Your brand: The bridge to community
January 19, 2009
This post is cross-posted over on The Engaged Consumer, Powered’s company blog.
My colleagues Aaron Strout and Bill Fanning have gotten a great conversation started around the difficulty of connecting community with a brand that seems not quite as “community ready,” starting with a recent post titled “Would you join a Toothpaste Community?“
This is a question we get all the time in initial sales calls with savvy brand marketers. They get social marketing, but can’t quite see how people could ever get excited about their product – that is, excited enough to engage at a deeper level within a branded community. Aaron suggested a nice approach where you categorize your offering and look to commonly effective strategies. I’ll add to that by suggesting an additional approach that is a little more zen.
Alright, clear your mind. Let’s imagine that you are in a room with your ad agency and you are trying to brainstorm a new ad campaign. They will likely put you through a series of exercises designed to explore what you want your brand to mean to consumers. What are you really selling? Where is the point at which your product or service connects with something your potential buyer really cares about? Answering these questions allows your agency to produce a 30-second spot or a print campaign that more powerfully engages your target audience.
You might offer auto insurance, but you’re really selling safety and comfort. You might serve coffee, but you’re really selling opportunity and energy. You might be a toothpaste manufacturer, but you’re really selling health and good looks.
Before someone ever considers buying your insurance, coffee, or toothpaste, they have to be in the mode of being safer, being opportunity-driven, feeling healthy. That’s why TV commercials never start with the product that’s being sold, they start with images that evoke those feelings and then end with product. What I would suggest is that while these lifestyle elements are the secret to effective ad campaigns, they are also your bridge to an effective, high-return social marketing strategy.
What about a social marketing program centered on how to make your family safer: in your home, on the road, on the Internet? What about a program about how be more productive, more organized, more energetic? What about a program centered around total health, personal appearance, effective presentation? These are passion points for people, and it’s where you already get them to care about you. So why not deepen and broaden that brand-relevant interaction with online community? Bring in experts, engage celebrities, turn your compelling 30-second spot into a compelling conversation.
As in many things, the secrets to success here aren’t necessarily in some new playbook. They are hidden in what you already know. Why do people care about what you’re selling?
Photo Credit: Originally Uploaded by Carolyn from Lucky Planet Photography
From flat to round: The new brand
January 5, 2009
This post is cross-posted on Powered’s blog, The Engaged Consumer.
I draw a lot of parallels between marketing and storytelling, and I’m certainly not the only one. But recently, I’ve been giving some thought (mostly as a result of it being a hot conversation on the web) to the branding dimension of marketing, how it’s changing, and how it relates to the art of telling a good story.
Branding is to me most like characterization in the storytelling paradigm, the ability to develop convincing and compelling personalities with whom the reader (a.k.a. consumer) can identify and form a firm relationship. When you read a book, see a play, or watch a movie where characterization is done well, your emotions (love or hate) for the characters are amplified. The actors are full, their flaws and their strengths are detailed, and you can get to the point where when the story ends you want to see more of them. Good brands are like that – you feel like you know them, you feel like your association with them says something about you, and you want to see more of them.
A little bit of research into characterization rendered this from the Department of English at The University of Victoria that digs a little deeper:
A flat character (also known as a type, or a two-dimensional character) is defined by a single quality without much individualizing detail. A round character is a complex individual incapable of being easily defined. The degree to which characters are given roundness and individual complexity depends upon their function in the plot–some only need to be seen at a distance, like strangers or acquaintances, rather than known intimately.
I would argue that most brands today, and in the old world of marketing, are “flat characters.” A brand’s time with us has been hindered by our inability to choose with which brands we spend that time, as offline marketing channels feature a more-or-less complete lack of consumer control. As a result brand-marketers have had to keep branding simple. Every commercial break has been like a round of speed-dating where you have 30 seconds to get to know each of the brands involved.
That’s changing. With the web now a major force in marketing (and driven by consumer choice, spread primarily by word of mouth) consumers now have the means, and the ability, to choose to spend more time with brands they like. Brand marketers have to be ready for that. They must build “round characters” – the kind with depth, complexity, even flaws. This is why many people define the new branding as more conversational, more social. What they really are describing is the process of brands shedding their archetypical trappings and becoming more like real people.
Two good examples that go part of the way, but perhaps not far enough, are a couple of great efforts by Dos Equis and Palm. Dos Equis’ “The Most Interesting Man in the World” is a crusty old guy who looks like a cross between Chuck Norris and Antonio Banderas. He is surrounded by women, and described by phrases like “his blood smells like cologne” and “his personality is so magnetic that he is unable to carry credit cards.” He’s a great character for beer drinkers, myself included. You can become a fan of him on Facebook, and you can visit a website where he is featured, but you quickly get the sense that, well, he’s not really that interesting. While I give kudos to Dos Equis for some great ad spots and a slick website, opportunities are missed here for a deeper and longer-term engagement. A similar treatment was given to Claus, Palm’s metro-hip version of Santa Claus. Great character, but a bit flat for the web.
