I was on a flight back to Singapore from the US and as I was putting together my presentation for Business Rocks, and midway I decided to take a break to watch some in flight entertainment. I was really thrilled to find that they had a recorded Coldplay 2012 concert video and so I decided to watch it. Very soon it dawned on me, that the concert had become an inspiration and a starting point for my presentation on ‘co-creation’.
The concert recording had some accompanying commentary from Chris Martin the lead vocalist of Coldplay and there was one thing he said that made an emotional connection with me. He said that as a band their philosophy was to make sure that each and every member of its audience participates in the concert experience and that they not only encourage sing-along but also use technology to make sure their audience gets a chance to contribute to the concert. Before any Coldplay concert, the concert organizers distribute Xylo wristbands that are worn by its audiences and then switched on by a radio signal at appropriate parts of the concerts, hence making the audience as one giant LED display. To me it was an amazing execution how a band and its audience could become one body participating in the same experience. And I wondered how many Brands get that? How many brands actually see their customers as an extension of themselves and treat them as co-creators of their brand identity. In the slide share presentation embedded below I share six examples of brands that I felt have innovatively used their audiences as co-creators.

1)  7-Eleven Slurpee Bring Your Own Cup Day 2012

So on September 5^th 2012, 7-Eleven stores across Australia held Slurpee ‘bring your own cup day’, where for  one day only customers could bring in their favorite cup and fill it up with their favorite Slurpee for just only $2.90! And the classification of a cup was left to the customer’s imagination and could vary from cowboy hats to yard glasses, to even watering cans. Prizes were distributed to the most original and innovative cups to show up on that day.  The result was that the fans created more content for the brand in one day than they had in the brands history. Check out more about the campaign below

2)  Intel Korea’s ‘Make Thumb Noise’ campaign with 2NE1

(Disclaimer: Author is Intel Employee)

2NE1 and producer Teddy Park partnered with Intel Korea for the project to create a song for their new category of personal computing called ‘Ultrabook™’. The ‘Make Thumb Noise’ project allowed fans to vote for their ideal song for the Ultrabook ™ computer. Fans voted in to choose their favorite instrumental for the track in Round 1, and picked their favorite song title in Round 2. Round 3 gave fans the chance to choose the song’s arrangement style, and in the final round, they picked the bridge for the track. Well the campaign results where outstanding, the collective views received for all videos on the project exceeded 7 Million and more than 1 Million fans participated in the voting process, but more than that the fans got themselves a stellar song ‘Be Mine’ from their favorite band 2NE1. Check out 2NE1′s music video for “Be Mine” below!

3) Hippo uses it customers on Twitter to take stock and help inventory crunch

Hippo Baked Munchies was successfully launched into the Indian snack market in 2010 and because of their simple but yet insightful philosophy of ‘Hunger is the root of all evil’, they hit a connection with consumers. Hippo soon became a runaway success, but its nascent sales and distribution network found it challenging to keep track of stock, identify and re-stock empty shelves across 400 thousand stores. In India, 90% to 95% of the snack market is unorganized and inventory tracking is usually a logistical nightmare. To help solve this, Hippo turned to its followers on Twitter and asked them to tweet whenever they couldn’t find the snack in store. The result was impressive participation from their customers that eventually lead to a 76% jump in their overall sales. Check out ET Now report on the campaign.

4) Dominos – The Ultimate Delivery Vehicle Project

The people at Domino’s are on their way to reinvent the way pizza is going to be delivered, and they are achieving this by partnering with Local Motors, an open-source automaker. Local Motors has activated their community ‘The Forge’ in action with end goal being to build a brand-new, purpose-built vehicle designed from the ground up with nothing but pizza delivery in mind. The winning design will earn its creator a good $50,000 US. The “design brief page” offers details about the competition, which encompasses five phases of design, packaging, interior, surfacing and rendering. Check out Domino’s Pizza Ultimate Delivery Vehicle Design Brief Video below.

