. At 100 listeners, we'd set up the message boards to let the fans talk to each other and start building a community. At 500 listeners, we'd start putting together the first knitting pattern book...that kind of thing. I remember writing down a milestone for 5,000 listeners and thinking that was just crazy, that we'd be waiting for YEARS before that ever happened. Three months later, we hit 5,000. I sat back, took a screenshot, sent it to Lime and told her that, perhaps, we should look into changing the structure of our business plan. Ahem. Duh, right? The problem, we found, was that we didn't dream big enough or fast enough, really.Not all of what we've done has been a part of the plan, since we had to scrap most of that pretty early on. We had a catastrophic lightning strike that took out our first book and the back-up copies thereof. Local hotels laughed at us when we approached them about doing a knitters' retreat on a full floor of a hotel (even though we had over 1,000 people who had filled out the form saying they'd come to our slumber party weekend). We tried partnering with various yarn/knitting-related companies for co-branded product support, but we found that contract law isn't quite our strong point and the brand started diluting a little. Lots and lots of learning experiences in that first year or so. If you want something done right, you need to do it yourself. So we started doing dyed sock yarns, which sprouted off into bath and body stuff when we talked a lot about the indie companies. The blog was just a way to pass on information to the listeners every day, since the volume of really fabulous projects and patterns and yarns coming into L&V Central was just too much to talk about on a weekly show. We keep learning all the time. It's one of the best things about the way we just dived right into this. Had we KNOWN the kind of work we were in for, we'd have turned tail and run, honestly. Our ignorance saved us from the get-go, really. The big lesson from the past year -- at least for me -- has been that narrowing the focus of what we're doing isn't nearly as counterproductive as I thought it'd be. We launched the Intention Yarn line, which has a very, very narrow focus (and, uh, intent), but it does 10 times better than our generic sock yarns did, largely because people know what they're about. They get the concept, so it's something they can buy not just to support their Lime & Violet addiction, but for a specific purpose of creation, and they seem to dig that. Same with things like the Neil Gaiman project, TheFatesThree.com -- which isn't just generic knitting patterns, but patterns all created with a theme around a particular author's works -- the narrowing-down process made the focus just that much more clear for both listeners and the occasional non-listener who stumbles upon it. There are other projects unrelated directly to Lime & Violet -- KnitLife, which is an oral history collection process that's just getting going, for instance. While it's not directly related to the show, I've got no illusions that being "known," so to speak, doesn't help promote the projects or get the word out there. Whether or not it's an obvious connection, the Empire doesn't just affect the success of the stuff we do -- it's the basis for it. FAME FOUNDRY: You share a lot of yourself with your audience and the community that has formed around the Lime & Violet brand. Where do you draw the line between your personal life and what you broadcast to the public? ELIZA METZ: There's supposed to be a line? (You can't see me right now, but trust me, I'm laughing relatively hysterically.) If someone has listened to every single show, they know more about me than my own mother. Before there was a Lime & Violet, there was me. And way back in the olden days of the Internet, when you used to have to do markup by notepad and ftp everything from a command line and design was largely a matter of tables with varying cellpaddings (and we rode dinosaurs to school both ways uphill in the snow...), I was one of those freaks with an online journal. (This is in the pre-Greymatter, pre-typepad, pre-blog days. Told ya it was in the prehistoric era.) I was one of the original 50 nutjobs who thought that their own lives, as mundane as they may be, were interesting enough to warrant putting it out there for the world to read. (And, incidentally, comment on. Good heavens, the e-mails...) Coming from this background and posessing of some kind of weird self-revelatory urge that's probably borderline pathological, I don't have a line most of the time. There are some things that we don't talk about much on the show, and we try to maintain the anonymity of the innocent (relatively speaking), but