The best of marketing has always been about behavioral economics and those proven strategies that ‘nudge’ people to buy or take an action. Recently, behavioral science has been popularized and, even advanced, by some pretty smart people.

Robert Cialdini has the six drivers of persuasion (neat compressed summary here). The Heath Brothers have the “Rider” and the “Elephant.” Jonah Berger has his own six principles (“STEPPS”). Dan Ariely has his stuff. Paul Adams from Facebook has his own synthesis of what drives people to action.

There are great concepts born from research across many of these works. In fact, sometimes there is just too much in the behavioral canon to practically apply to a business problem today. In my article for FastCo Create last week outlining The Principles of Social Design, I made a point,

“Many of them, like ”loss aversion”--the tendency for people to move more quickly to avoid losing something rather than to gain something of value--are more like a bolt of fine, durable cloth than a ready-made suit of clothes. You need to know which ones to stitch together to tackle a particular problem.”



Practical Principles of Social Design

I am well aware that the Facebook sales and marketing team popularized the phrase “social by design.” This was used to package up the best practice approach to using the Facebook platform to drive engagement and advocacy KPIs from consumers.

Early on, Facebook found themselves having to educate traditional marketers on brand and agency sides about how Facebook was different than interruptive advertising. I find it ironic that that same group at Facebook has latched onto the mnemonic that Facebook is “the new print” to describe the popularization of clever graphics in use by brand after brand to generate object “likes.” It’s an old-school concept that any art director can understand. It just may not advance the people-centricity of the platform like ‘social by design’ did.

Facebook did not invent word of mouth behaviors. They merely built a platform that takes advantage of a some of them.

We (my team at Social@Ogilvy) have learned from 8 years of social media marketing and communications and a ton more time in related disciplines before that. We are sharp students of academics in this field. In fact, our original work was based upon Robert Cialdini’s six drivers of persuasion.

We needed a more practical synthesis of the best research-based ideas that predict why people will advocate (all forms of word of mouth including sharing content).  Here is how we updated our original drivers into a new, highly useful “Principles of Social Design”

There are two parts to the principles. The first defines the messenger and outlines the various networks we might engage with to stimulate sharing or advocacy.  These networks influence us all in new ways. Some are more influential because the network is made of family, friends or people with shared interests.  The second part are the word of mouth drivers. These are the ways we design communications such that thye authentically capture the attention of people and networks of people and drive advocacy and, even, actions like sales.

Networks of Influence: The messenger matters. Trust in institutions and traditional media goes up and down (mostly down).  And while there are new potentially influential voices in many markets and within certain contexts, sometimes what our friends, family and social connections say matters more. 

Community Networks: How can we use communities to drive social behaviors? People come together around different affinities and interests. Sometimes that can be a brand. More often it’s a topic that matters to them – think about Maker communities; people who love the Outer Banks of North Carolina; or first time moms. If we can be of-use and deliver against the drivers of word of mouth, we can expect ideas and content to spread across the community.

 Influencers: Who are the professional and amateur (and in-between) voices who may have some authority and potential influence on this subject? These may be popular bloggers, celebrities, popular Twitter users. Their subject matter expertise may be narrow like gadgets or raising adopted kids. If we deliver on the drivers of word of mouth, we can encourage influencers to share across their social graph. Sometimes this is akin to a mom reading about new family wellness techniques from a CNN Health editor, and sometimes it is a little closer to them like a tip from a mom you may not know yet who seems similar to you. 

Content Network: How can we use our owned and controlled online and offline properties to extend the model? If for no other reason than to be found via Google, we need to use our own content network to publish relevant content such that when someone needs to know

Combine  a thoughtful strategy around using the right Networks of Influence with The Drivers of Word of Mouth (see FastCo: The Principles of Social Design) and you are now designing with the Principles of Social Design. That’s what it takes to reliably spark sharing, advocacy, word of mouth and more.

Next post: An Inside View of The Drivers of Word of Mouth

Related articles

Big Brands Need to Understand Word of Mouth

Influence Planning Will Eclipse Media Planning: Part 1 Research

The Art and Science of Social Media 3.0

Behavioral Economics Applied - Gamification

Getting the 1% to Do More

More brands are considering how to put content at the center of their marketing. Coca-Cola has put a stake in the ground with “liquid and linked.” Ford is doing it with their Content Factory. Intel is committed.

