This will be the last blog post I'll write on this Website.
Let me take a step back.
In February of 2006, before TikTok, Snap, Facebook, and Twitter, there was a form of social media built on the open Web where like-minded people found others like them, (as well as audiences). They were called blogs.
I picked a weekend during this coldest of months in Chicago to dig into what it would take to learn more about this space. I was intrigued by the potential and had become a reader of blogs myself. I started writing about what I knew most about back then—my first blog post was about user experience design (we call it UX now).
Blogging opened up a whole new world to me as the Web started becoming more social. Before I knew it, I had built an audience, started getting invited to speak all over the world, and I had new career opportunities which stretched me in entirely new directions from advancing leadership abilities to learning communications and public relations to expanding my knowledge through practice in the broader category of marketing as well as business transformation.
The world has changed much since 2006, and a recent Pandemic has accelerated decades of change and transformation in less than two years. We're only just at the beginning. Like many others, my career was unceremoniously disrupted and faced with uncertainty; I started my own venture with the fortune of securing some early contracts while dealing with my own fairly substantial case of Covid. I am happy to report—that which doesn't kill you, does in fact make you stronger. Yes, I've learned firsthand about the over-hyped word "resilience."
And as it turns out that when change is accelerated—experience in managing change comes in handy. I've found myself working with some amazing partners and hope to share more on that later when the time is right.
So, a new chapter begins. I'll still be writing and sharing insights, but not here. You can find me at the following places:
Armano Design Group We’re a design-inspired strategic consultancy that untangles complexity with purpose and passion so projects can be executed with precision. We help organizations solve complex marketing, communications, and business problems—by design.
David by Design Newsletter on Substack: Personal thoughts, observations, and insights Subscribe Here
"I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road." ~Stephen Hawking
This year's Superbowl was historic on two accounts:
1. It is the first Superbowl to have ever been won in overtime 2. It will be known as the Superbowl that brought Brand Activism into the mainstream
What Is Brand Activism? Simply put—it's when a brand decides to take a definitive stance on a societal issue and bring it front and center into its messaging or value proposition. And it's not totally new—one of the most well known examples of Brand Activism is P&G's #Likeagirl campaign which artfully brought the societal issue if gender equality into its core message of empowerment. Brand activism is part art, part science and part sociology. When done right, it aligns the brand and company's values with the values of consumers. When done wrong—it's heavy handed, forced, contrived or disconnected from how the company and brand functions.
When Should a Brand Take a Stance? A complex question to answer and it's a different answer for different brands. Some brands will look to Brand Activism as a way to remain or obtain relevancy with consumers and audiences. Others will do it because it is in line with either the company's or brand's stated values. And yet others may have a direct stake in the issue.
84 Lumber for example (a brand most people have never heard of) is in the midst of a recruiting campaign and logically who and how they hire is an issue likely on their minds:
"Under owner Maggie Hardy Magerko, the daughter of founder Joe Hardy, 84 Lumber currently operates more that 250 stores across the U.S. and it's planning to expand further by putting up new outlets on the West Coast.
Sunday's Super Bowl ad comes as the company is in the middle of a recruitment campaign."
But there may be more than just employment at stake—from 84 Lumber's Website:
Brand Activism When Done Right Means Both Living and Speaking a Brand's Values One can make the case that what 84 Lumber is doing is using a platform and compelling storytelling that supports the values which are true to the company. It took a chance to communicate those values on such a large stage and as a result—has the attention and awareness of a broader audience. Is this what the brand hoped to achieve? Likely—but there may be deeper foundational forces at play.
Brand Activism in a Politically Charged Climate Given recent events regarding Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the U.S.—the world is debating with itself. Individuals are questioning traditional institutions such as government and media and an air of uncertainty remains constant. In this world, brands are beginning to become more vocal around the issues they know their consumers think about and in the next four years at minimum, as brands look to fill the trust gap left by government and media—Brand Activism will become part of how they are built and maintained.
If a brand is irrelevant in our lives—it is a brand on the decline. Some brands have to work harder than others to remain relevant. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and other brands that we interact with on an hourly, daily or weekly basis are easily made relevant in our lives given our interactions as users. Other brands often have to work harder to remain relevant.
This year's Super Bowl is a good gut check for brands who will be working to remain highly relevant in the hearts and minds of consumers already in a committed relationship with the brand as well as those who aren't. Advertising and brand storytelling often reflects the culture, trends and increasingly the societal issues of the day. But in bringing the three together it also presents a tall order for today's brands who will likely hit the target with some and totally miss with others:
Culture: The context of which we live in often reflected by entertainment, news, media etc.
Trends: What's getting our attention at the time—things that impact how we live and work ranging from technology to art, music etc.
Societal Issues: The topics of our time reflecting social-economical and cultural context. The things we debate or deem critical to society.
Many advertisers during this year's big game find themselves at the intersection of culture, trends and societal issues. As a result, they are going to need to answer the question of "was it worth it" in a more nuanced ways. On face value—measuring the effectiveness by a Super Bowl ad in terms of views is the most traditional way to do it. But for brands who are dialed up at the intersection of culture, trends and societal issues—measuring views will not be enough. They must also break down sentiment indicators such as:
• Likes/Dislikes • Positive Responses (media, social, search) • Negative Responses media, social, search) • New Subscriptions and Followers • Lost Subscriptions and Followers
One of this year's Superbowl Ads which is operating at the intersection of culture, trends and societal issues is Audi—taking on equal pay through its ad and subsequent hashtag #Driveprogess. From Adweek:
The 60-second spot, posted Wednesday to YouTube and Facebook and closing in on 5 million views as of noon Friday, has a remarkably high ratio of negative sentiment—almost 40,000 dislikes to just 4,000 likes. There are two separate criticisms—one, that the ad is simply leftist propaganda; and two, that it is hypocritical because of the company’s heavily male leadership team. (Audi AG’s board of directors, too, has six men and no women.)
