POLAR

Labels and style: Your social fashion statement

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:23:00 +0000

Klout "style" combines the IQ of your score (the result of number crunching your social media interactions) with the "EQ" of how your behaviors are perceived, and the actions your engagements trigger. This allows you to look at yourself in a kind of "social media" mirror. You may like what you see, but you may want to be seen differently. If you do want to change how you're perceived, Klout might be your (or your brand's) social BFF.

Klout's immediacy reveals daily, how adjustments in your engagement begin to influence the type of influencer you're perceived to be... at least according to Klout. Perhaps you're identified as an "explorer" but want to become a "thought leader". What steps can you take to move there? Klout won't tell you how, but it will tell you if changes you're making are moving you in the right direction.

Find out more on Klout Style, or see mine.

*kindly re-"printed" from What the Klout - an unofficial Klout blog by @gknutson and @abelmind

Life... With The Dull Bits Cut Out

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:58:00 +0000

Alfred Hitchcock defined drama as life... with the dull parts cut out. Life is simply put... unpredictable. We can forecast the future, but we don't know for sure. There have been countless instances when even the most excellent predictive metrics have lead us astray.

What we can measure, to some extent, is memory of an experience. The better and more, well, memorable the experience, the more vibrant it is in a person's mind. We can ask questions about why an event or experience was memorable, and learn the thought processes involved.

Memory is rarely a word for word history of our past. It is rather, like a film, a compilation of scenes that we have rated at varying levels of importance. We may collectively absorb an experience (like riding a roller coaster together), but what we store from that experience is unique among individuals. We unconsciously edit the experience into something we can play back and enjoy, without having to fast-forward.

A brand's story is one that might be told by the brand in all forms of communication. But the story, as you or I would tell it, likely wouldn't be a match for what the company puts out. The associated accoutrements of a brand (PR, Community, Responsibility, Advertising, Relationships) factor into place as we, in our memory, "cut out the dull bits" and save the important ones. The brand story is perceived differently for each of us. That is why all relationships are local.

Experience is about crafting the not-dull bits that people will keep: Emotional communications and interactions with customers. While consistency in a brand's story is essential, we must think of how that story will translate into a memorable experience for customers.

*Thanks to Tom Asacker for the inspiration for this article.

Global is Inaccessible. Local is Next Door.

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:29:00 +0000

All relationships are local.

Social media has helped to de-globalize marketing. Everyone is local in the social world, regardless of where they live. They come online as individuals and expect to be treated as individuals, not small portions of a large demographic.

Think locally because you can. It's where the transactions take place, and it involves a consumer in the location and mindset they're in, at the point they make the decision. I call this "the now moment". While we can manage relationships on a global platform, it must be activated, joined and many times recruited at the local level. To make the promise of localization real, we need to uncover every byte of data, both real time and legacy.

And remember, data is not a number. It is a human expression.

While data may look like numbers, each value represents a choice made by a person, an expression. While demographics still have value, targeting the individual will only further a positive relationship between brand and consumer.

Brand Positioning and Differentiation

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 15:04:00 +0000

Understanding your brand's positioning requires among many things, a grasp of what differentiates your brand from others. Positioning and differentiation are intertwined, and a study of both require deep insight into your customer's values and motivations.

Derrick Daye at Branding Strategy Insider has a one-minute brand positioning self-analysis that's a quick and easy refresher. In positioning:

You fully understand the categories your brand is operating:

The different marketing segments
The competitive set
Which benefits are "cost of entry" vs. "differentiating"

You fully understand the decision making process the consumer uses to purchase your brand
You defined the role, target customer, unique promise, archetypes and personalities for your brand and have made sure there is synergy between key stake-holders
You have clarity around your brand purpose; what it stands for, and how it is unique and compelling to consumers.
You have criteria to help you decide when to use an existing brand, and when a new brand or sub-brand is the proper choice.

Adding an insightful matrix on differentiation, Carol Phillips, at Brand Amplitude, offers a white paper for Reconsidering the Brand Strategy Toolkit. It offers a compelling example citing the Blockbuster vs. Netflix battle for market domination in the home video market.

Positioning helps to establish difference, but another way is, as Phillips offers, "to map what, in an ideal world, customers would think and feel about the brand in multiple dimensions, including performance." A modern strategic approach recognizes there are many ways to create and sustain advantage and takes into account more than just product or usage-based factors, but include the user and relationships too.

Consider this diagram, taken from her Brand Amplitude White Paper:

Competitive advantage can be sourced from many elements including customer service, design, personality and performance. It can be product focused, or/and user-focused from participation in a subculture where a shared sense of purpose or community is fostered.

An understanding of this adds to the strength of the differentiation exercise required by strong, sound brand positioning.

Sources: Branding Strategy Insider, Brand Amplitude

Generate-tion

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 15:30:00 +0000

Building trust and adding value requires participation from both those in the online and offline spaces. The activity may revolve around business development, or perhaps consumer advocacy, either way brands must actively seek what Chris Brogan and Julien Smith refer to as "Trust Agents" that can help others to help themselves, and in so doing, build the trust required to engage at deeper, more meaningful levels.

Feed your web: Human contributions are the foundation for the web. What you think about anything related to your brand can be helped by your contribution. From consumer forums, online reviews, to unrelated brand topics like reviews on Amazon or tagging photos on Flickr. The more trustworthy data you generate, the more trust you're likely to build.
Help people: Doing simple things like answering questions or providing pathways to fulfilment create value that strikes at the core of a brand. Since so many people and businesses are in it for themselves, stand out by being one of the few that realizes connecting locally, and in meaningful ways, is part of the new normal.
Make things: Talking, commenting, and helping are great, but anticipating the needs of your audience and offering them help before they even ask for it will position your brand as genuine and authentic. Try not to create just another sales tool, but something that is free and useful, and gives people a reason to think positively about your brand.

The title of this article is "Generate-tion" because all of these ideas require action on your part. Generate not just to add noise and clutter to the already crowded space, but rather generate helpful things that simplify the chaos out there.

Unique Feelings Proposition (UFP)

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:27:00 +0000

I was reading Tom Asacker's blog the other day and came upon an article called "The Marketplace Theory of Everything." Citing a problem of abundance of information technology and ideas, he says "this wealth of opportunity has resulted in too many ideas chasing too few, very well-informed and overloaded customers."

We need a new value equation.