Driven by the direct relationships brands now have through their social media platforms with customers, we are all seeing the value in not just using content more effectively but to operationalize it – get a bigger bang for a lesser buck.

It’s easy to believe this is a significant shift for marketers that will affect how budgets are organized, which positions are hired, how success is measured. It’s another thing to have the answers as to how all that will align for business as different as a global FMCG, a B2B tech company or a regional retailer.

Now is the time to get sharp, smart, educated, and generally collect a few different POVs. Here are three that I have found helpful:

Get wise about the various tech partners offering innovative services.

Jeremiah Owyang and the gang at Altimeter have shifted their sights on the content marketing space. I expect great insight from them over the next few months. It starts with a pretty good list of content marketing tech companies like Percolate,Visual.ly, Stipple and more. 

Start thinking about how to better organize your company to work across internal teams.

Rebecca Lieb and team at Altimeter drafted a great starting point for brands organizing around content. From the Executive Editorial Board to the Center of Excellence (this time for content vs. ‘social’), they cover some reasonable choices. There are more options out there, yet this paper does a good job of dispelling the idea that you are a mere brand journalist away from becoming an effective content marketing enterprise.

Keep reading and talking with the ‘community of practice’ around content marketing.

As you would expect, there’s tons of content out there about…content. I have found the Content Marketing Institute routinely valuable with their nuts and bolts articles about how others are doing this out there. This article on the 3 building blocks is a good example of foundational and smart stuff.

(Thanks to Just Jared Jr for the horrific image)

Related articles

Getting Internal Experts to Create Content

Organizing Your Department for Content Marketing: Strategic Requirements

How to Build a Content Marketing Machine Part II

Agencies are the Ocean Liners. Sleek, steady vessels following their routes. Start-ups are the Pirate Ships. Oblivious to custom, rough around the edges and ready to change course as it suits them.

I work at a large, global agency. We put a premium on creativity. We sell ideas and other things (like execution and actual business results). Today, those ideas are expressed in digital technologies and behaviors. That’s the way the world will increasingly head. There is a war for talented people who know how to creatively engage people via digital and social experiences.

We must embrace a new era of “creativity”

Insights and lots of diverse POVs lead to disruptive, valuable ideas. Really interesting and creative ideas sprout from putting different types of curious people in a room with the right coach. It’s not always about what’s on people’s business card that qualifies them in the room.

Certainly, the expertise they bring is valuable. That expertise might be in storytelling or architecture or shopper marketing or behavior change. It might also be in advertising. But assuming that ‘creativity’ is the rarified domain of the creative director and his tribe of writers and designers is just plain wrong.

Creativity comes from creating an atmosphere, a culture that values “creativity” in everyone, not “creatives.” That comes from a guy whose last job was as a Creative Director. Building a culture of creativity allows all types of people, with all types of time on the job to contribute.   It works when we take the process of developing and cultivating creative ideas seriously. That means no more “magical thinking” about creativity. Oh, those guys on the 14^th floor do that.

 Agencies vs. Start-ups

Agencies have to change. And since agencies are largely a reflection of the brands they work for, I would argue that most businesses who value creativity (or innovation) need to consider change. Younger talent may be deselecting the agency world. If they cannot contribute because of hierarchical barriers, if they are not invited to be creative, then they will go somewhere where they can. Here’s how Jack Armstrong put it in Digiday:

“At startups, you start off being treated with respect and as an equal. The attitude is more “We’re all in this together” and less “Get used to it, kid.” There are no ropes to be shown, because startups are making up the rules as they go along. Startups are more receptive to the idea that you might be able to teach something, instead of learning what the old-timers already know. Life at startups just generally seems nicer than at agencies. At the end of the day, you can do the same work for people that actually appreciate you.”

I grew professionally in leaps and bounds in the three start-ups I worked in. There was a prevailing sense of “we are all figuring this out together” and people were judged more by their willingness, hard work and ability to get great stuff done.