The Pressure to Remain Relevant for Brands In a Politically Charged Culture is High 2017's Superbowl advertising is a reflection of today's culture in that brands increasingly feel the need to be a part of the dialogue despite societal divisions—so we're likely to see more brands attempting to be relevant at the intersection of culture, trends and societal issues. As a bonus—it also demonstrates a level of "responsibility" especially if the brand feels like it's taking the right stance on the right issues. However, success in this space cannot be discerned by reach alone. Sentiment metrics will become increasingly important for brands asking the question:
We're entering a new era of consumer activism as a result of societal divisions, a lack of distrust in once trusted institutions such as media and the mainstreaming of peer to peer information sharing enabled through social media. But how far should brands go to take a stance?
The answer to this question is as complex as the issue itself. For some brands, it's a matter of public perception, for others— a matter of principle and for others, it means aligning the values of their brand with the values of their consumers:
Taking a Stance Is Not Without Risk This Sunday, Budweiser will be airing an ad that takes on the issue of immigration head on. It does so in a powerful and emotive way—tying it to to its heritage and making the case that the brand would not be what it is today without immigration.
Budweiser's message for what they stand for and believe in is clear—but the question left unanswered at this point is how the message will resonate with the millions of consumers who have affinity for the brand. Will some cheer the move while others feel alienated by it? Will the typical Budweiser consumer appreciate the not so subtle stance? For every action there is a reaction which prompts a response from brands and for Budweiser, what's yet to be seen is the full reaction to their message.
Balancing Consumer With Brand Activism If we're seeing a perfect storm for consumer activism, then by logic the cause and effect becomes a form of brand activism. And this is where brands will need to do a gut check on their values and the alignment with the values of their consumers. Much like how social sentiment and search engines provided indicators for what people REALLY thought about Donald Trump—brands will have to have the finger on the pulse of their core consumers now more than ever. The stakes could not be any higher for the relationship between consumer and brand.
Consumer Activism: Just Getting Started Since the inauguration of president Trump, we've seen protests seemingly organized on a dime whether it be The Women's March, The March for Life or the recent immigration protests at local airports. These actions, however will not be limited to the protests in public but also in protests of the purse or at least the #hashtag. Case in point—when Uber announced that it would be removing surge pricing to pick up the slack caused by NYC cab drivers who joined immigration protests it was seen by some customers as profiting from an issue they vehemently disagreed with.
And from this, the #Deleteuber "movement" was born with people screen grabbing their deletion of the app, swearing allegiance to Uber's competition and encouraging peers to do the same. While consumer activism isn't new by any stretch of the imagination—today's record levels of distrust in once trusted institutions (see Edelman's Trust Barometer) combined with peer connectivity sets the stage for a dramatic increase of the phenomena.
From Brand Awareness to Consumer Activism For brands to raise their level of readiness in an era where consumer activism becomes more commonplace—marketers must think about four key stages in addition to the traditional funnel. Each stage carries with it a positive or negative impact for a brand.
Awareness + Positive: Consumer has general awareness of a brand and its values and finds them relevant - Negative: Consumer has low awareness of brand and its values and brand is not relevant
Affinity + Positive: Consumer has a high affinity for the brand and preference as a result - Negative: Consumer has low affinity for the brand and does not show loyalty
Advocacy + Positive: Consumer will recommend brand to others and actively promote it - Negative: Consumer will speak negatively about brand and actively criticize it
Activism + Positive: Consumer will actively defend or take action which benefits brand - Negative: Consumer will actively take action which damages brand (reputation or financial)
Source: Buzzfeed Earning Trust in an Era of Consumer Activism Emerging societal demands and divides combined with peer connectivity provide the perfect storm for consumer activism and brands must find ways to earn not only the loyalty but trust of their consumers. Edelman's 2016 Earned Brand study outlines that most brands engage consumers in a way that interest and involve them but fall short of getting them invested to the point where consumers would advocate on their behalf or act as "activists" in their favor.
Handle With Care: Consumer Activism Will Force Brands to Examine Their Values If nothing else, consumer activists will force brands to ask themselves "what do we stand for"? The biggest risk for a brand in dealing with a low trust environment is to act inauthentically, contrived or in a way that feels opportunistic. Still, consumers will continue to evaluate brands not only by how relevant they are in their lives—but how responsible they feel they are. Or to put it another way, how much they feel they have in common in terms of their values. If a brand today cannot express or articulate those values—it risks leaving its intent and action open to interpretation.
If you’ve come here looking for the latest thinking on virtual reality, drones and autonomous driving—you’ve come to the wrong place. Marketers are an interesting bunch—we pride ourselves on “being in the know”, with some good reason… Part of our jobs are to stay one step ahead of the game so we are better prepared for the changes that inevitably effect the business of our industry. But in the pursuit of staying ahead of future trends—we often overlook massive shifts that need to be operationalized over the next five years, if not decade. In the pursuit of keeping our eye on the ball—I’ve identified six near term trends influencing the business of marketing:
From Media Channels To Media Ecosystem Blame Digital. Just when we were getting used to shifting efforts and dollars to reflect not only print, television, radio and the internet—the internet itself has fragmented into a million tiny little pieces which blur the lines between paid, owned, earned and even social when it comes to dollar spend—and that’s not even getting into how it all get’s measured. Case in point—in the past year, MTV has seen it’s traditional television viewership of the Video Music Awards decline 34%. However if you look closely at the numbers, digital views including Facebook Live Streaming increased 70%. The problem here? MTV has yet to monetize the ever fragmented and complex digital media ecosystem and still relies on traditional TV advertisers to make money.
This makes the jobs of the media creators, buyers, sellers and strategists, well—complicated. Marketers are reluctant to embrace this complexity in their need to reach the largest and most targeted audiences they can. But in the near term—this complexity must be dealt with by diving deeper into digital and re-defining how, where and when dollars are spent within the complete media ecosystem vs. the easiest parts of it to put spend against.
From Text That Tells To Visuals That Show The entire Web is being re-built for visual and video content. Before you dismiss this as “obvious”—we must take into account that the previous and dominant version of the Internet became mainstream with the advent of Google’s search engine and search was and to some extent still is a game of text, meta tags, keywords and text based organic content popularity. Now let’s look at demographics: Boomers, and GenX grew up on traditional literacy in the written word. Millennials and GenZ are growing up on what I call “visual literacy” which is accentuated by platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube which are video and visual dominated as opposed to text driven.