So what is a “round brand” on the web? Isn’t it a huge effort to develop all the backstory on your character for the few that are interested? Actually, it might be less work. By merely pulling back the marketing curtain and exposing the personalities and voices of the interesting people on your marketing team (through social networks and through your own socially-enabled website), you can contribute those personalities to your brand – rounding it out. Just look at what Dunkin Donuts is doing on their Twitter account. And it might be more than just a few that become interested, as word-of-mouth spreads at the speed of the web.
What brands do you think have character?
Meme-Tags and Vintage Photos
January 3, 2009
Mr. Aaron Strout, who recently joined Powered as our CMO, just meme-tagged me! When the message came over via Twitter that I had been tagged, I have to admit that had no idea what it meant. Meme-tagged, me?
But after reading Aaron’s blog post, it became clear that a game of meme-tag is really a more fun version of those “20 questions about you” email chain letters that used to go out. In fact, I have seen these little games perpetuating not only through Twitter but through Facebook. Last month my Facebook friends and I had fun with the “open the nearest book and type in the 7th sentence on the 53rd page” game. Some of the quotes were pretty funny taken out of context, but the more interesting thing was to see what people had on their bookshelves. These are a great way to feel connected to the folks in your extended network.
The other, somewhat-related trend I’ve seen in Facebook over the past few months is that several unrelated people in my network are starting to upload really old photos – soccer team pictures, second grade pictures, prom pictures. Another small way to feel connected, or to reconnect, with old friends through the sharing of a small piece of media. And Facebook continues to cement its position as the truly de facto social network.
But back to Aaron – his challenge is to upload and display the sixth photo on the six page of your Flickr photostream in your blog. Here’s the embarrassing thing: I am barely a Flickr user. I checked and I only have 23 pictures in my account. So as a stand-in I am going to upload the 66th photo in my iPhone camera roll . . . it’s a picture I took at the Seattle wedding of friends Becky and Amit this past summer (friends from business school).
And who will I tag to do the same? Let’s tag Josh Wills (@dukethug), Rebecca Frasier (@bexmix), Amy Mendel (@atmendel), Shwen (@shwen), Brianna Barnes (@briannab), and Ryan Joy (@atxryan). You’re it.
Why Twitter Matters
May 8, 2008
When I heard of and experienced Twitter at South by Southwest Interactive 2007, I groaned. Wow, another way for people to waste time online, I thought.
Twitter, for the uninitiated, is an online messaging service that allows you to broadcast short, 140 character updates (termed “tweets”) to a waiting audience of other users who are also posting updates. The updates are meant to be “what you are doing” at that moment, but really contain all types of short-form content that are as diverse as the users who write them. On Twitter, though, you select the people whose updates you follow, building an aggregated “twitterstream” of the people who matter to you. Similarly people may or may not follow your updates.
I finally started using Twitter a couple of months ago when I saw that it was not, in fact, merely a diversion for internet geeks (in my defense, there are many out there). It has staying power. What I noticed, once I started to use it, is that hidden in Twitter’s simplicity lies a game-changing adjustment in social communications that could end up reinventing the way we do a lot of things in our personal lives and in business. That’s quite a bold statement, so bear with me.
Back in my days as a software developer I worked for a company who did and still does publish a suite of sophisticated tools for managing the business flow of a commodities trading business. Along this business flow we had organized the software into many parts that matched the real-world process. The contracts subsystem would allow users to enter buy/sell agreements, the distribution subsystem then allowed them to match those agreements to the required physical distribution, and so forth into invoicing and accounting.
One of the big issues we contended with early on was the communication between the subsystems. The activities of one always affected another, so when something changed in one domain the others had to be alerted in real time. This was a painful process to code. Which other subsystems needed to be alerted of what, and when? It was even more painful to maintain as the system grew and evolved new capabilities.
In response to this issue, our team rewrote the messaging architecture to what in programming circles is referred to as a publish:subscribe model. This model created a virtual broadcast system where every subsystem would publish its activities (um, “what it was doing”) to the entire system and the other subsystems could choose what messages to pay attention to and which ones to ignore.
This approach was far superior, for many reasons. Here are my top three:
Transparency is rewarded.