Ever since I can remember, marketing has focused on the USP, the unique selling proposition, and the product's/service's features and benefits. This is a traditional theory and applies to a rational, analytical view of value. In an oversupplied market with more, and often conflicting information, rational decision making becomes myth. Instead of a USP, try a UFP - a Unique Feelings Proposition.

What do we mean by feelings? To make it simple, Asacker says "Feelings refers to a very specific quality: Pleasantness, unpleasantness or neutrality in an experience." Desire stems from pleasant experiences: ease of use, fun, reward, increased self-esteem. Aversion stems from unpleasant experiences: effort required, pain, decreased self esteem. Neutral feelings are forgetful."

The goal should be, at all points of interaction with the customer, increase positive feelings, and decrease negative ones. It sounds so simple. Start paying attention to what people do (which is the best indication of how they feel), not so much what they say. The more choices there are and the more complex life becomes, the more people make decisions that "feel" right to them, and not on an objective truth.

In Opportunity Screams, Asacker writes:

Great success is the product of a great passion, a passion for sweating the small stuff and adding value to every product, every service and every interaction. Value delivered - value that causes people to become interested in an idea and feel proud about their decisions - is the meaning and purpose of any successful idea.

Welcome to the economy of feelings.

I Get So Emotional

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 14:43:00 +0000

Communication can span a multi-dimensional gamut in marketing. Features, benefits, 3rd party validation, testimonials, parodies, and many more techniques than I could mention are ways that we, as marketers, try to engage our target audiences. But because communication is so multi-dimensional, it is not so much about striking the right notes, as it is about playing the right chords that resonate on many levels.

The problem is that we want to impart non-emotional things like knowledge, intelligence, and many times in marketing, superiority over the competition. And we want it to have an effect we can directly measure, and clients, rightly so, like to measure. When the communication swings to an emotional appeal, that measurement gets harder to do. While we can tout five benefits of a product, we can’t very gracefully talk about five angles that foster joy in the minds and hearts of consumers. The approach needs to be different, because the appeal is not only directed at the logical and rational side of people.

People love to see themselves reflected back to them in popular culture. Look at the award-winning television shows. Our favorite songs, movies, TV shows and comedians seems to “get” us. Compelling pieces of communication are conversational, because we are conversational creatures. We like authentic voices and candid details, and some revealing of intent. As Tom Asaker says “technique does not win hearts and minds, intent does.” It is critical that communication is perceived as genuine.

In an era of increased mistrust and general attention deficit from over-saturation, brands need to be doing something unique and different to win both the minds and the hearts of people. It will be good for business, and great for the brand.

Think local, not global. Focus on the individual and their feelings. And show them that you genuinely care. Believing leads to trust. And trust leads to loyalty.

Substance. Conversation. Relationships.

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:07:00 +0000

Marketing is not about breaking through, it is about being invited in. This shift in dynamic extends across the communications spectrum as marketers seek to build influence and engagement. It represents a fundamental shift from quantity to quality that is a strategic and tactical change in perspective. Yesterday, we put measures like audience delivery or gross impressions at the top of our list (and they are still very important). But today, conversations and relationships dominate campaign goals.

At the October ANA Conference in Orlando, Joe Tripodi, CMO of Coca-Cola remarked that while ad impressions are great and a staple of any good campaign, brand expressions are a more powerful result of a well-run advertising campaign.

We are now, clearly, in the era of relationship marketing. Substance versus flash, and an idea Tripodi referred to as “the genuis of the and” where seemingly unrelated concepts converge to create powerful opportunities: Business growth and environmental impact; global reach and local message; brand love and brand value; and inspirational ideas and operational realities. The crux being that when you can satisfy the wants and needs of a community as well as your business, you have the greatest chance of creating an advertising campaign that has a lasting impact.

Not only do you have to optimize the intersection of owned content and earned media for true communication effectiveness, you also must invest in conversational tools that encourage person-to-person communication. Increased influence is gained when a brand is relevant to the consumer’s lifestyle.Just as we like people who are like us, we like brands that understand us, and seem to "get" us.

Robert Wheatly at Wheatly-Timmons says:

How do you know if your thinking is right on score? Ask yourself this question: "Am I actively looking for ways that my brand can act and operate to improve my best customer’s lifestyle and enable/facilitate their personal interests?”

Find that intersection, and you may be approaching “the genuis of the and.”

Trendspotting: Beyond the Brand

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 16:05:00 +0000

"The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience” - Milton Friedman

Trendspotting is an exercise in hypothesis. Predictive loyalty metrics allow us to decipher consumers' emotions, expectations and imminent behaviors in the marketplace. This prediction exercise, combined with the experience of doing it repeatedly in history, allows for the formation of a very valid hypothesis. One to which we should pay attention.

Dr. Robert Passikoff at Brand Keys contributed an article to Branding Strategy Insider about 11 Branding and Marketing Trends for 2011. Pasikoff is an authority on consumer loyalty, and uses predictive loyalty metrics to identify future trends with great accuracy.

While the 11 trends were all very good, I felt the need to combine and expand on some of them. Here are my Top Four Branding and Marketing Trends for 2011.

Value is subjective. While a brand can own how it looks and what it does, how a brand is perceived lies in the minds and hearts of consumers. Much of that perception is going to be focused on added value - the value a brand brings above and beyond just the goods and services it sells. What does the brand stand for? Can we identify with that? If a brand's higher purpose has our support, we will be more likely to align ourselves with that brand. Higher purpose can also be a major differentiator against your competition, which may now include non-traditional brands.
Brand truthiness. Comedian Steven Colbert was onto something when he defined "truthiness" as truth that a person knows intuitively "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic or facts. It's not enough for a brand to simply "stand for something" though. Corporate and social responsibility initiatives will have to be sustained, engaging and naturally, believeable. The most memorable, un-ignorable thing you can present to people is the truth.
Trust agents. "Friendtelligence." Your brand is increasingly discussed and reviewed outside of the brand space. Consumers are comfortable getting the true story about products and services from total strangers. Brands that are actively using Social Media Optimization (SMO) tactics need to reward engagement, and encourage the mashup. This leads to more trust in the community. More trust in the information, and higher quality word of mouth for your brand.
Mobile mania. While search and social provide the data, mobile provides the means. We've shown that we have a nearly inexhaustible appetite for mobile technology. As Google says "you don't need to be at your desk to need an answer". Wherever a consumer is, a brand needs to be prepared to reach them. And increasingly, they are not at home or at their desk. But wherever they are, they likely have with them a small device that is always on, and always connected. Search + Social + Mobile is the convergence of everything a good marketer wants: relevancy; timelines; a truly customized offer and, the proximity of the buyer. As we continue to learn this mobile space, we can expect promotions to explode. Brands that can indeed truly customize their promotions with the vast amount of data available will have the leading edge. We can certainly expect more mobile apps. But remember, mobile is one of the few spaces where top growth is coming NOT from the US. Watching successful programs internationally, and designing systems that can offer international functionality may allow brands to connect locally, across great distances.