It is this visual literacy combined with the changing face of how we not only search for but receive content which is changing before our very eyes. marketers have spent years perfecting their Keywords and then finding ways to get text based links to their written content shared on social media but increasingly it’s video that gets shared directly through a multitude of apps that is becoming the dominant social currency. Brands have yet to master modern forms of video and visual storytelling as even the rules are changing in this space. Snapchat for example favors short, compelling vertical video formats which tend to perform well. For marketers—many who built their craft on taglines or standard 30 second television commercials—these forms of video content (not ads) are foreign and still largely untapped. Marketers will need to re-think video, visual storytelling and the production of these things from the ground up in this new world if they are to remain relevant.
From Mobile Last To Mobile First We take for granted that Facebook is one of the most popular apps in the world and most of us access it from our mobile devices. But in the early days of Facebook—there was a time that they found themselves on the defense when it came to mobile and believe it or not—they actually didn’t get it. In less than a year—they transformed themselves into a “mobile first” company from the top down and had some of the most talented developers in the world at their disposal to see this transformation through. Unfortunately, even the world’s biggest and most resourceful brands and agencies do not have these resources nor the imperative to re-invent their organizations to think, act, and operate within the same context as their mobile consumers, customers and employees.
Thanks to Google, marketers have good reason to prioritize mobile development as their way forward since Google actually dings Websites that they deem are not responsive or functional in the mobile environment. But the shift to mobile is much more than making our Websites mobile friendly. It means we need to intimately understand how our audiences want to consume, create, share and interact with our brands. It’s one of the leading reasons we’ve seen customers shift to expressing their dissatisfaction about a brand experience or service publicly—they have a megaphone in their pocket at all times. We’ve done a disservice to our industry by treating mobile as a “duh”—it requires a complete transformation in many ways due to its impact on our daily behaviors. Facebook had it right—brands and agencies should do the same.
From Reliance On Media Companies To Being Your Own Media Company “Publishing Is The New Marketing”. Sounds good—easier said than done. But the reality is that thanks to social media—most marketers are already in the business of publishing whether they know it or not. Got a brand presence on Facebook or YouTube? Congratulations, you’re in the content business. The problem however is that most content isn’t very good and so marketers find themselves solving the wrong problem.
It’s not about creating content as much as it is about cultivating targeted and high quality audiences who want to hear from you again and again.
In the pursuit of cultivating quality audiences who not only are willing to consume a brand’s content but want to share and potentially co-create with the brand, marketers must understand how to engage with audiences not only during their “tentpole” campaigns but daily, weekly. monthly and quarterly. This is where the dynamics of marketing and publishing mix and brands are still scrambling to figure out how to do this.
From Ad-Hoc Influencer Engagement To Integrated Influence Marketing When CBS 60 Minutes does a feature on Influencer Marketing—you know it’s not fleeting trend anymore. However this space as familiar as it seems is new territory for marketers. Unlike traditional celebrities—most of these cultural influencers such as social media stars and Youtubers are creators who have built their OWN audiences using their OWN channels. So to protect their reputations with their audience—their preference is to collaborate and co-create with brands as opposed to endorse and act as spokespeople the way traditional celebrities have always done.
In addition—most brands are currently treating these kinds of partnerships as one-offs or ad-hoc engagements vs. re-thinking how they interface not only with cultural influencers but ALL influencers who often play off each other when it comes to reaching mass audiences often times through our peers. It will take years for marketers to fully evolve and build the process to support this in a much more integrated and scalable fashion beyond one off campaigns and programs. This entire space is still in its infancy.
From Brand Value Proposition To Brand Values Lock yourself in a room with the most seasoned and senior marketing executives and they will nod their heads when presented with research that reflects the purchase habits of millennials, especially one key shift—millennials are often influenced not only by the products, services and “value proposition” of the brands they buy from—they are also curious and care about how the brand acts, how it participates and what it “stands for” in a societal context. If they feel like the brand is aligned with some or all of their own personal values—these influence behaviors from purchase through to loyalty. My Employer (Edelman) produced research that most consumers are “involved” with brands but are open to “commitment”. And in many cases, being committed goes beyond traditional value proposition attributes such as quality, convenience and price.
The premise seems deceptively simple. Many brands understand this and in response have gone out of their way to show how they are “going green” or “doing good”—often through corporate channels that are responsible for these kinds of messages. But this shift goes beyond messages and block and tackle corporate communications. Marketers have mastered the art and science of building brands in the hearts and minds of consumers by balancing their emotional and rational needs. Products had to show they would actually work but the most successful brands went further and endeared themselves to consumers through appealing to their emotions (Think Nike—Just Do It)
Thanks largely to millennials—this is no longer enough. Marketers need to re-examine their value proposition and ask themselves if their brand’s “values” are clearly articulated and if their actions, marketing and every touchpoint with a consumer and customer backs this up. It goes beyond satisfying rational and emotional needs but adding the third dimension of “societal” but above all else—all three dimensions need to be true to the brand and supported by proof points. This becomes not only the job of the chief communications officer and CEO but the CEO, CMO and CEO working in tandem. Few brands have been able to successfully “stand for something” because it takes a village to pull this off right and in line with the brand values. But whether it’s #Optoutside or #LikeAGirl—when done authentically, it resonates.
If you’ve gotten this far, than you’re probably thinking that none of the above is new to you. And that’s the point—it isn’t. But the marketing industry has yet to fully make the needed shifts in most or nearly all of the above trends based on my observations and in working directly with clients. These trends each bring with them great opportunities but require companies whether brands or agencies to evolve priorities, re-evaluate staff and agency mix and place bets in areas that are still developing or require extra effort to measure. They may not be as sexy as virtual reality or cars which drive themselves—but in the next five or so years, it is how well we operationalize against these trends that may benefit marketers most in the near future.
Before there was social media—before there was mobile and the video revolution, there was blogging. Once heralded as a revolution in communications and to a degree, marketing—self expression and direct publishing of the written word became an influential force to be dealt with.
