Buzz Canuck

The Blindsiding and Bubble of Social Media

2009-11-08T10:09:09-05:00

By my rough estimation, there are about 300,000 people floating around Twitter claiming to be "social media experts".

Good for them. They are riding a wave of popularity rarely seen since the days of the dot.com bubble. If they can monetize or take advantage of this fever, even better for them.

As you can see by the Google Trends graph above , "social media" has rocketed up the popularity charts and took a sharp "hockey stick" turn up in the start of 2009. Some of the other strategies and tactics terms that my company Agent Wildfire has focused on (word of mouth, buzz, community) have taken a popularity backseat to this chart-topping beast called "social media"

As a Warren Buffett contrarian advocate, I believe the fever pitch around "social media" - the term and the tools is short-sighted. Be forewarned, when something moves this fast, this quickly - there usually is a letdown factor on the other side of the ride (file under Alaskan gold rush, backyard nuclear bunkers, zoot suits, disco, Y2K, Enron, Madoff-Ponzie, Avian flu, ethanol as biofuel) .

Why? Businesses continue to struggle to tap into social media as a source of value. The earliest of early adopters have jettisoned Facebook even though it's death star continues to spread. You hear a creeping resistance to the mere mention to the term - similar to the treatment we now give to the haggard terms Web 2.0, social bookmarking and blogging or dare I say, weblogging. Ironically, in some respects, social media has made a contingent of us remarkably less social, more stretched and less embedded in real kinships.

It is a jungle out there - how do you get noticed among millions of groups, billions of news feeds and hundreds of thousands of apps. Fact is - you don't - not in any sustainable way. A goodly percentage of us have placed our faith in "social media" and for most, it has been an experimental and unrequited love. More teenage crush than something palpibly meaningful.

I'll get on the same page for a moment so you don't believe I have lost my lid completely. Let's agree social media has revolutionized the internet and consequently how we spend an increasing amount of our time. It has provided the seed for smart organizations to think differently and early market movers to tap into its value. We have seen enhanced and sometimes surprisingly powerful benefits from social media with our client's programs. It is not a fad, it is here to stay and in a big way. My condolences to newspaper editors, radio producers and magazine publishers everywhere.

But in a very few short years, my prediction - the term will fade into irrelevance - all media will be social - no more need for the distinction.

And here's why the current fixation on social media is a bad thing, not necessarily for people but for business:

- it suggests that engaging customers can be boiled down to a type of media - check out how many company Facebook pages that are barren ghost towns to demonstrate the foolishness of seeing the benefits of a collaborative web through the myopic lenses of social media, be they pages, groups, blogs or feeds - social media is part and only part of an overall business strategy and a good percentage of its practitioners wouldn't know a strategy if it hit him/her on the front hood of a car

- the term "social media" is thrown around as inherently tactical and under-estimates by a healthy margin the strategy, talent and infrastructure required by companies to tap into its real value - it's great if John Smith can acquire a modicum of viralness by attracting 25,000 Twitter followers to his personal brand, what that has to do with Microsoft building an enterprise through social media is tenuous at best?

- except for the people that own the high ground - the platforms social media operate on (Facebook), the plumbing it runs along (Verizon) or the hardware it runs on (Apple) - social media is very tough to monetize - the belief that virtual companies will not need a website of their own and will just operate on a number of social media prongs is foolish and unfounded in success - social media is an adjunct to your web strategy it is not a replacement

- the lifespan of attention on social media is fleeting - for example, the timespan of utility on one of my tweets right now is about 45 seconds given the deluge of activity on people's walls - businesses succeed and thrive based on longevity of benefit and perception - addiction to social media would make them vulnerable to the flights of fancy and inherent novelty and lack of loyalty among social media-ites - if you're comfortable as a business riding the heroin-like highs and lows of social media enthusiasm, great - most of us would like to balance out that rollercoaster ride with some loyalty promoting investment too

- in our rush to embrace the transparent and tentacled world of social media, brands have forgotten the need to embrace the equally powerful aspects of storytelling, influencer and key stakeholder seeding, media integration, smart content and a well-differentiated point of view - what is a business and brand if it isn't an idea or enterprise that stands for something different - open source and socialize all your decisions and watch your business turn the compromise colour of "mauve" not the potentially brilliant individual colours in the spectrum

- how much of social media is really social? Perhaps in the heady days of blogging (2003-2007 RIP) you could make the argument that social media had taken down walls but media evolves and starts to look like the incumbent media before it - bloggers became A-listers and more aloof to real engagement, the pace of content quickened, user acceptance increased to the point that even the best company and/or blogger can't keep up with the volume - social media is simply becoming much more broadcasty and less interactive - for most, this will in time become merely a different channel

- social media loves to eat their own children - there is a culture of "gotcha-ism" in the Twitter and blogging landscape that makes big companies targets - and yet the most vocal social media-ites among them, question why these brands are slow to embrace it (it's kind of like hiring the worst, cantankerous employee over for Sunday night dinner each week to tell you and your family how much they hate you). Reality is, the best engaged companies do not practice the "one voice, one vote" rule - show your commitment, knowledge, investment to get things right and influence companies for the better and scale the ladder of access to corporations; act like a social media troll or curmudgeon and wonder out loud why brands turn tone deaf

So for the smart money, yes - consider social media within the scope of your business plan, but don't, I repeat don't, forget about other important factors in rooting the much more important benefits of engagement with and advocacy by your customers, influencers, employees and fans:

- building and incubating online community

- creating crowdsourced learning and insight

- leveraging word of mouth referrals

- supporting corporate social responsibility and smart grassroots marketing

- seeding and affiliating with key influencers

- getting noticed and talked about through alternative marketing forms - buzz, viral, guerrilla

- hosting customer advisory panels and beta testing groups

- providing a customer-centric brand and user experience

- offering up user generated content promotion and opportunity as avenues into your brand

- collaborating and co-owning assets with your customer base

I guarantee you that as we see the term "social media" bandied about, people are not talking about the above list of important items and if you as a business owner, take their advice as gospel and you will be blindsided by the lack of depth and richness of benefits you get back.

We've been here before. It's the boulevard of broken and inflated web dreams. Why does it feel like 1999 and people praising the virtues of Outpost.com shooting gerbils out of a cannon?

The 15 Debates in Social Media to End All Debates

2009-10-27T02:54:44-04:00

Social media has its own natural spin and hype cycle but what are the gold benchmark debates of social media; the "second Kennedy shooter", "artificial turf vs. grass", "Rowe vs. Wade", "Huxley-Wilberforce" equivalents.

The key ingredients to a a good debate is that there is enough real estate that people could be seen taken either side, that people feel passionate and strongly about a polarized opinion and that the discussion would be highly provocative and revealing.

We recently held a debate forum affiliated with our League of Kickass #13 event - Social Media Entourage - the concept rocked (having social media seasoned experts hold fort from the middle of a boxing ring had its conversation owrthy merits) and the three of the below 15 debate topics were explored. Here's a summary.

Here are also my votes for the top 15 barroom social media debates:

1) Facebook, Google, Twitter, someone else - by 2012, who will be the social media champion?

2) Is Privacy dead or has the new Age of Filtering just begun?

3) Is Social Media the new Customer Service?

4) Can strong corporate and personal social media brands co-exist?

5) To outsource or not your social media, that is the question?

6) Advertising, Digital, PR or Specialist agency - who best leads social media?

7) Is the blog dead? Have we killed it off its usefulness yet....

8) Blogger Disclosure Guidelines - about time? yes, but enforceable? double standard? against freedom of speech?