First, the higher number of status messages developers published to the broadcast system, the more they were rewarded by not having to worry about what other systems might need. This allowed for a high degree of transparency within the system about what every part was up to at any period of time. This became very helpful for troubleshooting and performance tuning (oversight) of the entire software package.
Autonomy = efficiency
Not having to worry about communicating to other specific subsystems allowed developers to have more autonomy and focus on the more important work of making their specific piece of the system work better and faster. It saved time, and money.
Spontaneous innovation happens.
Availability of more activity information than you think you need leads to creative thinking about how you might actually be able to use the extra stuff. Early into the publish:subscribe model we found developers using information in unexpected ways to make their particular domain more powerful and useful.
So you might be able to see where I’m going with this. Twitter is the publish:subscribe model applied to personal instant messaging. As a result, it is superior to the other existing tools (basically any other IM client), which are based on the de facto one-to-one messaging model – for the reasons I mentioned above. In the Twitter world each person is like a miniature subsystem, broadcasting information it thinks the world might be interested in. And others listen, selectively.
The important thing in understanding Twitter’s importance is to focus on certain contexts for Twitter, not on the platform itself. Without context the tool does seem frivolous. Unless you are a researcher you wouldn’t care about listening to the global twitterstream. It would be an overwhelming torrent of which you might find a miniscule percentage relevant to you.
It’s also important to note that the default approach – to subscribe to your friends – is actually one of the less useful applications of Twitter. I love my friends, but many of them just aren’t doing things minute-to-minute that are of any relevance to me. Personal details for the purpose of friendship don’t usually require instantaneous communication (unless you like to stalk your friends), which is why social networking websites and one-to-one IM work just fine for those purposes – not to mention old-fashioned and still far superior technologies like using a phone or (gasp) actually spending time together. Plus, real friendship is forged and bolstered by the slow-moving plate tectonics of our lives, over the long term – not by the daily humdrum of changing moods and insignificant occurrences.
The best application I see is actually at the workplace, or really any club or organization that has to get things done. In the same way that my old company’s system had parts, so organizations have departments, and departments have people. People at work benefit greatly from timely transparency with each other. The more autonomy every department/person can have, the more resources it/he/she can focus on the appointed task. And the creativity that leads to broader capabilities and innovation is fueled by an understanding of what others are thinking and doing.
So Twitter-like technologies might allow workplaces to function more efficiently and creatively, but why am I making the wild claim that it will reinvent the way we do things? Well, if you had an internal Twitter and a profile page to post longer documents, photos, and files at the office, would you even need email? How often does a lack of transparency, either intended or unintended, hinder your group accomplishment? Think about it.
Would you need a boss? Would your boss really need a boss? Would you ever need to have a meeting? Or would, through Twitter, the organization be able to function more democratically, instantaneously solving problems? Given a couple of “elected” leaders and judges, could organizations become almost completely flat and dispense with the immense overhead of traditional command-and-control management? Consider it.
What if you injected the twittering of your customers into the mental collective? Could your whole organization provide customer service? Could getting your product or service to market become extremely agile, taking input from your body of customers in near real-time?
How we do business in the future (Enterprise 2.0?) could be radically changed, in a way that makes us all more productive, and more satisfied, all because of a little website cutely named Twitter.
UPDATE: Strangely, Max Kalehoff published a good post with exactly the same title as mine, on the same day. Not implying any shenanigans, our posts are very different. Just saying it must mean that a lot of people are figuring out that Twitter “matters.”
Wicksite: Other writings from across the web
March 28, 2008
I realized recently that I had just passed the one-year anniversary of my first blog post, a day that will go down in history I tell you! That first post was for my previous company closerlook, on their Work + Play blog. I enjoyed it enough that a few months later, I started this one.
Most of the time I’m writing for other blogs along with wicksite, most of them associated with my current or past employers. Alas, the hazards of working for someone else for a living. Here is where else you can find me, and a comprehensive list of posts from other sources up until now. This is a big dump of links, going forward I’ll try to cross-post or link out as I write them.
The Engaged Consumer (Powered’s corporate blog) - We just recently started this blog, and so far, so good.
Five lessons from social marketing disasters (March 12, 2008)
Social networking vs. social commerce (February 22, 2008)
Outspend or outteach? (February 15, 2008)
The new focus groups: social networks (February 1, 2008)
The two voices of social commerce (December 14, 2007)
Work + Play (closerlook’s corporate blog) - We started the blog in March of 2007, and I left in September to move to Austin. It’s a great blog at a great company!