Blogging, in written word form of has been a commodity for some time.
Even as I write this on the reality is less people are taking in the written word, opting instead for “junk food” media which comes in highly shareable and snackable bits of sticky, mobile optimized content.
Today however, it is content itself that has and will continue to become the commodity. Content in all forms—even mobile optimized and snackable content. There’s simply too much of it.Most of it is not very good and even if it is—the amount of effort it takes to make sure that content will travel far and wide makes for considerable effort. Many will do this well but more will fail.
So what is value in today’s connected marketing and media landscape?
Culture
The ability to create it, influence it, co-create it and integrate a brand so seamlessly in culture and relevant sub cultures.This is the next frontier of marketing and communicationsand while it has much to do with things like social, mobile and content—it is the cultural aspect that must lead while everything else follows. A very excellent article in Harvard Business Review reflects some of this shift, labeling it within the context of something Douglas Holt calls “Crowdculture”:
“While companies have put their faith in branded content for the past decade, brute empirical evidence is now forcing them to reconsider. In YouTube or Instagram rankings of channels by number of subscribers, corporate brands barely appear. Only three have cracked the YouTube Top 500. Instead you’ll find entertainers you’ve never heard of, appearing as if from nowhere.
YouTube’s greatest success by far is PewDiePie, a Swede who posts barely edited films with snarky voice-over commentary on the video games he plays. By January 2016 he had racked up nearly 11 billion views, and his YouTube channel had more than 41 million subscribers.”
The challenge for brands is that they often times cannot create culture by themselves.Today’s culture creators often thrive in “sub cultures”—niche groups that exist under more mainstream areas whether it be food, sports, fashion—lest you think this only applies to “consumer brands” it does not.Subcultures exist in business as well and continue to diversify as business itself becomes more specialized and niche.
Brands and Organizations Must Become Collaborators and Co-Creators of Culture
Today and tomorrow’s challenge for brands and organizations is to tweak their marketing and communications infrastructure so they can effectively collaborate with influencers of culture across the spectrum.If brands cannot create culture from scratch—they can co-create it with the right partners across the paid, owned, earned and social spectrum.But to do this at scale, they must understand the ecosystem of influence and re-structure internally to connect that ecosystem and approach peer to peer influence from all sides.
The Influencer Ecosystem
Brands and organizations who wish to influence culture and become co-creators of it, must begin to coordinate how they approach working with those who wield influence, coming at it from different directions. For example, TIME magazine featured a cover telling us that we should “eat butter”. While earned in nature, the story and the journalists behind it are playing a key role in the resurgence of butter and how Americans are re-thinking fat. It’s an example of media influencing culture—in this particular example, this kind of influence cannot be bought—it must be earned, however, increasingly cultural influencers such as “YouTubers” require paid means to collaborate with. The influencer ecosystem can be broken down as such:
Cultural Influencers These can be celebrities but increasingly, it is the influencers of subcultures—those who are building audiences via Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube etc. that are becoming today’s trusted voices. In 2015, Variety reported on a survey which displayed a trend where digital celebrities (YouTubers etc.) began eclipsing traditional celebrities in terms of popularity:
“Sehdev predicts that within five years, YouTube stars will consume the entire top-20 celebrity influencer list, and aging teens will grow into a sizable fanbase for online talent overall. But that will require YouTube stars to remain genuine and relatable as they gain in popularity.”
However despite this trend, there are significant implications for brands. As stated above, the digital stars must remain genuine and relatable which makes working with them a challenge as brands must learn to collaborate vs. dictate heavy handed marketing. Also, brands must develop repeatable ways they can work with all levels of these types of influencers. As it is an emerging space often requiring complex contracts, disclaimers and transparency—it brings new operational dynamics to the table.
Reputational Influencers These can range from employees to thought leaders to analysts and experts and while they often influence consumers or customers who are highly informed and connected themselves. The challenge here for brands is that much of what they do in this space is often times disconnected from what they do with cultural influencers—but should be more integrated. Not long ago, Edelman (my employer) announced a strategic partnership with a start up called Dynamic Signal. One of the key benefits of their platform Voicestream is the ability to harness the networks of either cultural or reputational influencers acting as amplifiers of content that a brand places in front of them. Integration and accountability in terms of performance is now becoming possible, but brands must first connect efforts here.
Media Influencers As the TIME example illustrates—media in all its forms led by journalists and the media companies they work with can often influence culture and sub cultures also appealing to informed audiences who often share their content. But it isn’t just the “professionals”—while blogging itself has become much of a commodity there is still a role for blogger networks with niche audiences who have built audience and work with brands (often requiring a financial transaction) to incorporate their products and services into their content. But here again whether earned or paid—integration opportunity exists as what all three groups have in common is getting through to peer networks who then influence each other.
“Content Marketing” came after social media and mobile and it enjoyed a good run.But it’s not enough to create content in a complex media ecosystem that makes it extremely difficult to break though and earn attention.Brands will have to learn how to influence culture and sub cultures by collaborating with those who create it externally while coordinating their fractured functions internally. And they’ll have to do it in ways that can be repeated and scaled.
Q: When should a brand act like a publisher? A: Ad blocking software
You find yourself watching an entertaining series starring your favorite celebrity and Jerry Seinfeld. Or maybe it's your favorite internet cat celebrities joining forces in a holiday themed music video. Or it's a *satirical article from The Onion showing up in your Facebook feed. What the above have in common is the fact that none of them are the advertising most of us grew up with on our televisions or even desktops for that matter—but they are all working in the service of brands and organizations.
Welcome to the age of brands as publishers—designed for mobile screens, Google algorithms, social news feeds and driven by essential success metrics: "sharing and subscribing".