"You're going to grow, or you're going to change, but you're not going to stay the same" - Dan Olson

Incorporating these trends is going to require change in the ways companies track, measure, manage and market their brands. What this means is that we have to be open, flexible and quick to use all of the tools and resources at our command. Agile marketers will welcome these fast changing requirements and respond with creative and versatile thinking across multiple media to engage with these more connected, and more empowered consumers. And it is the customer that gives the brand its beating heart.

SMO Is The New SEO: Social Media Optimization

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 16:29:00 +0000

Brian Solis and Vocus released a research report about what marketing executives think of online influence. When asked what the single most important action a brand can take to increase their influence online, 50% of marketers answered: Create and share compelling content.*

But for many, search engine optimization (SEO) is a driving force behind their content marketing strategy. Keywords, page rankings and false goals like paid links sit ahead of the most important goal: Creating great content that engages consumers. Sure, generating more noise, more frequently fills up search databases. But is this the smartest publishing strategy for today?

Google, the dominant search engine, is an impressive but impersonal librarian. Ask it a question, and it can pull from a near-infinite amount of web pages to provide lots of answers. The problem is many of those answers aren’t the best ones for me. The ultimate search engine knows things about me, and can find what I am seeking even before I’ve asked for it. Personalized results like that require an algorithm that has a deep knowledge of its users. Who’s got that?

Facebook. And now Bing, following the announcement from Microsoft and Facebook about integrating "like" data and profile search into Bing's "decision engine".

Because Facebook knows more about what we “like”, and uses that data to inform search results, it has the advantage in finding the right content for me. Social media optimization (SMO) requires us to think locally, and appeal to people as individuals: Knowing what drives their interest, and activating their desire to consume and share.

Rohit Bhargava's five rules for conducting social media optimization are:

Create shareable content: This is more than just links. The better your content is, the more people will want to share it.
Make sharing easy: It has to be one-button easy so people will do it with minimal effort.
Reward engagement: This is the behavior that matters most in a social web, and the one we should be rewarding when it happens.
Proactively share content: This spans the gamut, from creating slides for Slideshare, tweeting about content and offering embeddable versions of it, to posting content to social networking sites and/or creating profiles on video sharing sites.
Encourage the mashup: Allowing people to take ownership in the content you publish, and remix it by adding their own voice continues to be a key way you can optimize your content for the social web.

SMO places more value on the quality of content and liberates publishers from a degree of alchemy used with SEO. Once again, the goal is creating the most compelling and appealing content possible. But creating quality content is not enough. It needs to be shared, and that means becoming part of the conversation.

Easy to say. Hard to do.

*Joe Pulizzi / Junta42 Content Marketing Blog

It's Not What You Sell, It's What You Stand For

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:24:00 +0000

Brand purpose* should:

1. Be elegantly simple

2. Be crystal clear

3. Be innately inspirational

4. Have a point of view and stand for something

Too much choice has led to chaos. Consumers, straining to discern messages in a very loud room, have new layers in their decision matrix: To buy green, to buy products or services from "responsible" companies. People are recognizing that for every choice they make in the marketplace, there are benefits and consequences.

Researching these benefits and consequences is increasingly simple thanks to search engines and social networks. But ultimately, search and social just demonstrate the answer to the question, "Is this brand living up to its promise?" Brands that fulfil their promise attract loyalty. Brands that exceed their promise (and are as Seth Godin describes "remarkable") create advocates.

Marketing these days isn't as much about breaking through as it is about being invited in. Because we tend to like people who are like us, getting an invitation means sharing a same set of values and standing for something, so you can stand with your customers. This must not be seen as a marketing tactic, but rather as authentic and genuine values.

A higher brand purpose goes beyond the functional benefits provided to consumers, and extends to include emotional and social benefits. Successful global brands are ones that appeal to people as individuals, and embrace their diversity in both one-to-one relationships, and in communities. They won't go for the demographic, but rather for the state of mind.

* Thanks to Joe Pulizzi (Junta42) and Eduardo Coronado (Motorola) for their thoughts on this

Converging on an Empowered Customer

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:40:00 +0000

At the convergence of Search, Social and Mobile is a customer who is now empowered to be a marketing partner. The data they generate points the way for targeted messages, and feedback from those messages enables further refinement. It is now a symbiotic loop.

Remember:

Search has de-leveraged marketing. We now have the ability to apply ever more powerful algorithms to understand the vast array of experiences happening in the online world.

Social has de-globalized marketing: Everything is local in the social world. People come online as individuals and they expect to be treated as individuals, not small portions of a large demographic.

Mobile is re-regulating marketing: New privacy concerns and increased involvement from governments is inevitably going to change how data is used and distributed in this still-new medium.

Each of these trends, or marketing drivers, forms a "New Customer Reality". Here are three compelling paths to keep in mind:

Data is not a number, it is a human expression.
Sharing is a two way street. We need to respect the customer as a marketing partner.
Global is inaccessible, local is next door. Transactions happen locally, and involve a customer in a location and mindset that is "the now moment"

Empowered by data and analysis, we can better predict the forthcoming shifts and lead clients into deeper, more engaging and prosperous times.