for the most part, if someone has listened to every single show, they know more about me than my own mother. I'm still not sure if that's a good thing or not. Contrast that with Miss Lime, who keeps a very strict bubble around her identity. No pictures of her are allowed on the site other than one that she swears looks nothing like her. Nobody knows her real name. For a while, we even kept it secret that we're in Omaha, though that slipped out through other channels. She's pretty convinced that the crazies would find her if they knew her name, and for that, I can't really blame her. The Crazy is pretty much everywhere on the Internet. FAME FOUNDRY: You mentioned the "crazies" on the Internet. What's the craziest encounter you've had with a an Internet fanatic? ELIZA METZ: I could tell you stories that would probably make Dateline NBC producers salivate. For the most part, we've found that knitters are a pretty sane bunch, with a few notable exceptions, but the combination of Internet anonymity and pseudofame still brings out the occasional whackjob. For instance, once we mentioned on the show that we love our fans. We love them so much that we'd love to invite them all over to my house for a great big slumber party. I mentioned that I have a guest room and a couple dogs that are quite fond of visitors, and I make a mean cookie. While intended to be kind of a joke, apparently I sounded serious enough that one girl found my real name, looked up my address and drove NINE HOURS to my house, where she got out of the car with four overnight bags (three of them were knitting projects-in-progress, I might add), and just expected to stay. Um. Oh-kay... She ended up staying three days. Great girl, but omg we never said anything like that again. Then there was the lady who didn't understand personal space and kept petting my hair. Or the one who named her babies after us. Or the one who, when we didn't write her back in an arbitrarily selected timeframe, made a WE HATE VIOLET website. I wish I was kidding. The Crazy. She is everywhere. FAME FOUNDRY: You're active on Twitter, Facebook and Plurk, though you use Plurk as your micro-updating site of choice. Why's that? When it comes to what we're trying to do -- building a community rather than just a following -- there needs to be interaction. ELIZA METZ: For me, it's a matter of connection. Twitter and Facebook and all the other myriad microblogging sites out there are all fine and good for most things, but it's largely one-way communication. You broadcast what you're doing to the world. Which, again, is all fine and good, if that's what you're looking to do. When it comes to what we're trying to do -- building a community rather than just a following -- there needs to be interaction. A conversation rather than just blindly telling people what you had for lunch. And Plurk has a format that depends on conversation and commentary to stay interesting, so people get involved. Once a fan is invested in a conversation, either with me or with the other followers, they feel like they're part of it. Instead of just reading ABOUT someone, they're talking WITH them. It's just a more human format to me, and it's the one I end up going back to over and over again as a result. FAME FOUNDRY: Art journaling is a big part of your life. How has this influenced your artistic approach online? ELIZA METZ: Through art journaling, I've found out a couple of big things about my own aesthetic. I really like handwritten things (more personal). I can have all the colors in the watercolor box, and I'll still end up with a white or mostly white background (which unclutters things for me visually). And white space keeps me sane. I don't claim to be any kind of techno-head web person who writes code in my sleep. In fact, I'm one of those freaks who still uses Notepad for most things. Call that a disclaimer from a semi-luddite here. That said, almost everything I put out there has a lot of that same, rustic, plain-looking, hand-hewn feel to it -- partially from just not knowing how else to do anything, and partially because that IS my approach. And if it works, I see no reason to fix what isn't broken. I'm just happy when there aren't broken links and people look at it now and again. FAME FOUNDRY: Thank you for sharing your vast experiences in building this empire you have. ELIZA METZ: And thank you for the interview. That'll be four goats and a skein of good cashmere, payable to the jester by the door. Elli Metz is the benevolent ruler of the Lime & Violet empire, which includes the independent republics of media, yarn, perfume and history. When she's not wearing her crown (which she often does), her job title is "starmaker," a fact that still amuses her.