A brand marketing meets publishing model is nothing new, nor is the Hero, Hub, Hygiene approach coined by Google originally as an approach for YouTube. But as many brands are finding out, adding the nimble publishing approach to your existing global behemoth marketing machine is a daunting task. Just like any significant shift organizations must make to any part of their business—marketers both at the brand and agency level must find common ground in how they define major components:
Brand Platform A common mistake made in the worlds of marketing, branding and advertising is confusing a campaign with a brand platform which is akin to confusing a banana with a banana tree. For the sake of clarity—"Dove Campaign For Real Beauty" is a brand platform, while Dove Sketches was an activation that evolved into campaign like territory. As referenced in Building Modern Brands—a brand platform is foundational in nature and modern brands are evolving to reflect not only rational and emotional benefits, but articulating what they stand for in a societal context. Can campaigns be derived from brand platforms? Yes, but they are more evergreen in nature vs. moment in time and should influence all activations no matter how strategic or tactical.
Activations Unlike a brand platform—activations are more time and context sensitive. These are your programs, campaigns, events and other activities that will range from highly strategic and pre-planned to highly responsive and in the moment. Activations should be strategically aligned to the brand platform but also possess the flexibility to expand contextually. These are the ways the brand platform comes to life over time.
Hero Hero activations are where brands place their big bets. Typically these are the global integrated marketing campaigns though increasingly they can still be big bets without ever coming to life in traditional channels like television. These can also be big communications and engagement activations involving media and influencers. Regardless of classification, brands often times don't support more than one to two of these annually and sometimes they can extend beyond a single year.
Hub Hub activations can be more frequent and are often times less ambitious than a Hero campaign. Partnerships with media companies or digital influencers for example can often fall into Hub territory. Depending on the nature of the brand or organization—Hub activations could be as few as quarterly or as often as monthly. The rise of native advertising and sponsored content is currently fueling the popularity of Hub activations that don't always directly support a specific Hero campaign.
Hygiene Hygiene activations can fall into the "always on" "daily" or "content engine" classifications. Often times, Hygiene activations require multiple publishing touch points such as social channels or Web destinations. Barilla for example aggregates both Hygiene, Hub and Hero content onto its "**Passion For Pasta" Tumblr. Hygiene activations can be as frequent as daily and in some cases even hourly.
Hero, Hub and Hygiene all have two things in common: 1. Activations across all three must be coordinated. 2. Increasingly, they require a blend of a "marketing meets publishing mindset" in order to scale and operationalize.
And it is here where many organizations will face challenges. Integrated marketing is an apple while publishing is an orange. Increasingly brands will need both in order to remain relevant in the search engines and social news feeds of consumers and customers. To do this—marketers will have to genetically splice that apple and orange together to create an entirely new fruit, designed to work around the ad blockers and entice consumers to pause, take a bite and pass it on.
*The Udder Truth was created by Dairy Management Inc. in partnership with Edelman **Passion For Pasta is a Barilla Group activation executed in partnership with Edelman
Building brands in the mad men era was a relatively straight forward endeavor...
A brand needed to effectively communicate its value to the consumer, plainly stating its functional benefits and for the more enduring brands—connecting with consumers at the emotional level typically through a story told via television led advertising campaigns. The most iconic of brands over time, mastered the art of really digging into the "soul" of a brand. How it was differentiated from others and how it should be expressed in all parts of the world.
Building brands became something of a religious pursuit, with high priests and gatekeepers of brands in place to ensure that a brand did not become diluted. These guardians of brands created all kinds of doctrine meant to keep a brand's value proposition pure and true. Brands have always been built and expressed based on how they met consumers needs at the rational and emotional levels. More recently, brand stewards have been grappling with the notion of a brand's "purpose"—industry shorthand for how a brand's "values" take into account societal context. Can a brand stand for something bigger than itself? Does it exist for a higher purpose? Is there a cultural tension point that a brand has a right to participate in (or lead) a conversation around?
Data from Edelman's Brandshare study concluded that today's consumers look for and evaluate their relationship with a brand beyond traditional rational and emotional benefits into areas that veer into societal. Well over half of 10,000 consumers polled globally indicated that brands having a clear "mission and purpose" influenced how they felt about that brand.
It is this tension point that takes us back to the drawing board when it comes to the "soul" of a brand. But we cannot divorce this exercise from how a brand must be brought to life. The re-visiting of a brand's foundation requires taking another look at how it comes to life an today's always on, multi channel world. Modern brands must master the relationship between these three key facets for how brands sustain their relationship with consumers after answering what it stands for and against:
Strategy It's tempting to think at the program level (campaigns, etc.) that once a foundational brand strategy is set—we can go right to ideas and tactics both big, medium and small. Avoid the temptation. Strategy at the program level should be the nucleus of any program and it should inform and influence all ideas. It should present clearly the balance between meeting business, brand and consumer/customer objectives. Creativity Never has creativity been so important. People are rarely motivated by statistics and logic—but rich stories and experiences can lead to desired action. However, telling stories and designing useful, usable and desirable experiences requires out of the box thinking. Stories don't get shared by people unless they are exceptionally compelling, entertaining or educational. There are thousands of apps to compete with and digital influencers can often times build audiences better than brands can. Creativity is now complicated.
Agility Probably the newest and most disruptive dynamic out of the three. Most brands grapple with agility because they are still operating in a construct built for the industrial broadcast era of marketing. As I've outlined in Responsive Marketing, it's adding a layer of smaller more nimble initiatives than can help inform and even optimize the bigger more comprehensive programs that are still linear in nature. What both layers have in common is that they must move away from the launch and walk away model and move toward a model that puts various "things" in a live environment and adapts along the way. Google's Ben Jones recently pointed out the elephant in the room when it comes to agility:
"Advertising has radically shifted to be more agile, useful, and relevant in the always-on age of mobile. Yet the foundation of creative work, the creative brief, remains largely unchanged."
The creative brief shouldn't go away, but if you truly buy into the notion of agility then the doctrine of briefs and briefing must become more dynamic than static while preserving the ability to influence big, medium and even small ideas.
It's been said that the more things change, the more they remain the same. In the context of building and preserving brands—this holds somewhat true. A brand becomes a brand only the the hearts and minds of consumers. And today's consumers have ever evolving values, demographics and technology/lifestyle habits. We didn't walk around with super computers in our pockets years ago and millennials are a far cry from baby boomers.
Modern brands will be built and re-built on foundations which reflect these evolutions but they must come to life informed by strategy, inspired by creativity and designed for agility.