Read Daniel Morel's The New Normal

Inventing a Mobile App

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 23:59:00 +0000

Everyone, it seems, wants a mobile app. Mobile is hot. Everyone knows it, and everyone wants to get in on the action. But why create an app that doesn't make people's lives better? Why create an app that isn't remarkable?

iPhone Applications

Android Applications

Blackberry Applications

Don't create an app, unless it does these things:

Make things easier: Think lazy. People don't want to type a bunch of junk into their phone. They type "google" not because they need to search, but because it doesn't make you type "www." and ".com" to get you to the right place.
Simplicity: Users of mobile apps are distracted. They may be driving (shame), they may be half asleep waiting for their next flight, and they may be out late at night, drunk. Software needs the simplicity of consumer electronics devices.
Eliminate steps: Amazon's big success is in one-click purchasing. Every stop a consumer makes on the stage to purchase, is a stop they may exit the process. Don't let them.
"Mobile" doesn't mean "on the go": People use cell phones in homes. It is quickly replacing the computer for many functions. Don't let 'mobile' make you think 'out of home'. Chances are, the user is very much in their home.
It's $1, or somewhere down there: A $50 DVD or Xbox game has to be pretty compelling to get people to buy. At $1, the criteria are much lower for mobile apps. Your mobile app does not need to be as immersive as a full video game experience because at a typical app price, it doesn't have to be.
Focus on the eternal: Social is where it is at. It's always been where it is at. The prime use of computing power will not be spreadsheets and Power Points, but connecting, and flirting, and doing all of the social things we humans do. Is it any wonder that about a strong percentage of companies' (at-work) web traffic is related to employees monitoring their Facebook pages?
Your significant other: There's a lot of stuff out there about "the new society." We still live, very much, in a classic society where most of our lives are spent in search of a partner, relating to them, and perhaps having children with them. Technology may facilitate human nature, but it will never change it.
Think universal: What do people need the most? When Steve Jobs thought about launching a mobile device in 2000, the staff pushed him to offer a PDA - as more and more people were bringing them to meetings. But he launched a portable MP3 player instead. Why? People had been listening to music since the invention of music. Give the people what they need.
The human condition: Most people are dissatisfied with search engines not because they don't know how to search, but because they don't know what they want. If you can work it out for them, you will become rich.
Forget the downturns: Bad economic times give good ideas a clear path. Google's big growth spurt happened in 2001-2005 - during which time Google never acquired any competitors. Hmmm.
Look for weaknesses: Nobody wants to print pictures from their digital cameras and store them. There are tons of people with boxes of photos that they can't easily share. The new generation prefers to store them on Flickr or Facebook. The problems mobile apps solve are right in front of your nose.
Look for problems - and SOLVE them: During the postal strike of the 1980s, many businesses bought a fax, and never went back to postal mail. Think of a way your app can change behaviors forever by solving a common problem or scarcity.
Feel the power: People like to follow instructions. Just look at how literally many people follow the directions on their GPS devices in cars, regardless of traffic or road conditions. Be careful what you ask people to do, as they may just do it.
Don't overburden the user: Introduce complexity slowly. Apple didn't allow anyone to customize buttons on their iPhone for the first six months. Grand Theft Auto doesn't let you unlock Manhattan until you figure out Brooklyn. Reward the user once they have demonstrated an understanding.
Don't overburden your partners: Conceptually, Apple's iPhone was easy for mobile network operators to buy. But if they had offered it to them with iTunes and the AppStore from day one, imagine the lawyers would still be negotiating the launch revenue splits today. Again, introduce complexity slowly.
Solve BIG problems: Google solves big problems, like the need for a visual street map, using solutions with scale. Solutions with scale can make you impossible to copy.
Think retro: If an idea once fulfilled a need, it could do so again. The ability of cellphones to create flashmobs needs further exploitation. What type of community can you create that brings back successes of the past?
Regognize the new state of the news: Think hard about what information really matters to people. Years ago, big stories like the fall of the Berlin Wall were popular. Today, celebrity news is big. How many tweets do the Jonas Brothers or Justin Bieber get for months at a time.
Don't assume previous generations know more: Guns 'n' Roses finished their hit song "Sweet Child of Mine" with the lyric "where do we go now?" not because they wanted to express existential angst, but because they did not know how to finish the song.

The insights are sitting in front of us. But only one person in a million can see them.

Source: Mobile Mania (A Y&R Book) by Simon Silvester.

Data is Not a Number

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:00 +0000

With so much marketing drive being placed on data and analytics we should do well to remember where those data come from. They're not just numbers, and they're certainly not masses to be swiftly categorised into demographics.

Data in marketing, above all things, is a human expression. Why? Because each value represents a choice made by a person. It is an expression. As marketers, we need to respect individuals who are creating the data. While demographics still have value out there, targeting the individual will only further a positive relationship between the brand and consumer.

In fact, customers ought to be viewed as full marketing partners. If we respect, and thank the customers for the data they so willingly share with us, then there's no reason for them to stop sharing. And sharing helps us to generate the right kind of creative communications that individuals want. The type of great work that creates change.

Source: "The New Normal" by Daniel Morel

Great Agencies Make Great Work

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:11:00 +0000

The belief system of an agency reveals their commitment to developing great work that creates measurable changes. For every great agency, there are probably a handful of agencies that truly aspire to greatness, and are creating processes, models, barometers, and waypoints to help them find their way. One of the best ways to create a process of your own is to explore, synthesize and improve upon models out there that are clearly working.

From clients like Volkswagen, to HTC, Johnson + Johnson and more, Deutsch certainly qualifies as an agency that creates measurable change. Here are some of their beliefs:

Creative Philosophy: “You got me.”

People love to see themselves reflected back to them through popular culture. Look at the award-winning television shows. Our favorite songs, movies, shows and comedians seem to “get” us. The most memorable, un-ignorable thing you can present to people is the truth. Can your consumers say, “This brand understands me. This brand gets me.”?

Integrated Marketing Communications: “Integrated people, not integrated departments.”

There is no such thing as “below the line”. If it touches a client’s customers, the agency should want to create it. By putting all disciplines under one P&L statement (direct, design, interactive, PR), campaign effectiveness can be tracked down to individual components, and easily understood. Blur the lines between the departments. Integrated people can think in any medium, and all departments can work to form a creative team that has the versatility and experience to solve client problems with any tool.

Team Building: “Big brains. Big hearts. And two degrees off center.”

Big brains: Attract the smartest, brightest and most talented people to your team. Big hearts: Life is short. Advertising is long. Agencies need people that can protect the agency culture and contribute simply by the fact that they show up and enjoy doing what they do. Two degrees off-center: Great work is created by people that think differently, and can offer alternative perspectives and inventive solutions to client challenges.

Marketing: “It’s not about breaking through. It’s about being invited in.”

Technology is allowing people to avoid advertising more and more each day. However, people are engaging with advertising in more personal and meaningful ways. Knowledge, loyalty and passion for brands is somewhat of a national pastime. Marketing is not an uninvited guest, it is an essential part of entertainment in modern culture. By creating work that is loved, you create work that becomes part of popular culture.

Results: “We keep score.”

Show me the data. Measurement should be a core value that not only tracks the effectiveness of a campaign, but also the effectiveness of individual pieces. From analytics to sales figures and leads generated, don’t be afraid to keep score. Be afraid not to. Results can showcase opportunities, and help focus future goals and objectives.