5) Aviva Community Fund

Aviva Canada launched a competition to find innovative ideas that would change Canada for the better in 2009, and offered $1,000,000 to make them happen. Centered on an online portal and supported by Facebook and YouTube, entrants were encouraged to submit ideas and upload photos, images, and videos to help describe their idea and attract votes to their cause. Canadians were invited to vote on the 2,000 ideas submitted, with the most popular entries qualified for funding. Aviva also ensured that other great ideas also received the financial and practical help they needed to get off the ground. Hear more about the success of this program, the lessons learned, and how Aviva departments worked together to create this unique forum where individuals could come together to make a difference. Check out Aviva Community Fund 2011 Video Playlist

6) Memories for the Future – Google Japan

The devastating earthquake and tsunami that ravaged northeastern Japan in early March 2011 caused unimaginable damage and heartbreak to many. In response, Google has created a website named “Mirai e no kioku”, meaning “Memories for the Future”. The website allows the people of Japan to share photos and videos of their cities in an effort to preserve the memories collected over generations that may have been lost during the disaster. Google has also provided thousands of miles of Street View imagery that includes “Before” and “After” comparisons of the hardest hit areas. Check out more on the project in the below video.

In conclusion, great brands know that there is a power in leveraging the collective intelligence of its customers and turn their ideas, content and conversations into marketing and business opportunities. Matter of fact in a recent Forbes article, ‘Brand Crowd Sourcing’ has been identified as one of the‘10 Brand Marketing Trends that will dominate 2013’.  I see co-creation and crowd-sourcing being actively leveraged in creating a shared experience, creating branded content, used in solving business problems, bring forth business innovation and making a collective difference in the communities we live in.

Fame will need to matchup with skills & talent

I am not sure about you but I have been to conferences where some of the speakers have been invited just because of the size of their networks and when you see their content you just know that they have never worked on or with a single reputable brand on their social media efforts. The days of being just a tweeting superstar are pretty much over. You are either a celebrity like a movie star or a politician or then you are damn good at what you do as a profession to be influential. If someone hires you or uses your services just based on your social foot print, then eventually your depth of knowledge or lack of it will show right through. Remember influence is a channel that can get you into the consideration set but it will be your skill and talent that will be tested eventually.

Tools will get smarter to call out Posers

Companies that are into influence measurement understand that if someone wants to, they can manipulate the system to get better scores. They are mindful of this development, so going forward they will be constantly looking at ways to figure out how to weed out the genuine thought leaders from the ones that have put their own system in place to game the scores. Recently developments like ability to identify fake followers, bots and auto responders are already making headlines. The entire online influence industry is going to be increasingly more transparent on the scoring system and you wouldn’t want to be caught in the process with your pants down.

Manipulating any algorithm is tiring and a 24×7 job

I know quite a few people who spend every waking minute being on social just to keep their scores high, which sometimes makes me wonder how sustainable is this going to be in the long run. Hey if that’s your passion and you’re a full time curator and creator then go for it, but if that’s what you do along with your day job then something is going to give soon. Figure out an activity and frequency rate that is natural and that you can keep up with. If you get better at what you do then you will eventually get more intelligent about what you contribute on social. The organic way to grow your influence is best and the most sustainable way to do it. Don’t burn yourself out and be forced to crash out from the big league, keep a goal you can sustain.

Be good at what you do and the followers and engagement will come.

There is no real substitute for real life experience and all the wonderful things that we do in our offline worlds. The trick is to make your offline expertise and talent available to an online population who wouldn’t necessarily have access to you if it weren’t for your social foot print. Just like talented people are spotted offline, people will spot you online as well.

Remember that you can’t just stay famous for being famous, unless you are Charlie Sheen

Recently I had an agency pitching for a campaign idea and one of their brilliant ideas – ‘Let’s make a viral video’ #FAIL. First of all you can’t make a viral video. At the best you can make contextual content that has the potential of being viral. Secondly there aren’t any free lunches on social, where you press the publish button and you sit back and relax and hit the ‘Viral Charts’.

First step is to get the Content right. It has to be contextual to your brand, meets your brands voice and personality and then it should be something that your consumers deeply care about. Creating great content is just half the battle won and most marketers stop there, and they often wonder why they get no love from their audience. Rule of thumb for any great social campaign is that content/ creative production should be less than 40% of the cost of campaign, the rest 60% should go into figuring the right content distribution strategy for that piece of content.

A good content distribution factors in multiple platforms, multiple mediums and multiple screens like smartphones, PC’s, TV and tablets.  But most important of all, a great content distribution strategy uses the powerful combination Paid, Earned and Owned to achieve its reach and engagement goals. Where in Owned is your brands communities and networks, blogs, brand website etc. Earned is your advocate networks, blogger networks, and social shares by audiences. And Paid is the media buys on social that the brand puts behind the content. In summary, you can see that setting up a great content distribution takes time and investment. From acquiring and nurturing communities to developing those advocate relationships and then having a commitment to spend media.