Agencies sell experts. Or do we sell ideas? Technically, most charge clients for people’s time.  Presumably that time is deemed valuable by the output of people’s efforts which very often ought to be remarkable ideas rendered in a way that can accelerate business. That means people within an agency must cultivate valuable and distinctive identities. If there is a group of people called ‘creatives,’ they naturally want to defend their distinct expertise at creative stuff.

It is time to let go of that. We need now what Miles Young Global CEO of Ogilvy & Mather calls “pervasive creativity.” (He didn’t call it “pervasive creatives”).

3 Ways to Help

Invest in Creative Collaboration

At Social@Ogilvy, some very smart people in our Hong Kong team led by Stephanie Chevalierand Jenna Boller, developed a collaborative workshop called Socialab. Originally, it was designed to help a diverse team that often included the client gain strength in thinking “socially.”

Socialab now describes how we collaborate routinely. It’s how we bring diverse expertise to a table to articulate a social brand character, a social strategy and the big social idea which we call the social experience. It’s also how we introduce people to the principles of social design – those behavioral triggers that drive people to share some form of word of mouth. 

We invite social strategists, creative, brand experts, clients, tech and platform partners and more. Diversity is key.

Steve Simpson, Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy & Mather North America, has begun  new habit of holding his own form of creative “hackathons.” These are purposely named after the tech startup community practice of creating collaborative work sessions that treat everyone equal and create a climate that helps individuals contribute.

Hire New Disciplines and Don’t Tell Them The Rules

No mystery that the last two people we hired came from editorial and content backgrounds with the BBC and Gannett. The two before that from tech start-ups. And so on.

We need different brands to develop creative ideas that can actually come to life in today’s fragmented world. We need to make room for them once they are on board. I suggest we hire some of them without overdoing the on-boarding process. I would rather encourage these new souls to disregard how things get done and the ruts of our routines and see what happens.

Form Start-ups and Take Hostages

Social@Ogilvy was a start-up inside Ogilvy. So is Ogilvy Change (behavior change). No one asked us to create this business. We did it. We hijacked some people and resources and proved pretty quickly we were on to something. Had we embarrassed ourselves and failed in any significant way, I am certain we would have been duly punished.

Start-ups inside big, operational companies have to be a bit more ruthless. You will not find a “Fail Faster” motto anywhere on the walls of these companies. But forming your own thing can work.   

Pretty soon, you find people inside the mothership intrigued by what you are doing and wanting to come on board.

There you have three practical ways we can change and put a little pirate ship in the ocean liners. 

My colleagues at Ogilvy India alerted me to a social campaign that aspires to movement status (they worked on this). That means they hope to gain broad awareness for their issue and presumably see that awareness translate into fund-raising and other key actions.

Helping Children in India

The issue is children born with cleft palates. The organization behind this is Operation Smile India – “Operation Smile India provides free surgery to repair cleft lips, cleft palates and other facial deformities for children throughout the country.”

In case you were wondering how widespread this problem is like I was, “Approximately 1 in every 700 Indian children is born with a cleft lip and/or cleft palate with an estimated backlog of more than 1 million people living with untreated facial deformities.”

For many, the remedy is a 45-minute surgery at a cost of about $400.

We recently published an analysis of Social Brand Movements that compared the performance of movements supported by brands with social movements supported by NGOs like this one (see paper at end of post). The goal was to understand how big the largest of movements can actually aspire to get.

Operation Smile aspires to 1 million tweets/retweets with some number of complimentary video views. By our own review, that is 25% greater than the social actions supported by GlobalGiving following the Tsunami in Japan. Big goal. And the kids deserve it. 

Is Raising Awareness Enough?

The recent effort to raise awareness has a few really smart elements.

1. They created a hashtag - #cleftosmile – that is easy to remember. They also created a graphic logo which uses a clever set of keystrokes - :{to:) - not quite as easy to remember nor as functional as the hashtag but still clever. There is a campaign site here. 

2. They told the heart-wrenching story in a video that mixes the graphic animation and photography of affected children. This softens the aversion people instinctively have to the site of the cleft deformity

3. Users are prompted to tweet to celebrities to capture their attention and earn their own reach-busting tweets

4. They have a big, hairy, audacious goal of 1m tweets and a simple call to action

5. All calls-to-action beyond tweets and video views lead back to the Operation Smile India site. That’s where the clarity of this simple program softens a bit as users must hunt around for what they can do.