Collaboration: “It’s a team sport.”

While a little confidence is a great thing, agencies should not be filled with delicate artists and obsessive ego maniacs. Where a great idea comes from is not important. Agencies should care about leading clients to great results. When opinionated individuals come together to collaborate, idea fusion happens. And while passionate about the ideas, this is a team of listeners as well. Never forget that nobody knows their business better than the client. Creating new ideas involves a certain amount of tension. Agencies shouldn’t resist that, they should embrace it. That tension is minimized by a sense of purpose… together. You work hard together. You play hard together. But the most important aspect of a vibrant, kinetic relationship is that you get to greatness… together.

Media: “The world is our medium.”

Advertising and marketing can no longer happen in contained and pre-designated spaces. Sometimes traditional advertising works. Sometimes the best way to reach people is to catch them off guard, with relevant messages in unexpected places. Wherever the audience might be, be prepared to find a way to reach them.

Thinking about agencies, would you add, subtract or change any of these beliefs to make them more universal?

Never Underestimate the Power of Television

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:50:00 +0000

The combination of moving pictures and sound might be the most exciting medium of the 21^st century. Indeed, more exciting than augmented reality or social networking, and something that looks very similar to what we know and (mostly) love today: Television, or more accurately streaming television.

The HTC EVO 4G from Sprint features HDMI Video Out

While “digital” as a medium is hot, digital people should not dismiss TV-led thinking. As broadband speeds increase, we will see video content driving everything from websites to interfaces. Even mobile phones are boasting exceptional screen resolutions, some even with HDMI outputs. They wouldn't do that if the content wasn't there to support it.

Streaming video content producers would do wise to follow TV-thinking. Both are a broadcast medium, and both obey many of the same rules. An understanding how people respond to streaming video will matter most.

Simon Silvester at Wunderman, offers seven key points for streaming content producers:

TV viewers want to “lean back.” Film, TV, and now video streams have always been a lean back medium. And they will continue to be.
TV viewers don’t want to think. Responding rationally to a video-driven web presence should not be expected, as was the case with text-driven websites. Songs, jingles, and personalities work better on video than dry information. We learned this in 1950. We’ll learn it again in 2010.
TV viewers want to relax. Interactive TV has been the biggest thing to never happen in broadcast in this decade. Recognize that people want to relax. Perhaps links and offers that can be followed up later is an answer.
Video is about visual stories. Telling those stories is a demanding art for any director of photography. Selling through moving pictures is demanding too.
Say it fast. Nobody watches anything for longer than three minutes say people producing video for newspaper websites. The same is true for YouTube. In fact, the best watched videos on YouTube are music videos – not commercials. So find inspiration in Lady Gaga, and not in P&G.
Don’t interrupt. It’s rude. People have committed time to acquiring and downloading a stream. Now that they’ve settled in to watch their stream, interrupting it will only make them angry.
Think social. In the past, you watched what you wanted. The BBC predicts in the future you will watch what your friends are watching. BBC’s iPlayer is building in rating and feedback features. TV is going social.

People will always want to consume video content. How they consume it brings about an evolution of the TV rules we’ve understood for years, to now incorporate streaming and social into the mix. But the rules have basically stayed the same.

When it comes to creating video content, are you following them?

Now it's personal: Facebook and FourSquare

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:48:00 +0000

and

With Facebook's new "Places" feature, mobile users can say where they are and track friends. Of course, privacy concerns are being addressed already, such as the ability to remove "tags" or disable the feature altogether. To those that are worried about how Facebook plans to use the data it collects, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says, "The main thing we are doing is allowing our users to share where they are in a really nice and social way. You can see who is around you and connect in the real world."

This sounds remarkably like FourSquare. And they aren't worried.

FourSquare CEO Dennis Crowley says, "We spend a lot of time telling people why location is important and why people want to check in. Facebook now gets to do that for us. We can focus on the stuff we want to do." And what they want to do is make the world a more interesting place to explore.

Their redesigned app is going to focus on drawing attention to going out and accomplishing some tips left by other people, and sharing those accomplishments. They are trying to be the bridge between what you read about online, and what you experience off-line.

If Facebook's service works as planned, it will increase how much and how often people share information on Facebook, giving the company even more insight into users' interests and whereabouts. And that could help draw advertising dollars. While FourSquare was in talks to be acquired by Facebook, it took a $20 million venture capital investment instead.

The trend for location-based services is poised to is poised to take off, as its popularity with Internet-connected smart phones grows. Over 150 million Facebook users access Facebook with mobile devices. And because mobile delivers immediacy, both Facebook and FourSquare are taking yet another step towards making a marketer's dream come true: The ability to deliver a relevant, timely and customized message that takes into account the proximity of the buyer.

Exciting indeed.

Parlez-vous "rapport"?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:16:00 +0000

The word "rapport" sums up the Holy Grail for marketers. It is taken from the French verb rapporter, meaning "to bring back, or refer." To marketers, it means a lot more.

Rapport is defined as a relationship of mutual trust and respect. The very notion of "bringing back" as is described by the French definition, closes what is hopefully a vibrant, continuous, and even infinite loop of shared experiences. Rapport is one of the most important features of subconscious communication. It is commonality of perspective: Being "in sync" with, or being "on the same wavelength" as the person with whom you're communicating -- whether it's face-to-face, on the phone, texting, or emailing.

You know when you have rapport with someone, and you sure as heck know when you don't.

It's true of course, we like people who are like us. We are naturally drawn to relationships that have a component of rapport.

Rapport = Trust

At the heart of rapport, is trust. Being "in sync" with someone requires that you trust.

David Maister, Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford in The Trusted Advisor, came up with a formula for calculating trust. They called it "The Trust Equation."

For a high value of trust, credibility (the signals people send out to show they are who they claim to be and as good as they say), reliability (delivery of what is promised on time) and intimacy (do you feel comfortable around them?) are scaled up, while self-importance is scaled down.

Mood

It is important to note that rapport is classified as subconscious communication. It;s a connection on a very deep, real, albeit intangible level. A gauge of "mood" must be included in order to function "on the same wavelength." Both individuals and constituencies are affected by the pressures the world exerts. These can be positive pressure as well as negative pressure. Being able to forecast shifts in pressure, or respond to knowledge of a shift in pressure empowers you the ability to set your wavelength to maintain rapport.

Frequency of contact and proximity of that contact make this activity much easier to achieve. In the digital age, we've leaned to rely so heavily on data, that at times we've forgotten the emotional aspect of communication -- we've forgotten rapport.