Establishing the difference between campaign’s and communities

Many marketing managers don’t understand the difference between these two and the common mistake that is made is creating a community to facilitate the campaign. Once the campaign is over the community is left abandoned which seems like a big waste for the effort and resources that are put behind creating it in the first place.

Here is a quick and simple thought process to engage in before you decide to allow anyone to create a new community.

Community Management Matrix ©Jamshed Wadia

1. Do they talk about brand personality and do they understand the personality of your brand?

Everything in Social starts with brand personality. Even before you make decisions on what social platforms and channels you need to be in, you need to figure out your brands personality on social. An agency that makes no effort to investigate that and goes straight into social platform tactics is the wrong agency to talk to. If your brand was a person and had a social media profile what kind of tone or voice would it have, and how it would and should be perceived by people is the starting point to any pitch worthy of mention.  Only when you have a handle on personality then only can you move on to important decisions like Social platforms, demographics and content strategy. Avoid agencies that start their pitch with claims to get you ‘X’ number of fan and followers by a certain time-frame.  You want brand ambassadors and brand enthusiasts to join your communities not fans that are ‘bought’ over by cheap tricks and who leave when the goodies stop.

2. Do they have a clue on Analytical Measures?

Analytics and Buzz measurement is very important in Social media. If you don’t know what’s working and what’s not, how can you take goals for the future? But still I find many agencies have no clue on analytics, on what those numbers mean and how they can translate them into actionable for the future.  The most common tools in social are publishing; community analytics and buzz tools. If the agency in question doesn’t have any experience on working with such tools then don’t make them custodians of your brand on social.

3. Do they respect guidelines and protect your brand?

Another contentious area is platform/ promotion guidelines. I just hate it when social media agencies propose ideas that are not compliant with platform guidelines. For example any good agency should know that Facebook’s like cannot be used as a voting or measurement mechanism in promotions, as they are in direct violation to Facebook’s promotion guidelines. I had one agency recently suggest to me that we do paid tweets and we need not disclose that we are doing that, which against FTC’s guidelines. What if you were to take these agencies on face value and implement everything that they suggested and then your brand got into trouble for it? I have had colleagues in the industry who have lost their communities or their credibility in matter of minutes because their agency didn’t have the adequate knowledge of promotion guidelines on social.

4. Do they have the right community managers?

Managing a community is quite different from running a campaign or developing creative for a brand. Community Managers are pivotal to the success of your communities, whichever platform it may be on. Community managers need to have people skills, they need to have empathy and love for their community. They also need to have the ability to put brand context to the conversations they having. Naturally being great listeners and genuine in their approach towards helping people find the right information they need. More often than not companies don’t care who manages their community within the agency. My perspective is that as a brand custodian you should be concerned who is leading the conversation in your community and that it’s not multiple people, but one person who understands your brand and audience thoroughly.

5. Are they practitioners themselves?

You must eat your own dog food, when I meet people in the social media space I check their profiles out on the popular platforms. If they can’t reasonably manage themselves on social can they do a good job managing a brand? I don’t expect them to have thousands of followers and friends but 10 friends and 5 status updates are not going to do it for me. If you plan to manage my brand on social then how you manage yourself on social is very important to me. As an agency resource if you don’t have a social media profile because you enjoy your privacy then I suggest you have an alternative career for yourself.

 60 Seconds: Things That Happen Every Sixty Seconds

Going Viral Visualized

Top 5 Mobile Phone Statistics 2011

The Geo social Universe 2.0

Social Sharing: The Impending Sharepocalypse 

Top Tech Trends of 2011

50 Hot New Social-Media Stats from 2011

The History of E commerce

What does a 2011 Android user look like?

Google: Top Algorithm Changes of 2011

A presentation i am giving early next week on Reputation & Risk Management from a perspective of a Social Media Practitioner.

My presentation focuses on these areas.

• Growing Importance of Social influence and Social capital of people and brands.
• Examples of Social Media disasters both Personal and done by brands that have impacted reputation.
• Importance of Social Media Guidelines and training.
• Listening solutions and identifying influencers for your brand.
• Managing potential Crisis and discuss best known methods to navigate through them.