A Big Job-to-be-done

I am certain that the issue of India’s children suffering from cleft lip or palate lacks broad awareness. Still, there are likely other problems to solve as well, like making the condition relevant to more people than the parents and outer circle (e.g. grandparents) of those children affected.  It is also likely a highly stigmatizing condition for all involved – child and parent. The video takes  steps to soften the impact of seeing a beautiful child’s face with the condition. I don’t want to in any way feed into the stigma, merely acknowledge that fear and challenging imagery often cause people to shut down in social marketing (behavior change) programs. That's why the animation works well here. 

If the tweets get loud enough, government and business leaders will pay attention: 

“The idea is to raise enough of a noise to make cleft treatment a part of the government's agenda. If this translates into volunteers and funding, it would be the icing on the cake,” said an official.

 

When the program is meant to drive fundraising directly, we would adjust our approach. People don’t get pushed down the funnel anymore. The logic that if we just raise enough awareness a certain portion will donate isn’t sound anymore. We need to give people actions they can take now. If we are lucky enough to earn their attention, lets ask them for some money. If they will retweet then lets get them to ping a celebrity like this campaign does. Hey, how about pinging titans of industry like those who have big business stakes in India? What does Warren Buffet’s investment strategy in India look like? Maybe if I tweeted him, he might rewteet….

Presuming the bigger barrier to more children getting the much-needed surgery is money, then Operation Smile could take extra steps to make it easier for all of us to take an action. How can people donate $5 or $10? Can I start a pot of money and get my friends to give enough until we reach $400 for one surgery? Can we all give micro-donations via mobile device?

Clearly, one of the biggest innovations from digital in fund-raising is mobile micro-donations. Within that is the behavioral economics “truth” that we just need to remove all barriers and make taking an action easier. 

Tweet this

All that being said, no child should struggle with the challenges of a cleft palate. Any parent can feel some of the emotional struggle that these children must feel.

Let’s throw caution to the wind. Give what you can. Tell your friends and social connections about these children.  And by all means, copy-and-paste and tweet this today:

RT now #CleftToSmile and help Operation Smile India deliver a smile to children who deserve that simple beauty. http://bit.ly/ZgKfRs

Or how to really engage the true brand fans to become more productive advocates (and save you money while selling more). 

So much energy and money is being spent on building what we all describe as big “fanbases” in Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks, that we lose sight of the fact that not all fans are created equal.

In our soon-to-be-released international study on brand advocacy, one finding is clear – the number of highly active and vocal fans for particular brands is quite small.  So what are you doing for your best, most connected customers (here “best” might mean most vocal advocates and not necessarily the biggest spenders)? What are you doing for the 1-5% of your fan or follower base who are actually sharing a lot and championing the brand?

Certainly acknowledging them with replies on Facebook or Twitter is good practice. But if you really want to cultivate strong advocacy from those most inclined to express themselves you may want to go further.

Fan Loyalty Programs

Brand have run loyalty programs for centuries. Most are geared towards encouraging customers to spend more. Data programs are run to filter and identify big spenders with tons of nuance about what they spend on and so forth. Our own Lasek Group are expert at designing and running some of the world’s top loyalty programs.

What are relatively new are programs designed to inspire and drive more focused advocacy from the most active advocates. These programs need three components to succeed:

1.  A technological platform that makes it easy to deliver messages and build insightful profiles
2. A steady stream of content, offers and access that the best advocates would find worth their time and their social capital
3. A program design and execution discipline based upon the key drivers of behavior

Technology platforms

We designed our own Insider Circle as a way to subscribe a group of ‘super-fans’ to a private club where they receive exclusives – content before anyone else, access to interesting people and experiences, product and service offers and experiences. We saw other platforms on the market but none really reflected the feature-set that we had learned from experience were not only valuable but also ‘right-sized’ to the market. That means baking-in social drivers like game mechanics and rewards and making it easy to use other behavior-drivers. 