Regardless of how technology seems to have shrunk the world, the reality is that the world has not shrunk in billions of years. Clients and constituents need to be visited, often, e-mailed often, listened to and heard often, pinged often. It’s not about the technology, it's about rapport with people -- living, breathing human beings.

Relationships are kindled by contact. While that's easiest to do in a person-to-person relationship, it's more difficult, but still possible in a brand to consumer relationship. In this "new normal", there is no global. It's all local. People have opinions and feelings. How you tune into those frequencies will determine the level of rapport you have.

Stop. Collaborate. And Listen.

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:28:00 +0000

Stop. Collaborate. And Listen.

Who knew that Vanilla Ice was a marketing genius when he released his one hit wonder so many years ago? Let’s look at reality: Everyone is busy. The pressure to perform is high, and the demands of using fewer hands to operate today’s more advanced tools have also increased. The agility required of today’s marketers calls for a deep understanding of strategy.

Over at his blog, Bud Caddell is crowdsourcing a definition of strategy. Here is my favorite:

“Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”

And when there’s nothing to do, it’s time to stop. After all, as Erich Fromm says, “You have to stop to change direction.”

Stop.

You have to do more with less. It’s a demand, it’s a reality, it’s part of the new normal. Clients are running with tighter, more scrutinized budgets. Agencies are running with smaller and hopefully more potent teams. Tim Williams suggests agencies should apply a methodology borrowed from software companies called, The Agile Manifesto. There are many principles, here are a few highlights:

Build projects around motivated individuals
Simplicity - maximizing the work not done
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective and adjusts its behavior accordingly
The team welcomes changing requirements, even late in the game
Satisfy the customer (or client) through early and continuous delivery of valuable [content].

A key take-away from this manifesto is a notion of the high value of reflection and simplicity. By allowing a measure of rest, a better product can be deployed faster.

Collaborate.

Seth Godin wrote a book many of you have no doubt read, called The Purple Cow. In it, he describes a new “P” that is a required inclusion in the classical mix of product, price, promotion, publicity, etc. Why a purple cow? Because “remarkable” didn’t start with a “p”, and being remarkable is critical to business success.

Remarkable marketing means appealing to innovators and early adopters. They’re the most likely group to create noise, and in the digital world, noise is data, and data tells us if what we’re doing is working.

If many hands make light work, many minds can make great work. Finding what is remarkable is not always easy, and today’s leaders seek council on ideas while they’re growing.

Collaboration is scalable. An idea should be scaled at least to the point of a team. As you scale further out, if time and budget allow, ideas from retailers and end-users can help inform strategy. You’re going to be seeing the data as your campaign is deployed, so why not take a barometer reading as you design the strategy?

But there is a critical difference between a collaborator, and a simple opinion. Knowing where that line is as you work through the discovery phase of your strategic planning will help maintain the essence of collaboration, and prevent it from falling into committee where it may languish or even die out of neglect.

Listen.

Eventually your strategy will be set free, and circle the entire spectrum of engagement. Setting up criteria that are measurable, and listening closely to what is returned to you empowers you to continually make adjustments and optimizations that more accurately target the individuals with which you’ve become engaged. Pay close attention to what the innovators and early adopters are saying, because their voices are loud and heard by many.

You may own the strategy statement, but consumers ultimately own the brand. Walmart could decide on a higher brand purpose, but it will mean nothing if their customers disagree. Listening to what the data are telling you closes the feedback loop between what began as an idea, and is now guiding your marketing decisions.

Refinement and optimization are possible at speeds we’ve never had before. We do it, because we should, and because we can. Stopping, collaborating with those around you and listening to those receiving the message is not only essential in developing viable strategy, it is a must.

More bang for your Chuck: Social Media ROI

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:09:00 +0000

One of the challenges of social media from a marketing perspective is defining ROI. Keep in mind, ROI is ambivalent to the type of media you choose. It is situational, conforming to what is expected from it. ROI is merely a business metric expressed by a nifty equation [(gain from investment - cost of investment) / cost of investment]. If the "investment" happens to be in lead generation versus sales, you simply assign a numerical value to each lead generated -- likely determined by their propensity to buy.

Many have made the mistake thinking that social is free. It takes people, it takes technology, and it takes time. Assuming like all other mortals, you are dealing with relatively fixed amounts of all three of those, social has an opportunity cost that requires vectoring efforts from other activities like traditional marketing and PR.

Getting to ROI in Social has not been an easy process to explain, especially to clients for whom a system of marketing has traditionally worked with wonderful formulaic accuracy. In "the new normal", these clients are finding the formulas are not holding up. They know social is a place they need to be... but how to justify it? They've heard they can do more with less on social. And they've heard right.

Olivier Blanchard at BrandBuilder Marketing presented a wonderful deck at the Social Fresh Conference in August 2009. He has detailed five phases of social marketing that lead to ROI:

Phase One: Investment. Commit resources to establishing a program.

Phase Two: Action. The program is detailed and launched. Measuring begins.

Phase Three: Reaction. Consumers engage in the program. Measuring continues.

Phase Four: Non-financial impact. This is the most important phase to measure.

Phase Five: Financial impact. Finally, ROI becomes apparent.

Non-financial impact is the most difficult pill for clients to swallow. While site-views, click-throughs and impressions are ubiquitous enough for people to generally grasp, Blog comments, social mention, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, YouTube views, etc. are all more abstract parts of non-financial impact that are difficult to understand. But all activity in this "non-financial impact" phase is potential activity that creates customers.

Proof of Concept

With nearly every company engaged in some form of social, a baseline for activities prior to social should already be available. Examine growth before and since social media was implemented. Any difference?

Create activity timelines. What happened on week 25? Did product management release a blog? Was PR's tweet picked up and retweeted? Were there any conferences, speaking engagements, new YouTube posts? Detail all of this, because it will be overlaid with other data later. You may notice similarities with content marketing strategy here, but instead of an editorial calendar (which is most definitely a component of this timeline) it also allows for unplanned engagements such as tweets, comments, etc.

Look at sales revenue, including the number of transactions and the number of net new customers. This data should be highly prized by your company, and highly detailed. Olivier Blanchard describes this as F.R.Y.: Frequency. Reach. Yield. How often your customers transact. How many customers you are reaching. How much are they spending.