Moment in time—the world seems obsessed with the renaissance of app led live video streaming and the rivalry between MeerKat and Twitter backed Periscope.
Debating who will win is a moot point.
The real winner is digital video in all its forms—especially if it involves a popular app like Snapchat or a mobile optimized popular platform such as Netflix. The demise of traditional television happened somewhere around the time that YouTube began gaining popularity alongside with DVRs that empowered us to skip ads. Since then, things have only gotten worse for traditional, tied to the box television viewing. A recent poll found that millennials find YouTube entertainment and the stars who create it, more relatable and entertaining than TV.
And while YouTube continues its video dominance—content creators are flocking to where the future audiences are being built up. Take Snapchat's Discover "channel" on the native app featuring a mash up between "traditional"media companies such as CNN alongside more modern counterparts like Vice. What all of the media companies in Snapchat's Discover pilot have in common is that they realize that video is more popular than ever with today's content consumers—only they don't consume it the same way our parents did.
A Nightmare For Brands And The Media Industry The complete and utter fragmentation of video consumption has not been lost on those who standardized how brands and advertisers are supposed to measure the effectiveness of 30 second spots built during the industrialized era of madison avenue when TV consumption and the impressions that came with it, was a simple thing to measure. No longer—in fact it is Nielsen itself who has recognized that video viewing has changed dramatically, and they've put forth an effort called "Total It Up" to attempt to bridge the divide between how brand managers are incentivized to measure results with the reality of how people are actually consuming video content today.
Live Video Streaming Only Adds To The Fragmentation The race between MeerKat, Periscope and likely Google to dominate the latest trend in video consumption is significant but must be chalked up to a bigger trend that's been in the making for the past decade at minimum. Video is more relevant and popular than ever both from a consumption standpoint as well as production. But it's becoming impossible for brands and organizations to measure their effectiveness because they are simply not built for the future but rather for the past when TV and YouTube ruled the video world. Those days have rapidly come to an end and live streaming is the latest trend to accelerate the splintering.
Once upon a time I was a Creative Director. Creative Directors typically come from one of two backgrounds—"art" or "copy". Having more of a visual design foundation, I started there—but also learned the techniques of "concepting" and getting to what's known in the marketing industry as "a big idea". Things were simpler back then...
Big Ideas vs. Ruling The "Aggregators" Today, if you want your message and or communications to break through—you must understand how the "aggregators" work. What's an "aggregator"? Google, Facebook, Twitter, E-mail, Text Apps, Snapchat, Flipboard... it's anywhere content can be aggregated. It's not the homepage of a media company—it's not their apps either. It's the newsfeeds we either search or browse from. So who is ruling the aggregators?
Buzzfeed Mashable The Huffington Post Business Insider The Onion
There's more—but these media companies all have something in common—they blend editorial sensibilities with a deep understanding for how media spreads (or doesn't) online. They know when something is about to trend and generate the right content at the right time. They don't put out bland perspectives but rather generate headlines and take angles that are instantly snackable, interesting and sometimes even controversial. They package content with a keen eye for millennial relevancy (hello President Obama using a selfie stick). They are masters of catering to the algorithms that are the motors which make the aggregators run. The Big Idea Now the traditional creative process looks a bit different. It goes something like this:
Planner leads some type of research Ideally, a meaningful insight is uncovered Creative team is briefed Creative brief is drafted "Big idea" is identified Program is developed around big idea Program is launched and measured
It's a lot of steps, but despite the approach—it's still a relevant model as many of the advertising campaigns that resonate with us typically involve some version of the above process. During this year's Superbowl—the "Like a Girl" campaign from Always enjoyed a second wind of popularity boosted by the game's visibility and amplified via social and traditional media. Like a Girl is a big idea fueled by a powerful insight and it takes on a societal tension point—girls believe they can do anything when they are young, but something happens as they mature.
Where The Magic Can Happen So here's where I see both a challenge and an opportunity. In one model you've got a modern media centric approach leading the charge to dominate the aggregators. In the other model you've got a "creative" (for lack of a better word) approach, which comes at it a bit differently—seeking to uncover a powerful insight that can fuel a compelling narrative. Today, the opportunity for brands and organizations seeking to own the aggregators is to take the best of both approaches—seizing on a trend as effectively as Buzzfeed and crafting communications as powerful as #Likeagirl.
The challenge is that as brands start embracing the "act like a media company " mantra, they often have fledgling editorial operations working in silos from their creative teams. Neither team brings every critical skill to the table—they both have the potential to complete each other, but more times than not, they don't or if they do, it's an awkward dance. Some will get it right—Rue LaLa for example has both a content team with an editorial director paired along side a design team led by a creative director. It's the type of model I think we'll see more organizations adapt (editorial and creative).
In the quest for marketers and communicators to "own the aggregators"—social savvy creative and editorial talent will be needed. And perhaps the greater need will be the willingness for that organization to empower those teams to produce non bland, compelling content that takes a stance or puts an opinion forth. These are the things that break through and influence the algorithm the aggregators thrive on and the creative/editorial combination will become a necessity in order to break through.
The Responsive Brand In A Real Time Business Environment In Edelman’s Brandshare study of 15,0000 people worldwide—we asked consumers to tell us which brand behaviours were most important to them. The number one most important behaviour indicated was a brand’s ability to respond quickly to concerns and complaints with 78% of consumers saying it’s important but only 17% feeling brands do this well. But we think a brand’s responsiveness goes beyond replying to people’s concerns and also extends into all forms of communication and engagement in a real time context.
Recently, Chevrolet took the notion of responsiveness to new levels this week, when Rikk Wilde, a representative of the brand created an instant sensation by appearing extremely nervous and somewhat awkward on camera during the MVP award portion of the ceremony. What happened next, generated a real time water cooler effect that started on social media, but quickly spread through the media landscape with news media reporting the story. What Chevrolet did next is worth paying attention to as it demonstrated an “always on” and “always ready”, response which traversed paid, owned, and earned media channels at lightening speed.