There are other good choices out there now. Social Chorus is one. Greg Shove, CEO, has led a great team to create a useful platform that helps brands identify ‘social influencers’ and then subscribe them via the platform. There is a significant distinction between fans and influencers. Clearly having fans who have the attributes of potential influence (i.e. high-reach and relevance) is ideal. Still, identifying your most vocal fans and being mindful that they likely span the spectrum of high potential influence and to low potential influence is okay.

500 Friends sounds more like a loyalty-minded firm or as they would call it, “LoyaltyPlus”

“LoyaltyPlus empowers you to present your customers with relevant incentives, such as rewards, points, status, recognition, and exclusive access and promotions. Engage your customers at each stage of their lifecycle, from the time they become aware of your brand through conversion to loyalty and ultimately advocacy.”

The platform combines customer rewards, advocacy stimulants (they make it easy and provide incentives), and a way to capture reviews and other consumer generated content.

Now, Dropify adds some functionality to Facebook to deliver content to your community. You can literally lay on an exclusive downloadable video or white paper to your fanbase. It’s not clear of the platform will support targeting that to specific members of your community – like your 1%. It’s also not clear if this functionality is really a step above how we deliver content now through the Facebook Newsfeed. But its inevitable that Facebook and or the network of developers working within that environment will try to get real about the different levels of advocates in the myriad of brand fanbases out there and develop tools to treat them special.

A steady stream of value

Many brands are redefining budgets and staff to support the content needed to mange always-on social networks. It isn’t easy or a trivial matter. But its happening. Now, comes the question of what are you going to hold back and release exclusively to your best advocates?

Most brands are struggling to keep good stuff in the pipeline for the mass Facebook fanbase. Choosing to create exclusives for an even smaller group is tough. They must believe in the power of the ‘super-fan’ over the myth of the mass-engaged fanbase (my bias is pretty clear)

Key drivers of behavior

The more things change the more they stay the same. If your goal is to drive your most vocal fans to action, then you would use the proven drivers of social behaviors. Think Cialdini, Health Brothers, Ariely. If you just start with Cialdini’s ‘6 drivers of persuasion,’ you can see instantly how we bring those to bear. ‘Scarcity’ is what exclusive and limited run offers are all about. These are the assets we make available via the technology platform for a limited time. ‘Social Proof’ lets other advocates see what their peers are doing this reinforcing their own impulse to share particular content.

As you plan out the rest of your 2013 plan and identify next priorities on into 2014, what are you doing to embrace and activate your 1%?

Related articles

The Art and Science of Social Media 3.0

The Psychology of Advocacy: 3 Reasons Your Customers Love You

Rethinking the Marketing Spend Towards Driving Advocacy

Misleading headlines in research

Eric Schmidt, senior manager-marketing strategy and insights at Coca-Cola, presented research at ARF’s Re:think 2013 conference that seemed to indicate that what the AdAge article is calling “buzz” doesn’t drive short terms sales of Coca-Cola product.

Meanwhile Coca-Cola's Wendy Clark, senior VP-integrated marketing communications and capabilities, countered via another AdAge article that integrated social media – social media programs that are integrated in overall marcom efforts – can be highly effective. The research may, in isolation, be true – that “buzz” cannot be connected to short term sales lift for Coca-Cola products, but that is not what any of us are doing in social media. Wendy does go on to challenge the study pretty directly, “In beta testing with Facebook, we've been able to track closed-loop sales from site exposure to in-store purchase with very promising initial results that are above norms for what we see with other media.”

Even Eric framed up the limits of what his analysis covers, “…he cautioned against reading too much into the research, noting that it covers only buzz, not sharing, video views or other aspects of social media.”

The value of social media to marketers

 I hate the term “buzz.” As the former President of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and a guy who runs a global business applying social media to business with measurable results, I find the term one-dimensional and misleading.

What we are all doing online is expressing some form of word of mouth – and it's not all created equal. When someone authentically recommends or relates something positive about a brand to their friends, family and social connections online and off, that is a powerful and trusted source that affects people’s opinion and their purchase behavior. Still, a customer “gushing” about great service or a great product experience online is not the same as an innocuous statement “blah, blah, blah, Coke.” The blanket term “buzz” does nothing to help our understanding of what is actually happening in social media – a range of consumer advocacy from subtle and implicit to bold and explicit recommendations.