It’s no fun to be alone! (August 7, 2007)
Gmail goes viral with “behind-the-scenes” video (August 3, 2007)
Firing a customer? Are you crazy? (July 12, 2007)
Keeping the questions golden (July 3, 2007)
Paying something for nothing (June 22, 2007)
Viral campaign freaking my mind (May 30, 2007)
Seth Godin and The Dip (May 22, 2007)
The strategy disconnect (April 28, 2007)
Now I finally know what Kurt Cobain was singing (April 26, 2007)
Saying “I do” to your customers (April 11, 2007)
Gimme some IMAX (April 7, 2007)
The trap of “what clients want” (April 6, 2007)
A song heard round the world (April 2, 2007)
Starbucks speaks its own language (March 30, 2007)
SxSW 2008: Henry Jenkins and the word “We”
March 12, 2008
Henry Jenkins, a professor at MIT who specialized in cultural/comparative studies, gave the opening remarks at South by Southwest Interactive on Saturday, and had a lot of interesting things to say about the cultural changes that technology is causing.
He put forth a lot of compelling ideas, which he does an excellent job of addressing and summarizing at this blog entry.
The thing I liked about him and his attitude toward people is summarized in his statement “people don’t engage in meaningless activities.” He’s respectful, understanding, and interested in everyone he comes across. As a result he is able to synthesize a great deal of knowledge about why people do the things they do.
He was all over the map with different cultural phenomena, many of which probably deserve their own blog entry at some point, but they all boil up into a point that rattled and changed my world view somewhat:
His opinion is that people have gone through a period of “mentorship,” where like children society has been stewarded by a few sage individuals – political leaders, big brand marketers, high profile academics. This has been a result of our place in the development of communications technology and the understanding of our world.
Now that paternalism is wearing off, driven by the internet and mobile technologies. Society is becoming the culture of “We,” permanently. This is reflected in the difference between the speeches of older politicians and the younger ones (Any idea why “Yes, we can” resonates so widely right now?). It’s reflected in the difference between old world push marketing and new world social marketing. It’s reflected by people taking more control of everything from their own finances to their own health.
It’s an exciting time to be a part of it, as the human race grows up.
Bookcrossing and shopdropping: real world social media
December 28, 2007
Over the holidays I picked up on an NY Times article that talks about the practice of “shopdropping,” which seems to always spike during the holidays. Shopdropping is when people bring something into a retail establishment and add it to the inventory, intending to pass it off as a legitimate product. Motives range from the self-promotional (a musician or author adding their stuff to a shelf in a record or book store) to the political (activists leaving toys or shirts promoting their philosophy).
Today I found an item on bookcrossing, which is another “stuff left behind” practice where people leave a book they have read in a random location and then promote the location of the recently “released” book on various bookcrossing websites (the most popular of which is bookcrossing.com). When people see a released book near them they race out to “catch” it. It’s lending library meets scavenger hunt.
What struck me about both of these trends is the cultural change that underpins them – a change that seems at the very least reflected in the way the web is developing. On the web people used to be just be surfing the wave, now they are the wave – making real contributions to what the internet is through social media. And whether the web caused it or is just part of it, I think people are looking around at their lives in the physical world and starting to think about a store shelf, a retail space, or a book in a different way. The question is no longer what can I find here for me? It’s what can I add to this?
I think there are business opportunities here. Retail businesses that increasingly focus themselves on a consumer’s desire to not just be a consumer, but also to be a contributor, could find themselves with many more, and more loyal, customers.
Powered: Social commerce out-of-the-box
October 9, 2007
This past Monday I started my new gig with Powered, an Austin-based company that creates social commerce web destinations for big brands (Sony, HP, etc.). I’m currently a “Business Architect” – which basically is another way to say strategic pre-sales, or even better, the guy who does the demos.
I’m really excited about the company and the role I’ll be playing. Social commerce, which is basically social networking wrapped around online shopping for products and services, is a part of the web that is really on the upswing. Powered is an emerging company in this space, and offers a unique service by bundling a strong content development offering with a social technology platform.
Basically, if you are a marketer scratching your head about how to leverage this Web 2.0 business for the benefit of your brand, Powered can have you up and running with a fully loaded social site driving interest and business in three months (mileage may vary). Do I sound like a sales guy yet? I’m working on it.
Powered has roots in “Online Consumer Education,” and if you go to the website now you’ll see it still reflects that content-focused approach. But next month we’ll be relaunching with a push into Social Commerce and a brand new technology platform named Panorama. Exciting times.
Beyond the impetus to join Powered because it’s a well-positioned company in a rapidly growing area of the internet, I joined up mostly because I was really impressed with the management and leadership here. People is always the first place I look to not only know if I will be happy somewhere, but also to know whether a company is going to ultimately succeed or not. I have a good feeling about this one.
More about Social Commerce at Micropersuasion and DMNews.