A Bold Move To Humanize The Brand In a Moment of Authentic Imperfection Immediately after the “incident”, Tweets starting flooding the Internet with “memes” being created around “#Chevyguy” and what was quickly becoming a catch phrase “technology and stuff”. The conversation reached a point where stories started popping up from media outlets ranging from Mashable to the local outlets such as the New York Post. To further complicate the buzzstorm—the truck Chevy is gave away to the World Series MVP is actively being recalled due to an issue with air bags. This was all unfolding in real time and Chevrolet was faced with a choice—do nothing or proactively play a part in the unfolding narrative. They chose the latter.
Chevrolet quickly sprang into action—displaying they had enough courage and coordination to participate in a moment highly relevant to their brand. And rather than take a straightforward defensive position, they mad a bold move—playing on the human essence of the moment, turning it into an integrated marketing campaign overnight. They started with posts on social, but then took ownership of the “Technology and Stuff” line and put it front and center of a real-time campaign which was earning media coverage but now extended to their owned properties and paid placements including a full page print ad in USA Today.
Implications For Brands & Organizations: Promote vs. Protect vs. Both The implications for brands and organizations revolve around a core question linked to an emerging context. The context is that we operate increasingly in a real time business environment. The question is when and how do we promote or protect our brands in an environment that moves in real time (for an example of where a brand did the opposite and responded too late, see Poland Spring & #Watergate”). The implications of the Chevrolet example are that it chose to do both and had the resources in place to make an impact across media. Consider that the brand didn’t only tweet text, but essentially put out a visual “ad like object” which embraced the brewing conversations. It then updated its current campaign on their Website to integrate the now infamous #technologyandstuff line and it was able to coordinate a paid placement which was printed in a major national publication—all in approximately under 48 hours.
Integrated Marketing In Real Time We’ve long encouraged brands to set up the infrastructure of a “Creative Newsroom” so they are ready and able to tap relevant and emerging trends as they happen. Chevrolet was clearly able to do this by demonstrating a high level of responsiveness which no doubt started by having their ear to the ground and listening to the conversations the second they started. They then proactively took a stance and produced content, taking ownership of the conversation—a classic principle of the Creative Newsroom construct. Then they went further and integrated a quickly moving trend as part of their marketing campaign—taking the Creative Newsroom approach even further. The implications for brands and organizations is clear—in the not so distant future the majority of brands will have resources in place to do the following:
• Monitor All Media In Real Time The team and technology that lets a brand know instantly what the conversation is around them not only from social spheres but also from media outlets.
• Create Content Instantly The ability to create compelling content (beyond text) when conversations and media attention are both at their peak. • Coordinate Media With Agility (Paid, Earned, Owned) The ability to rapidly coordinate the resources of both agency and internal who lead efforts and media budget across paid, earned and owned properties to maximize distribution.
Chevrolet was able to take an authentically awkward moment and make it part of how they are promoting and protecting their brand and their product (Chevy trucks). They had the courage to embrace human flaw, and as a result, made themselves even more relatable to consumers.
While Google Glass appears to be in its death throes, Google is quietly if not systematically re-inventing the digital work horse many of us have a love hate relationship with (mostly hate these days)—E-mail. I've been spending some time with Google's recently released app simply called "Inbox" and after five minutes of use the only thing that kept popping up in my head was this:
Is it possible that Google is making e-mail enjoyable again?
That's a lofty goal because right now for many of us, e-mail has become a second and third full time job. We use it so much at work that we're often exhausted by the time it comes to dealing with our "personal" e-mail. SPAM management is one of the key culprits which has also taken the joy away from e-mail. And while e-mail is ultimately mobile friendly—it can become a mammoth effort to keep it all neatly organized, while trying to ensure you didn't miss anything.
Inbox works pretty hard at all of this, organizing messages in bundles (some are already created for you such as travel, purchases forums etc.) The design is highly visual, using photos of other gmail users or abbreviations of names so you can visually keep track of threads etc. It surfaces up media elements attached to e-mails like pictures and videos so you can preview them and know what's in an e-mail before you click on it.
In short—it makes e-mail more useful, usable, desirable and shareable.
Implications For Users For the average user of digital technology, it's a great step forward in giving us a tool that we've needed for a while and optimizing it for the mobile experience. Sure it will mean that we may be toggling back and forth a little between our native e-mail program on our mobile devices, but we're already getting used to doing that with other apps. Given the time I've spent with it—I think it's designed to take on the challenges of e-mail that so many of us grapple with. It turns our inbox into more of what we are getting used to with social—a "newsfeed" in many regards.
Implications For Brands & Organizations For many organizations—having a sophisticated CRM system in place in which e-mail is already a workhorse, this is great news as the app may get Gmail users more engaged with e-mail again. But there's also the added opportunity to make e-mail more compelling—more visual and media rich and more useful. If people start coming back to e-mail again, brands and organizations will have a window of opportunity to re-capture and keep their attention.
Google Inbox may be one of the great quiet innovations of our time despite the fact that we are still intrigued by flashier trends such as wearables. A return to e-mail beyond work could translate to new opportunities for brands and organizations to provide value in the value exchange they have with their consumers, customers and people who are important to them.
I'm doing a mini tour of Texas this week having just left Austin and tomorrow I present some of our findings from Edelman's 2014 global study, Brandshare, in Dallas (full report here). The last time I talked about Brandshare, I focused on the macro theme of the report—that consumers indicated brands aren't living up to their side of the relationship when it comes to the value exchange that exists (or doesn't) with brands. The important context here is that we are talking about the relationship beyond the transactions (consumer buys product or services and "consumes"—rinse and repeat).
We tested fourteen behaviors brands could act upon as part of their relationship with consumers and surveyed fifteen thousand consumers across twelve countries to tell us what they thought was most important to them. Three key themes emerged in what they told us and for brands, it's worth taking stock on how you perform against these areas.
Responsiveness 78% of the respondents we surveyed indicated that responding quickly to concerns and complaints was important to them. In fact this was the number one most sought after behavior based on the questions we asked. And we think it goes beyond and concerns and complaints really and indicates that consumers are demanding that brands be more responsive to their needs. This could be fueled by an "on demand" mentality we are developing based on how we use technology. When we want something we can get it at the click of a button or swipe of a screen. It ma makes ense that consumers would expect brands to behave the way their technology and media does.