If we simply treat online word of mouth – the very nature of social media – as just “impressions” to be counted and weighed against other impressions, we will never realize the true promise of word of mouth via social media.  Word of mouth via social media delivers a scaled approach to building measurably valuable relationships with customers, activating an advocacy base that drives opinion and behavior beyond what traditional marketing alone can do and dramatically improving the efficiency of the complete marcom mix (equal or better result from equal or less investment).  

“Buzz” is almost as bad as “chatter” – two words used in the AdAge article to dumb down what is a more complex and powerful phenomena. Both words conjure up an image of clouds of white noise surrounding us like flies. That’s my friends, family and social connections you are talking about.

Integrated social media marketing does drive sales

With respect to Eric Schmidt, there are limits to the research on “buzz” as to its usefulness in guiding our use of integrated social media. It made a splash and good headlines. It heated up debate even within Coke.

Our own research via our Integrated Social Media Sales Impact Study demonstrated the correlation of social media in the mix for quick service restaurants (many of which, by the way, serve Coca-Cola products).   Clearly, the value of positive word of mouth is highly affected by the product category and context. Our study showed impressive benefits of social media as part of the overall marcom mix to driving higher levels of consumption (the things you buy at QSR’s like Coke) and greater brand-relevant KPIs. It’s all here.

Much like Wendy Clark at Coca-Cola, I don’t want marketers to mis-read the headlines around this one study. The power of social media is within an integrated approach. That’s what we do here at Social@Ogilvy and what we have spent 8 years strengthening. And we have done it for many multinational marketers across categories – including our wonderful client Coca-Cola.

As we all know, ‘attribution is a bitch.’ In our lives as consumers, I think it a fool’s errand to try and zero-in on the one communication that trumped all others and inordinately drove a sale.  What we will continue to do is go deeper and deeper to understand how effective social media marketing and communications integrated in a multi-channel, multi-screen consumer experience drives business results – including sales.

Related articles

Integrating Social Media into the Marcom Team

Coca-Cola: the 's' in social media doesn't stand for 'sales'

Coca-Cola's Wendy Clark Defends 'Crucial' Social Media

You can get our complete Slideshare POVs here. 

All week, we are at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Martin Lange will lead the charge for Ogilvy. You can follow our observations via our Tumblr blog and our core Social@Ogilvy blog and Twitter handle.

Last post, I suggested the need and a way for putting social, mobile and value creation at the center of the creative and strategic marketing and communications process ("The SoMoVa System").  Practically speaking, brands can organize their efforts to bolster the mobile portion of that equation in three steps:

Unlock the mobile storefront: Consider this the hygiene step. Every brand starting a new initiative or refreshing an existing one must do the base level of mobile accessibility. That means creating a great experience for smartphone users, simple phone users and tablet users.

Part of this is simple design for the screen and likely connectivity throughputs (e.g. 3G and lower) part is designing for the use-cases or likely customer experience.

To this day, I am stunned by how many restaurant sites are not enabled for mobile with four buttons on screen: menu, location, make a reservation and photos. I stand on a corner of St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin trying to find a great place to eat.

For too many brands, their mobile “door” remains locked for all intent and purpose simply because they have no good mobile experience. Time to unlock that storefront and invite people inside.

Teach ourselves to ‘think’ mobile-first: One big challenge inside agencies and brands is the sense that mobile ought to be everyone’s expertise from day-one. While it will be someday, we ought to care enough to make our brand marketers more successful immediately. We designed a training program for social media strategists 7 years ago.  It has evolved and grown. We believed we needed to supplement what even digital marketers understood about social behaviors and practices.

By creating the Principles of Mobile Design (“design” here takes the high road meaning the design of the experience not simply an interface), we establish a best practice checklist for expert marketers. Are they considering the top 3 mobile use-cases for their customer? Are they using the location-based data from mobile and/or the camera capabilities and/or the social network connectivity?

We also need to inject mobile expertise – creative, strategic and technological – into our creative ideation process. New team structures and fresh collaboration practices.  Don’t treat mobile as a channel (just as you would not treat social as a channel). Making ideas mobile from the get-go is best.