9) The Wisdom of the Crowd vs. The Influencers?

10) Free - Enlightened Business Strategy or Faulty Business Model?

11) Wikinomics - the miracle of customer collaboration vs. the Cult of the Amateur - How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture?

12) Should Apple (and other premium brands) engage in social media?

13) Can traditional media and journalism be saved?

14) Are social media conversations scalable or will it always be an intimacy medium?

15) Build your own community or engage on other social networks?

So top those? Debate...

Frontline Word of Mouth Performance Scorecard - Are You an Employee Evangelist, Advocate or Engaged Soul?

2009-10-19T10:30:27-04:00

I used to call it the "smell of a place". When you walk into a shop, a corporate head office or a boutique small business, does it appear like people love what they're doing? Are they genuinely involved in their jobs or are they merely going through the motions?

Frontline experience dictates at least half of the total experience many customers have with a company is with .

A lot of times, it's driven by the small things - next time you are at a Four Seasons look at how many of the small things are taken care of - we've come to understand that 82 items are routinely taken care of.

A lot of times, the torture test for the "smell" is what happens when the boss is not around. Take a visit to Westjet airlines for a 6:30am flight to get a handle on great customer experiences before the first coffee.

Sometimes, these experiences shake us out of our daily patterns and make us want to share them with others. Call them "acts of wow", "moments of magic" or "pursuit of excellence" but they make people buzz.

Some experiences of mine that recently to experiences going well beyond or below-the-call and have created conversations in my world:

On the positive:

the outright friendliness of Buffalo airport parking lot shuttle drivers
the lifesaving customer service and first name comfortability of my local UPS store (Sherway Gardens)
the welcoming appeal of my local Starbucks - free coffee when I stand too long in line and the efficiency in finding my power cord (on Kingsway and Bloor West)
the patience of my Netnation server support people - thanks for not thinking I was completely out to lunch on a piece of malicious code we fixed together

On the negative:

the arrogance of a collected series of Visa customer service people
the unbelievable slowness of Staples Business Depot print staff
the tone deafness of my Bell business phone customer service staff
the ineptitude of craft sellers Durie Lane to find a matching urn (perhaps no coincidence the store is now out of business)

My view of each brand has been enlightened or pockmarked by individual employees embrace of their companies and work environment, and in some cases, outright disregard.

We've developed a 100 pt.survey for clients that cesses out a score suggesting top-level front line fanship, above-service standards and customer face-to-face engagement.

Arrive at a score of 85 and you are a fully-committed, Frontline Word of Mouth Evangelist, between 70 and 85 and you are an emotionally connected Frontline Word of Mouth Advocate and between 50 and 70 and you are a satisfied and loyal Frontline Word of Mouth Engaged Soul.

Let's not even go near under 50 as a score, although our belief is 65-75% of frontline staff operate at this level.

Here are 10 components to the survey:

i) Personal Assets (10 pts.) - do you have a natural set of skills that lend themselves well to frontline WOM?

ii) Company/Brand Alignment (10 pts.) - are you living the life and genuinely excited about the corporate/brand and their values?

iii) Customer Focus (10 pts.) - are you driven by trying to understand and satisfy customers?

iv) Experience Building (10 pts.) - are you committed to not only providing a service but an experience?

v) Consistency/Remarkability (10 pts.) - even on "bad days", do you still go the extra mile and get customers to rave about you?

vi) Team/Culture Builder (10 pts.) - do you improve the morale and customer service of the people around you?

vii) Passion/Problem Solving (10 pts.) - are you enthusiastic about customer interactions, even negative ones?

viii) Growth and Development (10 pts.) - are you committed to personal growth and learning?

ix) Story and Surprise Building (10 pts.) - are you creating and sharing things that people will talk about through your creativity, mastery and experimentation in your role?

x) Valued Partnership and Evangelism (10 pts.) - do you feel valued in your company and feel you can leave your personal mark?

So what's your score? more importantly, what's your frontline staff's score?

In fairness, there are a subset of questions under each category and with many companies, we add and tailor specific questions that make sense for their objectives, culture and work styles to give us a fuller view.

Ready to take a Customer Experience Fitness test? Have a spin by Agent Wildfire if you'd like to connect with us on Frontline Customer Experience WOM Audit.

The Moffitt Dictionary : The Vernacular of Traditional Business vs. The New Community Economy

2009-09-06T12:29:50-04:00

Sometimes we encounter people in life that work so hard to fit in, be accepted, be loved and are willing the put on a "face" or "show" to ingratiate themselves with their newfound social circles or professional milleus....but there language trips them up and reveals likely what rests at the heart of what they think as well.

Here it is, with the case of the traditional economic world (of whom I was a part of for the greater chunk of my career) and the new world of the friendlier, more collaborative marketplace - the community builders (for which I have put my stock and become an entrenched part of).

Beyond philosophical differences between the two groups, there is a cavernous divide in how these tribes see their craft, which makes it difficult for the traditional and new worlds of communication to cooperate, never mind getting past the semantics for discussion.

It shows up in how they dress, who they vote for, what they value, how they socialize, what they covet personally and perhaps, most visibly in what language they use. As in any turf battle, neither side is wholly right (trust me, there are some idioms and words of the new economy that drive me batty - "it is what it is", cloud computing. "just sayin' and usability come to mind ) but establishing some common English-French dictionary of sorts for each group might be important.

So move over Roget and Websters- here is a compendium of the top 50 words and phrases used by traditional business speak (rooted in the capitalist and militaristic language from which it has its roots) and the new community speak (rooted in the more recent, more activist and post-war culture from which it emerged).

Words (traditional then new economy words)
1. Person - consumer/citizen
2. Succeed - conquer/crowdsource
3. Process - capitalize/collaborate
4. Group - database/community
5. Goal - attention/engagement
6. Place we do business - battlefield/playground
7. Management style - command-and-control/leaderless group
8. Secret sauce - proprietary knowledge/open source
9. Price of admission - pay for service/free
10. Vision - mission statement/manifesto
11. Where power comes from - resources/network
12. Key communication outlet - broadcast media/interactive
13. What to do with customer - exploit and tap/embrace and love
14. Intelligence - patentable/collective
15. Content - broadly distributed/viral and interesting
16. Target audience - demographic/behavioural
17. Management focus - competition/cooperation
18. Genius - quarterback/savant
19. Feedback - comment or suggestion box/forum or wiki
20. Governance - rules/guidelines
21. Participants - suits/t-shirts
22. Work structure - organization men & career trajectory/free agent nation and gigonomics
23. Bad characterization of the other side's people - socialists/sheeple
24. Partnership - joint venture/mashup
25. What to call the new social online - Web 2.0 and information superhighway / P2P
26. Group Meeting - conference / camp
27. Bad, dumb and overused words to use in any context - synergy, win-win and best-in-class/ scalable, beta and next-generation
28. Better media - mainstream media/rich media
29. Smaller customers - niche markets /the Long Tail
30. Intelligence - integrated /semantic web
31. Aimless web use - surfing / tweeting
32. ROI - return on investment/return on involvement
33. Frontline customer employee - customer service manager / community manager
34. Suffix of choice - -metrics and -assets /onomics and washing
35. Great workplace efficiency - well-oiled machine / frictionless
36. Bad endings - "at the end of the day", "net net" / LOL or IMHO
37. What's your - phone number / PIN or IM
38. Please send - email me / ping me
39. Customer facing people - spokespeople, fans and supporters/ambassadors and evangelists
40. File - index / tag
41. To connect - meet, reach out or link /fave, friend or follow
42. To produce content - author or write / blog or tweet
43. Customer relationship - CRM -customer relationship management, database management and acquisition/ CEM -customer experience management, community building and word of mouth
44. Customer happiness ratings- customer satisfaction, brand equity and page views / interestingness, net promoter scores and brand attention/time spent on site
45. Key players to have on your side - celebrities, lobbyists and journalists/ influencers, grassroots opinion leaders and bloggers
46. Frequently used insider acronym - GAAP / SaaS
47. The corner suite - CEO/COO/CIO/CFO/Directors/President/Chairman / Chief Happiness Officer, Chief People Officer, Chief Evangelist, Head of Spin/Magic, No Titles
48. Security - firewall. lawsuits, protection, privacy /hackability, creative commons, remixing, openness and filtering
49. Trust - trust authority, trust centralized figures, have faith / trust yourself, trust your friends and trust your network
50. Niceness - campaigns, promoting X or Y, fundraising and donation, conforming to regulation / corporate social responsibility, sustainability and greenlining and double or triple bottom lines

Additions?