Measure transactional precursors, what actions and reactions are taking place before the customer makes a move? Monitor your mentions. Are they positive or negative? Do negative mentions impact traffic in both retail stores, and website activity. Do positive mentions also impact those factors. When there is positive mention, how is the blog-to-website click-through rate.

Now it is time to overlay all of the data: Activity timeline. Social data. Web data. Transactions. Loyalty metrics. Look for patterns. What activities correlate to spikes (or depressions) in the data, and then prove the relationships. "This group was touched by social marketing because...."

By proving the relationships, you will be proving the concept. All that remains is to figure out the cost savings versus your activity prior to social media, and plugging those numbers into the ROI equation.

Note:

Sociatic also offers five misconceptions businesses have about social media that is an insightful read. The ROI question was #5 on their list. Worth a read.

Images taken from Olivier Blanchard's presentation. Please visit his blog for the full slide show and video.

Substance and Flash: Gifts From Home Start Up Believes in Both

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:00:00 +0000

At the heart of all sales transactions is trust. In today's business world where increasing numbers of relationships are built and maintained on the internet, the need for establishing and fostering trust is more important than ever. The best way to do this is to listen to your customers and give them the information they need. The 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer found that a majority of respondents considered the most credible source of information about a company to be "a person like me." Relationships are dominating advertising when it comes to trust in a brand.

So, with more publishers adding noise daily, how do you reach your target audience and become a trusted brand?

By adding not just more noise, but better noise. With relevant information.

This is exactly what startup Gifts From Home is doing to reach their target audience of parents of college aged kids. They provide timely and relevant content in the form of a "Parents Room". From this well of useful information, access to the site's e-Commerce features are clear and simple, but the information is there for everyone to get. No covert call to action embedded. No lead capture required to visit the Parents Room.

Lead capture boldly reveals that marketers have the desire to broadcast (newsletters, updates) or interact (community) with consumers. But by making lead capture an option, the content marketer allows everyone, consumers and non-consumers to benefit from their investment in content. At GFH, the free content is the Parents Room. There's no smoke and no mirrors, and no consumers asking themselves "Why do I need to leave my email address to access this content?” It is a critical step Gifts From Home has taken to use compelling content to build trust. Just to be clear, apart from the Parents Room, there’s a Gifts From Home newsletter you can subscribe to (a quid-pro-quo capture) but that seems fair enough.

Content strategist Joe Pulizzi writes of seven content strategies to build trust with today's consumers. Here are the steps as well as insight into how Gifts From Home is employing them:

1. Assign a conversation champion: Gifts From Home has a content officer, with years of experience in journalism and higher education. He receives news updates through Google News on relevant subject matter to their target: "Parenting", "Financing College" etc. etc. He synthesizes the material, interviews news sources, etc. and creates relevancy.

2. Make sure you really know your customers: Every member of Gifts From Home's board is or has been a parent of a college aged kid. They are "people like me" in the eyes of the customer. And because "people like me" tend to associate with others that are like them, Gifts From Home has access to a local network of friends to which they can test their ideas, rather than devote scarce start-up money to expensive focus groups in the early stages.

3. Conduct a content audit: The site is examined for content relevance and delivery effectiveness, and is discussed in a weekly meeting involving all the key players.

4. Be willing to try new things: New initiatives coming from media outreach conserves marketing dollars by encouraging third party endorsement of the company's unique feature: The Parents' Room, as well as paid options to increase community on Facebook by sharing all blog content with fans.

5. Get on a schedule and stick to it: By having a content officer, Gifts From Home has applied some of old publishing's rules to new publishing. Regardless of site activity, content is being produced on a weekly, sometimes bi-weekly schedule. Subscribers and visitors to this blog can look forward to new content regularly, and because of that, they will keep looking.

6. Take care of your customers: Gifts From Home has loyalty programs that include a newsletter, and are considering other programs in addition to encouraging community on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook "fans" are a potential for a success story (not a testimonial) that might be featured on the website.

7. When you need help, get it. Gifts from Home is inviting experts in education and psychology to contribute to their content, offering additional viewpoints that support the content strategy.

Drum Beat: Companies don't own brands. Consumers do. Is your company working for the consumer, or against them... it will only take a consumer a few seconds online to find out.

Gifts from Home is a study in how a start-up company has pledged itself to developing relationships by offering useful, meaningful content to everyone. Some of those consumers will share content with their networks, and grow the number of content consumers. And a percentage of those content consumers are likely to convert into Gift From Home customers. Bravo.

Why PR is Your Brand's Best Friend

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:15:00 +0000

Consumers validate brand strategy by welcoming and accepting a brand. Third party authentication of a product or service makes PR the ideal model on which to base content strategy. By placing the public first, it is no wonder that social media and community management often look to PR for strategy, guidelines and content. PR is naturally the most social and trustworthy discipline of marketing.

Rules of Engagement

Less flash. More substance. It’s a core belief shared by marketing trendwatchers today. In this context, “substance” means relevant, timely, authentic content that has a unique “truthful” quality. PR people know all about this. There’s a phrase for it: Third Party Endorsement. And, it’s gold. It can come in the form of “published editorial” or as user/reader opinion.

Marketing is storytelling, and now with social engagement being so pervasive, storytelling is about inviting everyone to participate in your story. With the explosion of publishing (the internet is synonymous with publishing), marketing stories told well feel like news.
Borrowing insight from the PR discipline, consider five qualities of storytelling that are essential today.

1. Be clear: PR people will always argue for the best information condensed into the smallest package, written in a way that can be “lifted” to help other publishers share the content.
2. Over-deliver: Leave room for a positive “surprise” about the product or service. A conclusion that can be made by the consumer of the information without being told.
3. Don't be something you're not: Understand the mission and vision of the product, service and brand.
4. Be consistent: Make certain that the same story is being told in all media. This doesn’t mean an approach from different angles can’t be taken to reflect the media vehicle chosen, but a consistent message must resonate.
5. Be the leader: Innovators and early-adopters will make the most noise. If you aren’t leading, find something about your product or service that is remarkable and sets it apart.

Summing Up

The need for PR styled thinking now falls to everyone in the marketing department. It is essential that consumers engage and share your brand story, so make it the most refreshing, authentic story that is possible.

Image from Global Nerdy

Unlocking the Code: Will Stickybits Stick?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:03:00 +0000

Can objects become media? Two companies, CauseWorld and Stickybits believe so.