Disrupt before the disruption: Martin Lange cites Uber and MyTaxi as disruptive services. My favorite is Bands in Town which alerts me to when any of my bands are playing in town – no matter what town I am in. How will mobile disrupt the core business of many of the brands out there? To some extent, it is pure hubris to think that an internal effort can anticipate the unimaginable disruptions that may come from a vast entrepreneurial landscape. On the other hand, smart businesses can do two things to stimulate that within their organization:

• Sanction ‘disruption-hunting’ from the top – the C-suite can challenge managers to be their own competitors at times. When I first started Social@Ogilvy 7+ years ago, there were plenty of business leaders invested in television advertising who would have liked us to go away. A little air-cover from the C-suite goes a long way to build internal courage.

• Put a bounty on disruptive ideas – are we all doing enough to stimulate and reward idea-generation from across our employees? Do we have a formal program that solicits ideas and then funds the most promising?

Three ways brands can make offer a shot of mobile adrenalin to their organizations:

• Unlock the mobile storefront
• Teach ourselves to ‘think’ mobile-first
• Disrupt before the disruption

We are not mobile enough. Brands are under investing in meeting customers at all of the mobile touch points just as they are under investing in social media. But business leaders want to lead and do more in mobile.

THIS WEEK

Media companies, brands, technologists, carriers and Ogilvy will flock to Barcelona to the Mobile World Congress 2013 to not just pace the trade floor for promising mobile solutions beyond the obvious, but they will also attend insightful keynotes like the panel on Vertical Disruption featuring GM, American Heart Association and Qualcomm and the panel on Mobile Innovation 2023 offering a near-future vision.

We will publish throughout the event and distill what we learn into useful takeaways just as we did for CES. Our own Martin Lange will be leading the charge and you can follow his team’s Tumblr here. Start off with their ‘5 Trends to Watch For…’

 

Mobile in the Middle of SoMoVa

Marketers need a “stimulus package” for mobile. They need an artificial way to motivate their marketers to commit to making mobile a core expertise and a primary way they engage customers. Someday, mobile will just be how we engage people from smartphones to the tablet-of-the-future to the ‘internet of things.’

But until that future arrives, and to ensure it does, we need ways to spark the imagination of marketers to put mobile first now - to make it routine and consistent. Clearly, mobile usage broadly defines varies market-by-market and consumer context-by-context. Still, you would be hard pressed to examine a market anywhere in the world and not be able to identify ways in which mobile is changing the customer journey.

Many would say that mobile (and social) don’t fundamentally change how marketing works. Maybe. To help ace marketers focus on mobile and social behaviors, I would suggest a simple rubric with checklists to help us all put these considerations front of mind.

Social + Mobile + Value = Successful Marketing

Okay, okay, that’s not all that goes into “successful marketing.” These ingredients are now essential, however.

Social

 Brands can increase the social qualities of their marketing and communications by designing programs around the “Principles of Social Design.” These are the lessons we have learned that explain why people share all types of word of mouth (i.e. “earned media”). The more they do this and learn their own context-specific principles the more they will meet consumer’s needs.

Mobile

Likewise, brands can increase the mobile accessibility and utility by designing programs for the customer across the heterogeneous experiences of mobile. That means understanding the context in which we reach for our tablets at home on the couch or press on our smartphones standing in the aisle.  Google’s Multiscreen Study continues to be a great reference that starts to articulate useful context.

We need the equivalent “principles of mobile design” to serve as a checklist to inform creative and strategic work from all marketers not just the token mobile experts. At the very least, our checklists include “…the inherent advantages found in the mobile world: location sensing, cameras and instant access to social networks.”

Value

Every marketer thinks about the additional value they are delivering to customers whether in the form of complimentary recipes posted on Facebook or via a mobile app or something much bigger like a Nike Fuel where a whole new business model is inspired by technology and mobility. What is the core value we are trying to dial up? How is that being enabled or amplified via our mobile and social-first design?

 If brand marketers and their teams had this simple rubric and the questionnaires for each axis in front of them as they designed marketing and communications programs, it might serve as a stimulus package to making SoMoVa central to how we serve our consumers/customers today.