The League of Kickass #11 - From Digital to Reality

2009-08-21T13:41:38-04:00

We can't legislate great ideas coming into your life but here are our top 10 reasons why you should join us at our gathering Monday, August 24th at The Social in Toronto:

1) Three energetic speakers, rarely heard in Canada, running the operations of three kickass web startups:

Lisa Rodwell- Global head of marketing for Moo.com

Adrian Salamunovic - Co-founder of DNA11 and CanvasPop

Darius Bashar -President & Co-Founder, DailyChallenge.org

2) There's always a good mind-expanding, career and business opportunist conversation in the audience on LOK nights

3) Drinks, catered food and the near-celebration of the end of summer, bittersweet - aren't you tired of the cottage yet? Hmmm, forget that last part...

4) Highly motivating moo.com door prizes and exclusive LOK advance signup offers

5) Each speaker will be revealing new exciting ventures in an intimate and interactive setup, be the first to know

6) An announcement on what's happening with the 2009/2010 calendar of League of Kickass activities and final casting call for League of Kickass Under 30 advisory panel

7) For those wanting the full Monday out, our venue The Social's busiest night is actually Monday - right after our event, join the teaming hordes of Queen St.

8) Tired of Spadina or other... yawn...traditional venues for professional meet ups - take a spin by Queen St. and bring your professional posse out early to a number of cultural attractions before our event

9) Get your 30 seconds in the sun and stand on our Kickass soapbox, broadcasting what cool things are going on in your professional world to a well heeled audience

10) Worlds collide - LOK + LOKU30 together at the same event - talent knows no age, now watch sparks fly

And forgot to mention - early bird LOks and LOK Under 30s get in for 1/2 off but only through this link rather than paying at the door.

http://lokeventaug24fromdigitaltoreality.eventbrite.com/

Wait for our 2009/10 calendar of events, sponsor announcements, Vancouver on Sept 23rd and our first Montreal event in November.

if this is your thing, join our two communities:

For our seasoned executives, directors and managers:
http://theleagueofkickassbusinesspeople.ning.com/

For our great rising talent under 30:
http://theleagueofkickassunder30.ning.com/

Networking begins 6pm, formal start at 7pm...see you there.

I'm 1,500 times Stronger - The Strength of Weak Ties and Social Networks

2009-08-06T09:17:18-04:00

I marvel at what social networks and the power of people I only know through digital connections have done for my professional and personal life.

So many potential partners, clients and personal contacts, I would have never met without the tools of the social net. There may be many ills about the internet - loss of privacy, pornography and other vices, the rise of the gossip mill, the drop in sports participation - but connecting with like-minded others is one of it's big saving graces.

Back in 1992 when I was a "wet behind the ears" brand assistant at P&G during the digital infancy era (remember LED terminals), my world really did consist of the immediate world around me. Being a social guy, I likely at the time could keep about 150 "social friends" in the air before I hit the Dunbar number.

It would roughly breakdown 20 family-related, 40 work-related, 40 school-related, 20 neighbor/community-related, 30 hobby/interest related people, people who I wouldn't feel weird about inviting over for dinner (given my small bachelor pad of course, not at the same time).

And if I was enthusiastic enough about something, these people, given a sense of personal affiliation to me, could likely extend out that idea comfortably to about 12 other people - people they had enough familiarity and local contact with to feel comfortable phoning or discussing my "new thing".

That makes 8,600 possible connections, not bad. We could start a mini-insurrection or some type of grassroots movement but it would be tough to grow beyond a certain point without the help of traditional media.

Now in 2009, the equation is much different. The social web has made it so easy to send messages and connect to a web of weak ties that my potential social footprint is about 1,500 times larger.

How did I get to that number?

Just using the top 5 networks I participate in - I looked at how many people are in my first generation of contacts (and yes, mathematicians there will be overlap). I have tapped out on Facebook at 5,000 friends, across 5 principal Twitter profiles - I have about 8,000 followers, I am what they charitably refer to as a LinkedIn lion, I have about 2,000 people that traipse through my blog every so often and I have two networks of very interesting people on Ning that are 1,700 deep.

Now if I look at their second level of connections, here is the key social multiplier factor -
Facebook - an average person has 120 friends on Facebook(mine have more but let's be conservative)
Twitter - an average person has 70 followers (same deal as facebook, but let's take the mean no.)
LinkedIn - my average contacts have 170 connections (the average LinkedIn contact is more likely 30)
Ning - these same people are professionals with Linkedin attributes - I have assumed the 170 number
Blog - I have taken the average blogger I'm connected to as having 1/4 the traffic that Buzz Canuck gets

All told, that suggests that 2.8 million people can be reached almost directly if I came up with the Next Big Thing (was thinking shoes that had bottle cap openers the other day), a great new cause (remember Twestival is coming up everybody) or some incredibly genuine personal outreach (cancer and Crohn's diseases seem to have beset my family this year).

That doesn't even count the scenarios where things go viral and dip out to the extended third and fourth circle of friends among the 1.6 billion internet users in the world and their extended 6 billion non Internet-linked friends.

Before people jump on this note and say "Sean, typical flesh-peddling buzz marketer - just sees his friends and followers as chattel". Wait. The caveats: Social currency is built up here through sweat equity and investment of time, content, dialogue and effort. Unlike digital display media, you just can't run in and broker eyeballs. Even great content or motives get missed on the web through clutter or wrong context. And if you abuse these relationships by over-messaging, over-promoting or over-broadcasting above the dialogue, you risk social media "blowback".

I just find the potential of the social web so interesting and it has changed the tables on old equations of hierarchy, power, monopoly, nationalism, media and a host of other sacred cows we have believed to be true, many since the start of the industrial age. If only all my professional colleagues adopted the same faith in the social web around their brands, maybe my 2.8 million "friends" can become ambassadors for my message.

Young Adults and Teens Don't Tweet...and the 10 Reasons Why

2009-08-05T08:03:27-04:00

From Nielsen, via Mashable...the answer to our social media fears....teens don't tweet.

So, in using Twitter, are we as adults bound by this "ham radio" for the web that won't be picked up by the generation behind us? Will it become the web version of playing bridge? or the social media equivalent of donning whites and playing lawn bowling?

A client asked me yesterday whether or not, their target audience of middle-aged people were on social 'nets like Twitter. I usually pay a certain credence to people's outmoded beliefs about the 'net - on this one I was blunt - "Yes, incontrovertibly, indisputably, old people are on Twitter.... in droves."