It's a cool idea. On a small scale: Hand someone a business card with a barcode on the back, scan it with their smart phone camera, and they are delivered information, or joined in a threaded conversation. On the global scale: Barcodes are everywhere - a UPC (Universial Product - or Purpose Code) on almost every product. Imagine what kind of an opportunity this presents marketers: People tell and share stories, your location (GPS) can tell a story, and now Objects tell stories.

Gary Vaynerchuck, a Stickybits advisor and co-founder of VanyerMedia says:

"The UPC is a part of the infrastructure of commerce everywhere. If you're able to redefine the UPC code, you can create a powerful emotional connection at point of purpose."

Critics cite that this is not a trend, but rather a fad. But in the new normal, even fads are worthy of testing. Major packaged-goods marketers are wading in with cautious pilot programs. Coca-Cola and Pepsi leading the way. Much like paid search, the "official bits" are sponsored, and seen at the top of the list.

What's on the list?

Coca-Cola delivers a stream of content from both users and the company, while Pepsi redirects to their Refresh Project for community funding efforts. Scan a bag of Lay's potato chips and learn about partnerships with local farmers. Campbell's Soup is expected to launch a Stickybits campaign in conjunction with a sweepstakes on July 8th.

So then what happens?

With emerging technology, there are many opportunities and many risks. First, consumers need to be convinced to scan and participate, often. Since this is mobile-based, there is quite literally the technology available to provide consumers with a perfectly customized offer, and they will need an incentive to do this. Campbell's planned efforts with the Sweepstakes will be one to watch.

But social's open nature leaves open the possibility of negative messages or competitive messages getting into the stream. Not to mention concerns over egregious content including offensive language and pornography. There are already some privacy concerns concerns among users.

The implications and purpose of UPC-based mobile apps are still being defined. It may be too early to call it a fad, but it is definately too soon to mark it as a trend.

The next few months should be interesting. This is one to watch.

Stickybits CrunchBase Profile

Pocket Mind Reader Sold Here

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:41:00 +0000

Search and Social are already converging. And that the convergence is heading straight for mobile devices is something our industry has been discussing for a long time.

Mobile = Immediate

Half the people on the planet have a mobile device. It's on when you're on, and it goes where you go. You tap into search to find something on the go, you tap into social to tell your friends about it (and even GPS where you're at), and marketing people that see this paradigm shift as an opportunity to engage a consumer in precisely the time, place and mindset that they're looking to be engaged: The perfect offer at the perfect time.

Social Searching

Search is going to become less demanding on the user. Just look at how Bing is socializing search with smart tendrils that dip into Facebook and Twitter transparently to avoid privacy concerns. Search with mobile is more about preferred data and popular suggestions, not just a simple list. Just as a smartphone learns your habits, smart search reads your mind.

People

Another component of this paradigm shift is one that sees a transition from demographics, to individuals. People matter, and they want to be engaged as individuals. And because mobile can provide data to consumers as they consume, marketing needs to be more authentic and open with its targets. When it's this close and personal, how can we but share and share alike.

Think Quick

The change is already happening. Curiosity, experimentation, failure and optimization will drive improvement in the way devices interface with us, and the way we use applications. Business goals and consumer needs can be bridged in a way that advances both the marketer and the consumer.

For an incisive publication on this subject, check out Mobile Mania by Wunderman's Simon Silvester.

In Authenticity We Trust

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Wren) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:32:00 +0000

In The New Marketing Manifesto, John Grant says “Authenticity is the benchmark against which all brands are judged.” But what is authenticity, really? It means original, and when used in branding, can extend to include “genuine” and “trustworthy.” But it is also useful to examine the meaning of this particular word through a different lens, like say, art.

John Furguson of the Brand Insight Blog suggests this definition of authentic as applied to art: “being faithful to internal rather than external ideas.” In other words, faithful to the artist’s self, faithful to the brand’s strategy.

Transparency in operation, clarity in your stated vision, and following your stated mission combine to let customers know that your brand has indeed a beating heart, that values that can be followed and shared. This is key because consumers often have a high degree of mistrust in marketing. When a brand’s ideals are not consistent with its actions, the ability to persuade falls.

Patrick Ohlin, on the Chief Marketer Blog says:

“Brand authenticity is itself an outcome - the result of continuous, clear and consistent efforts to deliver truth in every touch point.”

Authenticity is strengthened by staying focused, reflecting the fiscal modesty we see in consumer behavior, doing things well, and being consistent.

In Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith offer six steps to becoming more authentic, and more worthy of trust - from the day to day interactions with your colleagues, to the army of friends, followers and fans. These steps are worthy of quoting:

Make Your Own Game. Using a synthesis of what is out there, and finding creative uses for tools we already have, or inventing new tools to solve problems, creates opportunity. What you do today, may be tomorrow’s cost-of-entry. It’s the best way to stay ahead of the curve.
One of Us: Take a lesson from actors, real-estate agents, restaurant servers. All of those people want to be seen as one of us. So do your customers, clients, and partners. And because we like people who are like ourselves, we tend to believe what you say more.
Archimedes Effect: Leverage means you “never have to reinvent the wheel” Think more about the opportunities (and opportunity cost) rather than who’s got the advantage. Speaking in terms of opportunity means both sides of the lever have some power, even if we know we have the advantage.
Agent Zero: Connecting is the name of the game. Small networks are stone’s throw away from big one’s, and the more dots you are able to connect, the chances of you reaching your destination faster grows.
Human Artist: Etiquette and human understanding are the cornerstones of any meaningful life. If you are to have trust, you must have respect, and understand how to interact with people. Whether you’re face to face, or running a dialogue on Twitter - they’re still people. And expect that they want to be treated that way.
Build An Army: To be a leader, you must be able to call resources to your command. Help grow your army by helping them build skills and encouraging them to become participants in networks. There are millions of people out there with special skills and experience. Those people can help you achieve the business objectives by adding a point of view, and a level of honesty that may be a key ingredient overlooked in marketing strategy.

In building trust, it is important to stay active with a solid content strategy. Publishing content of value increases search, which increases the chances of it being tweeted, facebooked, or blogged upon, which adds more to search, which can start switching on editorial. But this can’t all be done by marketing or PR. Others in the organization need to support the corporate effort; employees and customers both are great champions of products.

So invite them in. People want to know that there is a human out there that is facing the same challenges they are. “One of us.” Increasing your authenticity might include occasional posts on things you love, like basketball, or cooking. Customer engagement is about humanity, and you better believe that’s personal.

Why is this important and timely? As social media is de-globalizing the world, we have to apply a new criterion for trust.

Authentic messages. Transparent behavior. And human connection.

That will create trust.