 

 

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Left in the Dark? The Pitfalls of Taco Bell’s #OnlyInTheApp Social Media Stunt

Taco Bell recently unveiled a new mobile app, available for both iOS and for Android, that “gives consumers complete access to every Taco Bell ingredient to create what they want, when they want it – all in the palm of their hand.” The app allows customers in drive-thru or in their dining room to order and pay for items directly on their mobile device. The app itself may be a great idea, but the marketing push behind this new addition from Taco Bell is certainly raising some eyebrows. The company decided to “go dark” on their social media platforms and on their website, replacing their normal content with a black background and a large message that says that “the new way to Taco Bell isn’t on the Internet, it’s #onlyintheapp”, using a hashtag that they have created for this campaign. While I can appreciate the company’s desire to focus heavily on marketing this new feature, doing so at the detriment of all their other messaging and marketing channels is short-sighed. In this article, we will take a look at the possible benefits of this “all in” approach and why Taco Bell may have done this, as well as the pitfalls of this type of campaign and putting all your eggs, or in this case all your tacos, in one basket.

Information on demand

We live in world where immediate access to information is now expected. Have a question? You can whip out your phone or open the web browser on your desktop computer and hop over to Google for the answer. The same holds true for the services we use or products we buy, including menu items and locations or contact information for restaurants. Having worked on websites for restaurants in the past, I can tell you from experience that this information, menu and locations/contact, are some of the most heavily requested pages on those sites. Taco Bell’s current marketing approach, and their decision to “take down” their normal website in favor of a marketing message and nothing BUT a marketing message, is not a customer-friendly decision because it runs contrary to the information on demand culture that our customers have come to expect from websites. Now, to be fair, Taco Bell did not actually take down their entire site. If you run a search engine query for “Taco Bell Menu”, you can find those pages still live on the Web, but you have to work for it! Their current homepage, which is where their visitors will likely go, includes no links to the other pages of the site. If a customer needs menu information, or if they are looking for something like a location’s address or phone number, they will have to go out of their way to dig that information out. That is asking a lot of a person and few customers will go to those lengths.

What they want versus what you want

Taco Bell’s current campaign is a perfect example of placing a company’s needs before their customers’ needs. The marketing message that now dominates Taco Bell’s media properties is what they want people to know about. There is nothing wrong with promoting a new service or product, but by removing easy access to the rest of the information their customers may want, they are ignoring their needs in place of their own. What if a customer comes to the site to find nutrition information, only to be greeted by a message to download this new app. Is that a good customer experience? Perhaps they do not have an iPhone or Android device. This message is lost on them and they are at a dead end. This is a lost opportunity. Saying that this information is “not on the Internet” and instead forcing them to download an app is like saying “we don’t care how you want to access this information, we want you to download an app and we won’t give you that information unless you do so.” That may sound harsh, but that is absolutely how this decision comes across. Yes, there is value in putting a marketing campaign front and center in big way like this. Taco Bell’s new app is certainly being talked about, but most of the chatter I am hearing is not about the app itself or how great or convenient it is, it is about the company’s decision to market it in this way, with the rest of their messaging and information absolutely non-existent. A better approach would have been to market this new app in a big way with a bold, prominent placement across all their media channels, but to also include easy links to the normal website and social media content. With that approach, they could still ensure that their message comes across loud and clear, which is what they want, but they would not be ignoring what their customers want because that information would still be easily accessible.

Ignoring the conversation

Another interesting (and not in a good way) aspect of Taco Bell’s “going dark” campaign is what they are doing on social media. Their Facebook page currently includes only 1 post with a message similar to their website about the new app. The Taco Bell logos and everything else have been removed. What this page does have are comments – 1,194 of them as of this writing. If you read through those comments, you will find people complaining about the removal of the website content, the lack of delivery services, and many random slams on Taco Bell in general. Bottom line, there is a lot of negativity on this page, but Taco Bell is nowhere to be found in those comments. Their “going dark” campaign also includes them removing themselves from the conversation. This is not how social media works. Social media is all about engagement and conversations. If you put something out there, especially something like a new service like this, you should be prepared to answer customers’ questions and have those conversations. Taco Bell has yet to do this. Instead, they have “gone dark” and are nowhere to be found.

A better approach

When you have an important message to convey to your audience, you want that message front and center. There may be the temptation to take the same route that Taco Bell did and remove all your other content in favor of that message. Yes, people that visit your site will see it because that is all that there is to see, but is that the end goal? No, you do not want customers to only see your message, you want them to see your message and take action. Preferably, you want them to take the action that this campaign is focused on, but if they cannot do that, you do not want them to hit a dead end. In the case of Taco Bell, someone without a mobile device that can download the app, or someone with no interest in downloading that app, has hit that aforementioned dead-end. There is nowhere else for them to go other than away from Taco Bell. That is a lost opportunity. For your own marketing campaigns, you want to ensure that if you put a message front and center, you also make other paths available for people who that message may be lost on. Bottom line, you do not focus on one message or campaign at the expense of everything else you have to say and offer – and you never take yourself out of the conversation! When customers are talking about your company and what you are doing, that is a golden opportunity to respond and start a conversation. If you instead decide to “go dark”, you miss that opportunity completely.

In closing

I expect that this campaign is a temporary one for Taco Bell. Soon enough, their website and social media will be back to normal, but in the meantime, all I see in this marketing push are missed opportunities and ill-informed decisions. When planning your own campaigns and messages, speak to your marketing team or agency and always ask yourself whether your plans focus too heavily on what you want instead of what your customers need. The key to a successful campaign is finding a way to address both of these needs and tie together your company’s goals and those of your customers.

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