Here's my support, according to Pew, the average age of a Twitter user is 31 (vs. Facebook at 27) , some sight the figure as high as 41 and getting it's getting older. Although people under 25 make up 25% of the internet, they make up only 16% of the growth of Twitter. Twitter reaches 6% of people under 25 and 12% of over 25s.

Why the gap? Here are my lead 10 thoughts (borne out of discussions with many staff and influencers under 25):-

1) Twitter was started by adults and flourished through adults (unlike Facebook), and who wants to hang with serious-minded, self-promoting adults when you can hang with narcisstic, self-promoting young people

2) Teens are very into themselves - SMS is a much more fluid, "all about me" medium - the average teen sends 440 text messages every week in mediums they use already (this type of frequency would kill a follower list) - even the ADD-driven twitter universe delivers an average of 244 updates per quarter per member

3) A twist on reason #1 - Twitter etiquette frowns on privacy, people don't follow people with protected updates - and generation of hard-wiring suggests teens simply don't want parents to know what they're doing.

4) Twitter is filled with professionals, certain professions way overindex on Twitter usage - teens simply aren't ready to get serious and "into" the workforce yet - the majority would rather focus on getting through school and overcoming the social minefield that is teen life - not too much advice or coaching on Twitter that does that.

5) Teens haven't crested on smartphone use - although 13% of us have smartphones - teens aren't well above that index (how many teens have a company-enabled Blackberry?) and a lot of what makes Twitter go is mobility and context.

6) Highly publicized adoption of Twitter by Oprah, Demi Moore, Martha Stewart - not exactly the stuff of Zac Efron and Miley Cyrus.

7) Social 'nets Facebook and MySpace and YouTube (with 18-24 year olds) have done a particularly good job embedding themselves into the under 25 life - what time is left over?

8) Teens actually have a real life - they play sports, go to movies, have cottage parties - who has time to Tweet when you're actually doing stuff?

9) I hate to say this because relatively speaking Twitter is pretty lazy, but to be followed on Twitter actually does require thoughtful, pensive stuff to broadcast in small bite-sized forms - the frequency of bff, imho, ttfn and myob on Twitter is scarce vs. links to Techcrunch and Mashable

10) Twitter strength is its weakness with teens - there is not a wide range of stuff to do onTwitter - you can broadcast and digest content and play around with it through things like Tweetdeck but that's about it - teens want to poke, gift, game, play "Hot or Not" ...sometimes all at the same time...Twitter doesn't have that bandwidth (imagine the Fail Whales if it did)

Any other lead thoughts on why teens and young adults haven't taken to Twitter like a tawdry Perez Hilton post...

The Lost Art of Storytelling Explored

2009-08-04T16:51:52-04:00

Many people who work with us at Agent Wildfire understand my love of our local bakery-restaurant Artisano's, it is the ultimate boutique bakery-meets-cafe of West Toronto.

Don't get me rolling on my love for this establishment. You can just tell the people running the business have a passion for it. You can breathe it. You can smell it. You can taste it. I have had the benefit of talking to one of the owners, and you can tell she lives for this business and the customer experience.

I spotted this sign above their fireplace musing over my morning coffee the other day and I had to take a pic. You can not just make up these words or blindly put them up without meaning them. These people love the art of making bread and servicing their customers. It got me to thinking about stories and brands.

Unfortunately, stories are mainly dead in marketing. On one side, you have the sell more, sell more camp, too eager to get to the punch line to romance us along the way. On the other side, you have the social media gang, too emphatic about being transparent and glaringly obvious and open to add some mystique, enchantment maybe a tad of stretch along the way that lift our aspirations, real or imagined.

In a world of "paint by numbers" advertising and digital media, where are the storytellers? Have we lost it as an ability, have we tested it away or do we just not believe in them?

That's why I love Nike so much. That's why I think this TV ad might be the best ever created, at least the most enagaging.

That's why I still love the print magazine and hope its never goes away, the ads as much as content make us dream, escape, explore (at least in the good magazines - thank you Men's Journal). Still love VW's original ads and the interplay between visual and story. It's also likely why I love this so much too.

When it turns digital, that's also why I love the Common Craft and cobrandit. They get it. The essential truth distilled --- most of what we buy, experience and talk about that rises above our sub-conscious state, is emotional, and when done well, it stirs our insides and makes us feel something. It provides meaning vs. just telling us something.

When I consider the few storytellers we do have, they have a number of traits in common:

- they exude passion - you can see it every word, they intuit what makes them great
- they are human - many likely have nver been professionally trained in copywriting or marketing and they are better for it
- they have a belief system - there is a "them" and "us" and they fervently want to be a "them"
- they reach beyond a brand - they encase themselves in a philosophy, a cause d'etre, a perhaps unachievable goal
- they don't hold up a mirror to their customer, they hold a prism - they don't just preach from the brand temple, nor do they just reflect back what their customers are saying, they provide a kaleidoscope what together you can be ...with them as a core part of it not as an after thought
- they leave room for building - they create the conversation and allow others to contribute and fill in the blanks

Most brands can not be described as such. Very few would dream to do a modern version of the British Airways ads or Coke's I'd like to teach the world to sing. Were copywriters, and by extension, their sponsoring brands, less jaded back then? Did that take more risks? Were they simply better at their craft? Did we all become mercenaries and stop believing that a business or organization could stand for something that was different or noble?

I love John Steinbeck's quote on this topic, probably no more relevant than today:

"We are lonesome animals. We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say-and to feel- ‘Yes, that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it.’ You’re not as alone as you thought."

That's exactly how I feel, John. Now somebody tell me a story...

Attention Marketers/Media: "By 2013, You Can't Hide Behind TV Media Anymore"

2009-07-31T07:07:24-04:00

My good friend Paula Gignac from IAB Canada just released their 2009 report and lo and behold, the web just took over radio in Canada as the third biggest medium - it will take down daily newspapers by 2010 and garner top dog status by 2012 given my number crucnhing and current trending (pictured above).

It's foolish to think Canadian marketers are spending only 11% of their media budgets on the web when in actual fact, their consumers are spending over 30% of their time on the medium (that's discounting the quality of potential customer online vs. other mediums). By comparison, the Brits, the Danes and Norwegians are spending above 20% of their budgets.

Can you think of a profession so out of step with the zeitgeist of their customer pool? What are the reasons we resist the lure of the web? Is it unfair to measure media spend as a ratio vs. time and resources on the medium? Do you think trends outlined above will abate, continue or accelerate? What are the biggest reasons to pull us out of our slumber?

Gary Coleman - New York Fries, Feels Gimmicky...

2009-07-30T10:48:56-04:00

I get it, put Gary Coleman on anything and you'll get eyeballs to look. Poor Todd Bridges doesn't have the same "Cabbage Patch" warm and fuzzy 80s appeal. I'm sure the cast of Happy Days, Webster or Corey Haim might have the same effect (ok, maybe not Corey).

Heck, most anniversaries are artificial signposts anyway. Why not have the excuse to do some crazy nostalgic work?

This campaign from New York Fries just screams a little desperate - particularly based on a retailer that puts so much stock in their actual and real product.
Good Vegas money says Gary never had a New York fry before this gig.

New York Fries may get buzz out of this but I guarantee you it will be transient and likely not for the reasons they want.

Oh, apparently there is a virtual Bobblehead facebook application on the way - just for more artificial "paint by numbers" social network goodness.

Why Doubt the Impact of The Influencers?