I just spent the last hour browsing my dashboard in Tumblr, “hearting” many posts and reblogging a couple that live up to what I am trying to publish in my Tumblr. I follow artists, designers, comic book artists, architects, map enthusiasts, photographers of empty spaces and much more.  For me, it’s about inspiration. And pausing from the frenetic pace and tension of my life to remember what I care about deeply.

"EVENT: Don't miss my interview this week with Tumblr founder, David Karp. 

A Conversation with David Karp, Founder of Tumblr: Brands Connecting Inside the Index of Passions -- Ogilvy & Mather Theater NYC February 20 -Time: 10:30am – 11:30am

Join us as for a candid conversation with David Karp who has created one of the fastest growing communities of people sharing what they care about most. How can brands participate in Tumblr with meaningful brand or business impact and how do we do it without spoiling the beauty of Tumblr? Join Social@Ogilvy’s John Bell as he asks David Karp about his vision for brands and Tumblr."

Tumblr is a place of passions, things we care about. Sure, it’s about “creators” but a broad, generous definition of creativity. As such it’s a network of people who care about the affinity that draws them there.

Many brands are more than experimenting with the site. You can browse some of the brand pages via the Brands on Tumblr page. The advantages are clear:

• Tumblr hosts interest and passion-driven content through the personalized dashboard
• Connecting with relevant microcommunities will become essential for brands in the next phase of data-driven social media marketing
• Tumblr pages are indexed by Google and enhance a brand’s discoverability
• They can be masked within a brand domain and therefore be part of the corporate domain
• The network of 150 million, highly engaged users has appreciable reach and a built-in social behavior - reblogging
• The simplicity of the platform supports brand ambitions to embrace content marketing
• They visual design of the service lends itself to visual expression and emotion
• There are some simple advertising solutions – two – that help brands be discovered

The 4^th Place

If Facebook is the key social network that brands want to master due to its broad global reach, Twitter is likely number two due to broad global relevance, it’s influencer status and suitability for service brand care. YouTube comes in next as the defacto platform for serving up video inside the world’s #2 search engine.

Pinterest? Instagram? Tumblr stands a better chance at earning the 4^th place position in social brand architecture for companies who know they need a searchable content place and who want to be inside a network of passions.

There are over 93 million Tumblrs (Tumblr blogs), users average 23 minutes on the platform per session and they clock 18 billion page views a month. It’s got reach and engagement. (Get some strong stats here)

Many arts-related brands have made a home here. Fashion brands are a strong niche.

Burberry: they established the Art of the Trench, the emotional “home” of the brand and are asking people to submit their photos of their ‘trench.’

Chanel: they keep it simple and post images that people can lust after and reblog

Dolce & Gabbana: An endless flow of fashion covers and spreads ready for reblogging and ‘hearting.’

Tory Burch: Torypedia is personal and luscious. Big, rebloggable pictures which si just what we want from fashion

Urban Outfitters: their pages start with the UP Community which aggregates a growing collection of pages that tie seamlessly into the ecommerce site. Check out the Swim Look Book in their site. Now check out the Tumblr.

Not just Fashion

Now is the time to explore in Tumblr. Brands like Ford, IBM, Amex and others are exploring how to use great content within this interest community.

The Lincoln Motor Company: our team did this work and created a poetic and beautiful site for Lincoln that taps the heritage of the brand.

Beautiful Creatures, the Movie: Hollywood embraces Tumblr as the platform of choice for new releases. Think about all those wasted dollars creating the Flash sites of yesteryear.

Coca Cola: the brand that embraced content marketing (see Content 2020) brings you a tumblr full of shareable images and gifs

Whole Foods: the Dark Rye Tumblr aggregates "pioneers of unconventional ideas..."  thus building on the brand story of Whole Foods as a disrupter. 

I know the guys/gals at Tumblr and have a lot of faith in their plans. They are embracing brands while staying committed to their original vision of a platform for creative-types. They have created an index of passions in my own words. That means emotion is part of what you will find there and as brands re-embrace the power of emotion and, perhaps, how to create great brand experience in a social world, Tumblr is the place to do that. They are innovating and working with brands now. That's why our team participates on their A-List and produces Tumblr-based ideas for Ford, IBM and other brands.

Facebook and Twitter serve to point to other content. Tumblr is content.

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