Obsession with Social Capital will continue
I found some of the conversations about the new Klout scoring very amusing. Many people professed that they didn’t care about their social score and that the entire system of measuring social influence was flawed and superficial but to me the fact that they were upset and bothered to have an opinion was proof enough that they really cared. Let’s accept it, checking out your klout score is equivalent to checking yourself out whenever you are in vicinity of a mirror, you can’t help it, it’s just the way we are all wired. We all need a standard or benchmark that we measure ourselves with and that doesn’t necessarily translate into being superficial, because we all know looking good is as much how you feel on the inside as much it is on the outside. So no matter what the social media enthusiasts tell you about them not caring, they actually do. Is Klout the only answer out there? i don’t know, but I am pretty sure measuring social capital is here to stay for good.

Brands and marketers will always pay attention to Social Capital
Most marketers today know that there are no accurate measures to social capital and influence and that this industry is in its nascent stage but there is no doubt in my mind that this will get better and more transparent with time. As a marketer closely associated with social I haven’t seen any listening or Buzz tool worth its salt that doesn’t filter buzz by some influence measure or the other. Its common sense that with so much buzz around marketers may not have the resources to cope with all of it so they will need to prioritize and one way to do that is by influence.

What is the best way to measure social capital is debatable, but its importance is not in question.
Make no mistake that no matter which side of the debate you are on social capital is here to stay. Klout and others like Peerindex and Empire Avenue may not have nailed it completely but they are definitely on the right track to have chosen a high growth and high potential service offering. I must say Hats off to them to have got in early here.

Why I think Klout did this.

These are some of the reasons I think they did it but this is just my gut feel and not backed by any data. So don’t come after me.
- They may have been highly skewed towards twitter and the fact that there were many more formidable networks emerging, it may have been difficult to keep it real, relevant and balanced. So was there previous algorithm wrong, not really it made sense in a world where twitter and blogs were king in terms of public content, but now things are different.
- The other reason I think is that they may have been too volume focused and less engagement focused and they decided that it needed to be fixed.
- Better getting it right and keeping it relevant then staying wrong because of fear of upsetting people is the philosophy here i believe.

Final thoughts if I think could they have done this better? – I say yes. They could have given more heads-up, been more transparent about ‘Why’ and done it gradual. Will this affect their future – No way. If you ask me, I think they have benefited out of this. There are so many people who didn’t know about Klout and have now decided to join to figure out what the fuss is all about, and for those who are upset, they are going to forget about it as soon as they have their weekend drinks.

I guess we all know the importance of partnerships, especially in the area of marketing. Carlos Slim Helu the Mexican business magnate recently said – “In this new wave of technology, you can’t do it all yourself, you have to form alliances.” and he is spot on. We all need alliances and partnerships to achieve our business and marketing goals. The key to is finding the right ones and navigating successfully through it, the latter sometimes being more difficult than the former,  especially when you are dealing with large size organizations that may have different goals and a totally different culture.

Starting Early – Campaign Influence levels

One of things that I personally found challenging is that many marketers view alliances with a narrow goal of covering their gaps in their marketing budget.  Most of the times the search for a partner starts after the activity is completely thought through and then they realize that they are short of budget. Most marketing efforts that arise from partnerships of convenience like stretching the marketing dollar will mostly appear patchy and disjointed. Therefore it’s extremely important that partners decide to work at the early stages of conceptualization and ideation rather than down the line when the only thing left to do is add one more brand logo. Starting early also increases the level of influence you can have in the campaign idea and it works as a Win-Win for both parties.

What role does your partner play in your purchase funnel?

Depending on what industry your product or service belongs you would know best which part of the purchase funnel of opinion forming, research, consideration & purchase does your marketing efforts pay off on. On areas which you can’t play in or not that relevant you can let partners in. For example you maybe an ingredient brand and hence working with partners during the consideration and purchase phase of the funnel would be of great importance.

Driving change with partners

Sometimes driving change within partners in your ecosystem maybe challenging, for example convincing your partners to work on more digital marketing projects vs. traditional marketing.  A certain degree of education and evangelizing is sometimes needed within your partner’s organization.  Nothing works better than research insights and data here. Working sessions where you discuss latest sociological trends in your market can go a long way in opening up minds to new ideas and new ways of marketing your products.

I would summarize the key lessons from driving partnerships as

-          Change needs a certain degree of evangelism

-          Start early in order to be clear about audience, target, objective and messaging.

-          Set mutually agreeable success metrics.

-          Be sure to involve stakeholders –Finance & Legal

-          Behave as a brand Equal

-          Target your weakness and look for a value exchange

-          Your Partner can be anybody even your consumer