2009-07-30T10:27:18-04:00

If anything, the flourishing wave of social media over the last 5 years has taught us and identified quantitatively the influence of grassroots opinion leaders, experts and connectors.

Whereas before, we intuitively knew that some people were more influential than others, now we undeniably know it.

The introduction of the term "social graph" underlines the fact that those people with an increased ability to connect have distinct advantages on the social web. LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman calls them light alliances. Guy Kawasaki considers twitter a weapon given his ability to connect to millions of people through his followers (at the time of this writing he had 155,000 of them) and his digital footprint is undeniably large.

There is nothing malicious here. It doesn't mean these influencers are better humans, or perhaps smarter or even appropriate for all types of project involvement, but it's irrefutable the impact an influencer can have on a company's prospects.

Here are the quick stats that bring the "law of the few" into light:
- the top 1% of Wikipedia editors constitute 70% of the content
- the top 10% of Twitterers constitute 90% of the tweets
- the average amount of Facebook friends is 120, less than 1% have more than 1000 friends

The influencer naysayers have it right in one respect - "might" does not always right. These highly connected could be spammers, shameless self promoters, gamers or pay-per-friend members - a simple view of their content and reputation will cess this out quickly.

But "might" combined with real influence - the ability to produce interesting content, build a reputation, have leading persuasive expertise and connect to other influencers with genuine relationships is an extremely influential combination.
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So why then do people want to deny the fact that a person that produces more content, posts more photos, shoots more video and links to more friends has more online influence than one who doesn't.

There seems to be an ideologial strain borne out of the "open source" movement thats blinded to the reality that some people know more, connect more, prodduce more and infuence more than others. I read a post by my friend Sean Howard called F*^k Influencers that casts doubt on the existence of a group of opinion leaders and shapers and I must respectfully disagree on three counts:

a) influence is tightly concentrated online - just try to start a movement with 10 friends or one great post - it won't happen - a very small percentage of people get the ball rolling on big and small movements - these don't have to be elites - some have magnetic personalities, some are unbelievably passionate, some are very engaged with their communities - in social media, you get very few influential that like to sit on their gold thrones

b) the term "influencers" gets people shorts in a bunch - although there can be general omnipotent influencer traits, there are different performers by category and their ability rests not only in their ability to spread messages but also to feedback insight, produce content, change perception, offer expert solutions - when performed best, influencer-based strategies are not merely transactional and mercenary as Sean identifies

c) influence by its very nature have deep and wide networks - one without the other has obvious limitations - the more connections you have, mathematically, the more chances you have weak ties in those networks that engage in different communities of interest - whether these are nodes of influence, at some point, you need to engage and identify the difference makers that are making those communities tick if you want to activate interest into organizational value.

In the open world's hope of being egalitarian and open to all, they are ignorant to the fact when given the open opportunity, a small percentage of people take a big bite out of the apple, while others merely shine and buff that same Granny Smith.

My belief is that smart innovators will start building more, not less private communities of people online that engage a distinct pool of influencers in the ways that Gmail, Apple, TED and others have effectively done in the past.

Most top performing community and social media-driven companies understand and tap into this phenomenon ...Mozilla calls it their meritocratic hierarchy, Microsoft calls them MVPs, eBay calls them Powersellers. Zappos have introduced a VIP program.

And in a culture that rewards work ethic and intellect, there is nothing unethical or undemocratic about giving more access, more rewards, more influence on decisions or more priviledged information to the more passionate, more engaged and quite frankly, more valuable members, customers, users and stakeholders.

With that in mind, Agent Wildfire is relaunching The Influencers and building a companion network of digital influencers called The Influencers in the Know for September - more about these in August...stay tuned. In the interim, all you trendsetters, tastemakers, opinion leaders, mavens, experts and social ringleaders, feel free to join our Twitter page.

Diapereez - User Generated Babies

2009-07-24T18:07:10-04:00

Love this retail contest - simple, straightforward and who doesn't like baby photos.

The 11Cs of Community - #2 - Competition

2009-07-15T10:34:31-04:00

Beyond being one of the sexiest brand communities, Nike Plus has tapped into intuitively what its target audience loves to do - compete.

To compete against each other, to compete as teams, to compete against themselves. Most Nike runners would not stop for a picket line, parade or nudist protest - they are just that committed to their run.

In fact, marketers and businesses don't get a lot of the finer points of building and managing communities, getting people to compete is not one of them (think promotions, contests and sweepstakes - we sometimes view our consumers as willing lemmings to do almost anything for a tshotcke) ...just Nike does it better.

As you can see my Nike Plus' community (pictured above), there are so many platforms of competition on their web 2.0 portal to the world. Rivalry, challenges and leaderboards all stoke people's need for participation and help build tribal reputation.

Specific features on Nike's site:

Personal Challenges - the ability to select an adversary/friendly partner and create a competitive distance or pace challenge and also get in on the nastier public forum TrashTalk

Team Challenges - pull together a gaggle of joggers and wage a competition against another set of short shorts-wearing individuals

Community Goals - have a group compete in pursuit of a common distance goal

Personal Resolutions -get people to come back again and again to see how they are faring against their monthly or annual targets

Leaderboard - a world run, rankings chart of the top people who have run by week, by month and ever (top member in the world has run 24,000+ kilometres ... impressive!) sortable by duration, distance and pace and gender, age and geography, very cool

Distance Club - see members and give props to those who have met their distance milestones - 250km, 1000km, 2000km, 4000km and 6000km

Widgets - very robust downloadable desktop widgets for your challenges and performance

My only feedback for the Nike team would be to do four things:

1) Profile the top performing or most interesting people on their community - highlight their efforts in a much deeper way and create a better level of personalization and grassroots connectedness than currently available on their site (as they had to a certain degree with their 2008 Human Race blog) ..also I'd love to know if there are any explicit incentives (free shoes, customized merchandise or exclusive experiences) for performance beyond the call

2) Allow more runner-generated activity to bubble up to the front page - yes, they do have a really well designed tracker of recent stuff on the front page and a clutter free, almost perfect design, I'd just love to see a leaderboard and more populated front page of the wealth of activity coming in from their 1.2 million community members and 72,000 runs tracked in the alst 24 hours

3) Extending their presence out in the social media universe - how difficult would it to integrate Facebook, Twitter and other globally relevant sites in addition to providing a supportive blog

4) Allow links - based on its flash based set up, all parts of the site point to the same url - having areas that bloggers, Facebookers and Twitterers could easily link to would be helpful

But this is quibbling - for competition reasons and sexy looks, you'd be hardpressed to find a community better than Nike Plus. Now attack....

Let me know if you've run across other communities with competitive features. And stay tuned here for #3 in our continuing series of Community features - Customization - gold standard features that enhance member personalization (please provide thoughts in advance here).

Disco Sucks and Other Veeckian Ideas

2009-07-13T05:23:00-04:00

The cultural event that brought disco to its knees was hosted 30 years ago today (shown in documentary video). Here are some other buzz-generating campaigns the Veecks, baseball's original marketers and best showmen, were able to pull off:

- Tonya Harding Mini-Bat Night
- Labor Day, when pregnant women got in free
- Groundskeepers dragging the infield in drag
- Locking fans out of one park for five innings in order to set the record for lowest attendance
- Hiring mimes to act instant replay
- Letting 3-foot 7-inch Eddie Gaedel pinch hit in order to get a walk
- Hosting Grandstand Manager day - where the crowd decided on key on-field decisions
- Staging morning games for wartime third shift workers
- Introducing baseball's frist avant-garde uniform - a pullover top and bermuda shorts

Lost behind his stunts were some pioneering successes that have a legacy extending to today:
- the first American League owner to sign a black player Larry Doby
- the first to put player’s names on the backs of their jerseys so the fans could more easily identify them
- signed the oldest rookie - 42 year old Satchel Paige, a Negro league star
- the first to introduce the “exploding scoreboard,” a scoreboard with electronic effects that were unleashed when the home team hit a home run
- the first to do fan-appreciation nights
- a couple of world series to their name
- the first owner to hire Tony Larussa
- the designer and planter of Wrigley Field ivy
- intorducing the curtain call for people that made big plays or hit home runs
- singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in the 7th Inning

In three years, he grew Clevelend's attendance from just over 500 thousand to 2.6 million

And now Hall of Famer Bill Veeck's 12 Commandments (and survivor of 33 surgeries), sounds like he would have fit into the most interesting part of Silicon Valley very easily :

1) Take your work very seriously. Give your all. Go for broke.

2) Never ever take yourself too seriously! He loved to paraphrase Shakespeare: "What fools we mortals be!"

3) Find your alter ego. A Rudie Schaffer, and bond with him for the rest of your professional life.

4) Surround yourself with similarly dedicated soul-mates of whom you can ask "why?" And "why not?" Naturally, they may ask the same of you! Never hire a coat-holder.

5) In your hiring be color-blind, gender-blind, age-and-experience blind. You never worked for Bill Veeck; you worked with him. Everyone was in it together and you were allowed to make a mistake every once in a while.

6) Attend every home game and never leave a game until the last "out." It's rude!

7) Answer all of your mail. You may learn something.

8) Listen and be available to your fans-customers. Again, you might learn something.

9) Enjoy and respect media members-the stimulation, the challenge. The "them-against-us" mentality should exist only between the teams on the field.

10) Create an aura in your city of operation, that you'd better be at the ballpark, at the game lest you miss something exciting and unexpected. No offense to radio and television, but at the ballpark you are a participant not just a spectator.
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11) If you don't think a promotion is fun, don't do it. Don't ever put on something "for the masses." Never insult your fans. It was Ed Linn who summed up Bill's philosophy about "fun at the ole ballpark." "Every Day a Holiday and Every Fan a King" and-Queen, naturally.

12) Don't be so concerned with structured "photo ops" to preserve for some future viewing, that you miss the essence of what is happening at the moment. Instead, let things happen. Cherish the moment, commit it to memory. After all, the popular expression, "are we having fun yet?" was not manufactured out of whole cloth.

To think that some of the ideas and philosophies stemmed all the way back to the '40s and '50s - Veeck might have been the original viral marketer.

The 11Cs of Community - #1 Communication/Content

2009-07-07T08:34:35-04:00

In an 11 part series, I'll be breaking down the essential components and tools of great online brand community sites.

The first 4 are "table stakes" - a high percentage of communities are aware of them and do them, they just need to do them well (communication, competition, customization and conversation).

The next 4 are "take 'em or leave 'em" practiced by 1/2 the communities we run across (connection, community, categorization and collective wisdom). The last 3 are rarely practiced or practiced well but truly harness the potential of an army of enthusiasts when executed correctly (co-creation/ collaboration, contextrual extesnions and culture-building).

On to #1 - Communication & Content.

Like any website, communities have to deliver communication effectively, efficiently and provocatively. In communities, the ability to convey a lot of multimedia information in an inherently uncontrolled environment presents some challenges. Given that most communities "seed past" were built around pioneering yet really clumsy looking sites from the 90's like "The Well", good web design and "pleasing on the eyes" user experience is sacrificed at the altar of functionality and good web practice.

So when you run across a community-based website that works good, feels good and looks good. You sit back and admire. I had a number of sites that present their photos, blogs, information, video, user gen content, albums, news and updates well but we settled on American Express' Open Forum (screen shot pictured above).

What do I like about Open Forum?

- a clear purpose statement

- a great secondary top menu, getting you to the key interaction areas - business stories, forums, blogs and member wall

- a smart menu breakdown of the 5 constituent areas of the site

- a video flash based area where the most important content bubbles up

- a prominent login and call to action for current and new members

- countdown clocks, countdown clocks - I love the conveyal of "something important coming this way"

- a secondary flash based area that covers off top leading content with transparent bacground messaging

- a tag based menu architecture to allow for random surfing and top subjects of interest

- shining the light on cardmembers and highlighting their contributions through their "insight area"

- video, news and content in clean 3 column interface

- branding - a good secondary balance and support for more explicitly American Express branding and benefits - the sponsorship of the site is clear that it is American Express-driven (in fact, they could have heightened the brand presence even more without giving it a salesy look and feel)

- a search area to easily sort for content and people

- a bottom menu that is loaded but not overbearing

- a member signup area that is straightforward and presents other members who have already joined - also uses intelligent dropdwons that speeds up the signup experience

- an RSS feed on content, added subtly to the front page

- a colour coded, well integrated forum that looks like it was built with readability not technical ability in mind

- a well presented blog with highlights on affiliated subject matter experts

- the use of community guidelines which takes legalease and good intuition and puts it into a nicely packaged 12 clause statement

- a privacy policy that has a parent menu followed by all the legalease

My only four issues with Open Forum are:

1) not allowing the user generated side of the site to surface beyond certain areas and the ability for these same people to join groups, connect and create their own mini-communities. The site is great partly based on the funds American Express has put in to buy or broker interesting content. Perhaps what's in the works for their relaunch is to take the same design credos and apply it to their open and networked member side of the fence.

2) the ability and incentive to refer others, from a simple "tell-a-friend" functionality to sophisticated social network integration - simple builds could increase referral at little expense, effort or design compromise.

3) The site did not feel well-integrated within the social web - no perceived integration with other sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Flickr, although there was an RSS feed and a tweet tracking widget on their blog posts. Maybe intentional to keep the exclusivity of their audience but may be undermining the traffic funnel they could create (currently the site has 13,000+ regsitered members).

4) granted the cardmember/small business audience may appreciate this or find this comfortable, but the site can look too corporate in some areas, and not enough "taking off the tie and shoes" content areas. Perhaps nit picky - but that much pale blue, grey and black sets me off sometimes.

Overall though, a well planned, well-designed and well-executed communication/content/community site for a well-targeted community of people.

Next Online Community Tool C post - Competition

Bring Your Luck

2009-07-01T23:12:42-04:00

I maligned the creative industry's use of advertising the other day in The Absolute Waste of Outdoor Advertising, so I thought I would at least heap praise when I noticed a good one that turned my head.

This Fallsview Casino ad taken from the Gardiner Expressway In Toronto (always challenging to take pictures with one hand on the steering wheel).

Smart, eye catching...and how much does it cost really to make 4 large pieces of 3D underwear?

The Evolution of Brands & The Sixth Phase - Wiki Brands

2009-07-01T14:49:05-04:00

Marketing and culture at large, has a pretty short memory. They know what is in front of their face and they know what happened yesterday, not so great at placing things in context. Blogging 2004, YouTube 2005, My Space/ 2006, Facebook 2007, Twitter 2008 (strange we haven't heard about the new on the scene 2009 thing yet). We are a flavour of the day, ADD-driven, low mental storage capacity industry, which makes us tough to see the forest from the trees.

Let's unveil the curtain of history for a moment. When you consider this wondrous art of marketing and communications that has flourished into this $350 billion economic juggernaut, we really have only been practising it for 150 years. People are sounding off about the end of this sometimes poisoned practice with the onset of new technology, the new social "shiny things" and new business models, when really it's still in its early adolescence (and like most adolescents is going through an awkward phase).

My postulation is we've seen 6 distinct phases of marketing and brand development. Each phase marked by a different driver of brand value, a different brand-customer relationship, a different focus of management and a different force at work within society and the marketplace that brings about change.

This would probably make for a really good Ken Burns 24 part documentary, but I'll give the abridged version here. A

In the beginning, there was a trademark - with the advancement of business law, brands became signatures for "hands off, my property". A good brand owner back in the 1860s wanted a distinct mark that made it their own and would display it prominently. Company marks ceded way to brand marks, in fact, the world's first legally registered brand trademark was Bass Ale's red triangle in 1875 and having once managed the brand in Canada, I can testify it is still in existence today.

As markets expanded, distribution networks became more efficient and the industrial revolution rolled into high gear, brands started to have a bigger geographic reach. Your customer base wasn't just the 8 general stores in your vicinity - but customers that spanned states, regions and countries. Brands became icons of trust and good value for customers. Companies started to produce brandmarks extensions to a portfolio of company products. In the late 1800s, P&G's brand Ivory became the soap everybody wanted because it was so pure 99.44%, mild on children and that it would float. Mass produced products started to push away locally produced versions based on good product quality at a better price - good branding helped aid the spread of these products.

In the golden age of mass market brands starting in the 1920s, increasing wealth and aspirations, caused corporate innovation to flourish - automobiles, appliances, exotic travel, radios then TVs - all became attainable by the middle class. A brand became a badge - a set of associations that satisfied our real and perceived wants and fulfilled our dreams and communicated that to others as well, from simple household items to big purchases. Think Marlboro. Think Ford. Think Tiffany's. Think Coca-Cola. Brands became embued with values, frequently promoted by celebrity spokespeople that embodied those values and efficiently communicated through 3 TV channels, your local 8 radio stations or 3 local newspapers- no further questions asked.

Fast forward to the 80s and 90s, and we started to have a surplus of stuff. Grocery stores saw an eight-fold rise in the number of products that carried. From expanding retail big box stores to global competition to corporate love of line extensions and the rise of generics, there was an explosion of choice for customers in every industry. In this post mass market brand era, brands had to stand for something and as Ries & Trout outlined in their book Positioning, the need to be first in something in the customer's mind was key. Brand managers focused on building brand equity and strengthening their credentials on some attribute or another. Well owned positions were able to charge a premium and withstand the increasing power of retail demonstrated by Walmart's rise to power. Volvo for safety. BMW for experience. Mercedes for luxury. Cadillac for prestige. You get the picture - owning something important and maniacallyt adhering to the script was the plan.

But what happens when there is just too much stuff and not enough attention to go around. Good positioning is no longer enough to overcome a customer's increasing lack of attention, time and trust. Even if you can claim superiority, do I believe you? do I care enough to listen? or do you get past my attention span inundated by media and product proliferation?

In a Lovemark world, popularized by Kevin Robert's book of the same name, brands in this recent era are applying cause marketing, story telling and design leadership to overcome customer hurdles and force them to love us. Apple. Virgin. Stella Artois. Starbucks. Dyson. Southwest Airlines. Moleskine. Target. RED products. RED Bull. All brands succeeding based on remarkable brand affinity that goes past simple brand features or equity and focuses on creating an extraordinary, well-loved experience. Lovemarks are able to get past the mass media glut, the pressure of getting on shelf, the commodification of categories and short product life cycles because people simply adore them.

My belief is we are just at the beginning at a very different phase of brand life that requires a complete 180 degree turn on what we have learned and what might have worked over the last 5 phases. I've outlined this as the Wiki Brand era and have written a critically acclaimed paper of the same title talking about what brands now need to do in a customer controlled marketplace.

We're talking new ways of positioning, new ways of targeting, new ways of innovating, new ways of communicating, new ways of measuring, new media usage, new levels of openness and transparency and an overhauled marketing organization, skill set and structure. The ascendancy of broadcast media, mass marketing and command-and-control brand development is seriously threatened, if not made already irrelevant.

Marketing has become a function of what you actually do as a company not what you say you do. Going to market has become less about who you are targeting and more about who is involved. Brand success is less measured by how satisfied your users are and more about how excited and engaged they get. Gone are the days of brokering eyeballs, and a keen focus is being now directed to how companies build positive word of mouth.

Why? and why now? There are so many factors coming to play at once - I've tried to bucket the key 5 reasons -

Shifts in media - close to 70% of what's on the web now is not produced by companies or professionals but from people - users, customers, hobbyists are creating the stuff we hear of, know of and believe in- this is having profound effects on where and from whom customers are learning about their next purchased products, brands and services

Shifts in customer needs - as mentioned in my previous post "Mindnumbing Brand Sameness" - quality and leadership are tablestakes for product attributes, Wiki Brands deliver a lot, are unique in how they do it and involve their users along the way - they are delivering freedom, authenticity, experiences, innovation, personalization - this is what the new customer wants

Shifts in technology - the tools for life skills are in the hands of users - you can buy anything, produce anything, create your own media, evaluate anything via the web - there are few monopolies left as technology has created a level, much quicker-playing field

Shifts in business models - the most successful brands of the wiki brand era either have started online or migrated online, they are not saddled with legacy costs, the slowness of conventional thinking, the inefficiency of traditional business processes

Shifts in demographics - call them Generation Y, the Millenials, the Net Generation - but a demographically powerful group of people under 30 are flexing their teeth - they are tech savvy, they are collaborative, they are inquisitive, perhaps somewhat too entitled but crave particpation - they are also an increasing part of your customer base and employee roll call

Put together, these shifts are creating a sixth phase in marketing that demands collaboration, cooperation, co-development, crowdsourcing and in some cases, co-ownership of brands. Great brands are now the host of conversations. They are creating forums for their users to play, learn, experience, create, mashup, socialize and improve what they have. Think Zappos. Think Facebook. Think Mozilla. Think Threadless. Think Wikpedia. Think eBay. Think Lego. Think Wold of Warcraft. Think Wii. Think Nike Plus. Think Obama. Think Intuit. All engaging brands that are opening their worlds up for their users and creating and promoting the sparks for real two-way dialogue with their stakeholders.

This is the world Wiki Brands. So you just gotta ask yourself the question, "do you want to want to practice marketing in the 6th phase or something less than 5th? Well do you...traditional world punk.

History class dismissed.

Mind Numbing Brand Sameness

2009-06-29T09:12:12-04:00

"One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

Did you guess which thing was not like the others?
Did you guess which thing just doesn't belong?
If you guessed this one is not like the others,
Then you're absolutely...right! "

As marketers, were we having a "timeout" when other kids were learning this Sesame Street song and life principle? I think yes.

Whether it's the world of automobiles, airlines or retailers, we have so achingly little differentiation in our brands. What happened to the excitement people?

This weekend, I walked into no less than 13 shoe stores in one of local malls. Let me ask you - how many of them had - women's one side, men's the other, a central bank of chairs for sitting, rows of shoes on the side wall - 4-8 rows high, 2-4 awkwardly smiling sales clerks hovering, a clumsy sizing tool and angled stool for fitting and a fenced off register area toward back of store. Check. check. check. check. check. check. check. It was an ode to podiatric conformity.

No digital displays, no innovative store setup, no foot models, no coffee bar, no his & her couches, no running ticker on how many shoes were sold there today, no employee faves wall.

Yawn...if shoes are this boring, how do we make other more staid categories sing....and more importantly why is this happening?

Young & Rubicam may have the answer. They evaluated that 40 out of 44 categories have seen less differentiation than a decade ago with consequently less brand affinity and loyalty. With the recent economic downturn, this has almost reached crisis proportions with some major brands losing as high as 59% of their highly loyal users.

So after testing a battery of 50 attributes linked to brand value, here's Y&R's scoop.

The top 8 attributes linked to brand value are:
#1 High Quality
#2 -Trustworthy
#3 - Good Value
#4 - Reliable
#5 - Original
#6 - Simple
#7 - Fun
#8 - Leader

A wonderful and noble set of attributes to be sure, however if you put these attributes on a scale of differentiation, these attributes average rank sits at #36 on attributes that make your brand appear different.

Here's the problem - the attributes above are table stakes, the price of admission for getting in the game. Years ago, they may have actually meant something. Nowadays, everybody can claim some title to these attributes and even if you could uniquely, it can be quite tough to prove or raise to the level of consciousness in the customer mind and perception game.

No, here's what your "best practice" consultants aren't telling you. In order to truly drive brand value in a distracted, underwhelmed and over-sensated marketplace (and in my world, to get your brand noticed and talked about), you need to be maxing out on Y&R's top 8 differentiating attributes:
#1 Unique
#2 Dynamic
#3 Different
#4 Distinctive
#5 Innovative
#6 Visionary
#7 Daring
#8 Progressive

Dyson. Virgin. Westjet. Vespa. Zappos. Calvin Klein. Apple. This is the very DNA of their brand's existence.

So brand owners, please stop playing a game of "me too" and start singing the song we want to hear "one of these things is not like the others..."

The Absolute Waste of Outdoor Advertising

2009-06-23T09:42:31-04:00

Now before you accuse me of being a "head in the sand" digital addict that hates all forms of traditional media, let me state my case.

Used well, I believe outdoor ads can be one of the most effective traditional mediums.

With commuting times double what they were a generation ago and consumers' ability to filter nearly every other medium, outdoor has some unique built-in advantages - locally contextual-relevance, captive audience, ability to create beyond the medium itself (through digital display and 3D buildouts).

So I really want to be a fan Clear Channel, CBS, Pattison and Astral, you have a good thing going. I love your canvas, it's what gets painted on them that makes my eyes roll with the wasted marketing dollars at play.

- Is there not a school for good outdoor creative that you can send clients to?

- Is there not some price incentive that you can give discounts for really great creative?

- Can you not help these marketers invent or reinvent the medium?

- Will you please not build a blog to profile the best of the best, as opposed to letting us rely on the good work from adrants, Beyond Madison Avenue and others that profile where the best is happening in New York, Amsterdam or somewhere else but here.

Case in point, I was driving to my parents for Father's Day across two of our fair city's major arteries. Here's my summary of outdoor creative:

18 of the ads were decent - they created awareness for something new or interesting - whether it was the Tim Horton's $2.99 special or Bud Light's new Lime launch - not breakthrough but enough to wend their way into my sub-consciousness - most I would pass over but post enough of them and the message might sink in.

33 of the ads were a complete waste of money - they were an annoyance on the landscape - BMO in particular was bad, they asked questions that left people wondering, where the heck are the answers and does BMO even have them?

5 of the ads were downright incomprehensible transgressing the rules of nearly every good outdoor execution. Thankfully, most of the offenders were the small, one-off executions.

Just 3 of the ads were interesting, I repeat 3 out of 59. That is a bad batting average in any field of play, never mind advertising. These were the few that caused me to act, to at least take the extra step of going online to hear what the story was all about.

Casinoramavotes.com was the most interesting, with a series of ads asking people to vote "yes" or "no" to excitement. Although the web destination, was a big marketing disappointment, at least the outdoor execution caused me to act along with about 2,000 others according to the microsite's stats.

For God's sakes marketers, be interesting, will you. Let me provide some inspiration.

- Claritin used to have a pollen count meter board on the Gardiner that would tell people how allergic they might be that day - imagine that, outdoor that actually helps and perhaps sells more product

- James Ready asked people to get involved with their campaign, encouraging people to make an offer

- What can you not say about Ikea helping reinvent the medium and getting people's head's to turn and chins to wag

- BBC has helped reinvent the canvas that gets used, increasing its noticability and likely helping the outdoor guys make more money

- Mini - the best practitioners of hero outdoor - 90% of their outdoor's benefit is the PR it generates

- Lego - brilliant - that's all I have to say

- The Economist - guess what people, outdoor can interact and likely for no more than a couple of extra grand

- 3M - the torture test

- Fido - outdoor that entertains and truly understands the nature of its locations

- The Weather Network used to have such smart ads that played with your mind, invest in outdoor again, please!

- BC Hydro - outdoor that practices what it preaches

And this is only a small sampling:

Note to Rogers - if you're going to brag about Canada's best coverage - show me how many bars you're getting at your outdoor locale vs. your competitors

Note to Telus - love the animals campaign - but it's like wallpaper - can they not do something, interact with me, let me find 101 hidden meerkats around the city

I honestly was going to write more notes to advertisers for improving their stuff, but I couldn't remember any of the others. Please marketers, if you're going to waste money so lazily and carelessly, send it to me and I guarantee I'll put your budget largesse to much hungrier and better use.

Online Community - 25 Motivations and Incentives For Getting Involved

2009-06-22T17:51:55-04:00

The reasons that online communities fail can be chalked up to a number of factors, but by and large, it's not sub-par technology, lack of resources, bad creative or lack of client will.

No, the key factor concerns an inability to assess correctly or execute exactly what members want out of their community participation.

And people do want something. Trust me, it's not all peace, love, brand addiction and likability. Although that might keep them happy to participate for a few weeks, maybe a month without it appearing in front of them, they do see community participation as a reciprocal relationship.

And having too few incentives for participation is a recipe for building a ghost town of community. Tapping too many motivations in one platform and you get a bouillabaisse of confusion.

We've listed the 25 core motivations for rallying around a community in the above chart and an example of an incentive or online piece of functionality that addresses each motivation.

They end up being grouped into three very different camps of motivation:

Intrinsic - this motivation is based on the feeling that you've joined something you identify or affiliate with and can get behind - by and large, brands and companies, in and of themselves, are not big enough or attractive enough to create this level of engagement - a chronic mistake companies make is overstating their importance in people's lives - investing in ideas bigger than the brand itself is a tenet of healthy sponsored, brand communities

Extrinsic - this motivation addresses the quality of your standing and public profile in front of your peers improving by participating actively - highlighting contributions, featuring profiles and establishing VIP tiering or leaderboards are all powerful incentives for building personal reputation as part of community participation, and although we don't like to admit it - upper case Ego ("I'm the best") and lower case ego ("I'm recognized for my worth") are basic human instincts that can and should be harnessed

Explicit - this type of motivation is tangible and explicit and answers the "what's in it for me" question - perhaps it's merely access to information or maybe there needs to be a physical reward but community builders often under-estimate the amount of "dollars and cents or special access content" involved in creating community participation beyond the call of duty, and very occasionally they over-invest in this area (at the expense of others) leading to a dependence on "stuff" that can't be maintained as community grows

So the next time, a boutique technology company tries to sell you a 2.0 platform or a communications agency sells you on a sexy looking flash-based site for 6 digits - ask yourself the fundamental question - "why the hell would I sign up for this community in the first place?". The answer could be the most important driver to your community's success or failure.