Involvement 68% of the respondents we s surveyed told us they think it's important for brands to communicate openly and transparently about how their products are sourced and made. They also value brands who give them many ways to ask and give opinions. In short they want to be involved. They want to know what you're doing, why you're doing it and they even want to be able to ask questions and give opinions while you're doing it. These round out the top three performing behaviors in terms of importance to behaviors. But there's more...
Conviction 58% of respondents told us that brands having a clear mission and purpose is important to them while 52% want to see brands use their resources to drive change in the world. This rounds out the top five out of the fourteen behaviors we asked consumers questions about. We interpret this as consumers seeking a real conviction from brands—a guiding "north star" which is core to how they operate. This finding if brands take to heart will act as a catalyst to re-examine their core values and determine if it makes sense to expand their remit by re-prioritizing how generous they are with their resources.
In short, they only way we can interpret the data is by evaluating the performance of the behaviors we asked consumers about. The above represent the top five base on what we asked them. It's worth noting that in each of these behaviors, brands are underperforming according to how respondents answered. From our perspective in this snapshot of time (2014) consumers are telling us that they increasingly value how quickly brands respond to their needs, how they can participate in the decisions brands make and the actions they take, and want to see brands stand for something that's true to who they are at the core.
Imagine taking a trip to New York city. As always, it's crowded and bustling but it's also a nice day. You want to get around and see the sights but the idea of waiting on a corner to land a taxi or spending a portion of your day underground don't appeal to you. You're active and enjoy finding ways to incorporate exercise in your day. You come across a bike sharing station with blue bikes and an interactive kiosk that helps you decide where you should go next. You use your credit card to obtain a bike and you're off and running, feeling a sense of empowerment that you've taken matters into your own hands and maybe even a little satisfaction that you're not contributing to the noise or other pollution as you pedal through the streets. Your needs get met, but you're also meeting the needs of the brand (*Citi) who helped put the bikes there in the first place. You've entered a value exchange with that brand whether you know it or not.
Edelman's 2014 Brandshare Study Edelman's 2014 global Brandshare study launched this past week, serving up some timely insights into the evolving relationship between consumers and brands. A comprehensive survey of 15,000 people in 12 countries about the performance of nearly 200 brands within 11industry sectors. We asked people to evaluate the importance of 14 brand behaviors and evaluate how effectively a selection of brands perform on those behaviors. The business outcomes we evaluated are: likelihood to purchase, recommend or defend a brand; propensity to share branded content with their own social networks; and willingness to share their personal data with a brand. We also queried respondents about nine consumer need states to more holistically understand the relationship between brand behaviors and the fulfillment of these needs.
There's Little Value In Today's Value Exchange Between Consumer & Brands That was the over-arching theme of the study. While brands likely feel like they are delivering value to consumers beyond the understood transactional relationship (you buy our stuff and we make sure you buy it again), the people we surveyed across the globe are indicating it's not enough. 87 percent of the respondents polled indicated they want more meaningful relationships with brands but only 17 percent feel like brands deliver. But what I thought was really interesting was a related data point which we asked the following question in connection to specific industries:
"Do brands ask for your personal information, so they can provide you something tangible in return, or for their own financial gain?"
The results to this question is underwhelming for brands across industry—in an age where brands are in need of data from the people who purchase their products and services, consumers largely feel that brands are benefitting more than they are. As the below chart shows, some industries have better footing than others in this area (food, CPG) but none are exempt from the sentiment.
Take a "brand" like Facebook (yes you can debate if it's a brand or not—I believe it is) whose business model relies almost exclusively on the data "users" provide it every time they engage with it, not to mention the jackpot of data we provide Facebook when we create a profile. We can debate how we feel about how Facebook's intent for that data, but there's little debate about the value exchange in using Facebook every day to connect with friends and business associates and its value as a newsfeed. Every day we log onto Facebook is a validation for the "brand" that there's value in the value exchange that exists between it and us.
There were many more insights in the study that span from what consumers value most and least and how their needs are met not only from an emotional and rational perspective, but also from a societal lens as well. I'll be writing more about that in the days and weeks to come. For now, the report can be found here:
Like millions of others, I recently filled a bucket full of ice and water, shot a video and called on a few friends to do the same. While not required to, I also donated to the ALS association because it seemed like the right thing to do. Is the infamous "Ice Bucket Challenge" working? According to the New York Times, the campaign has raised over 13 million dollars compared to the 1.7 million raised last year at this time. So is there a down side? According to my social feeds—kind of. While I don't agree with them, here's a snapshot of some of the feedback I've seen in addition to the participation. Perhaps you've seen some too:
The Narcissist Police This person is quick to point out that anyone taking the challenge on is simply enjoying the attention and in it for themselves vs. the cause. They feel obligated to point this out, before they move on to posting another selfie of themselves.
The Hard Newser Isn't there enough real news going on the world we should be paying attention to? This person overlooks the fact that part of the success behind the Ice Bucket challenge is probably linked to the fatigue associated with watching the world's problems escalate. Who doesn't want a break from non stop reports of global violence and unrest?
The Financial Advisor This financial weekend warrior is quick to point out that all of those people pouring ice cold water on their heads are missing out on the financial part of the equation and should part ways with money that the "advisor" has no viable claim to. The advisor conveniently overlooks the fact that many who take on the challenge go on to donate themselves or inspire others to take action but instead places their financial advisor role first.
The Meme Hipster Ice Bucket Challenge? That's so last week. This person can't stand the idea of jumping on a bandwagon and instead is focused on getting on the next trend before it takes off. Godspeed meme hipster—keep your finely tuned ear to the ground.
The Marketer This person won't actually take the challenge or support the cause, but instead prefers to debate the pros and cons of the campaign, dissecting the approach and debating with other peers if it's a case study or one hit wonder.
The Ice Bucket Challenge has taken the world by storm and leveraged social media as an engine which keeps it running across all media. But above that—it's an opportunity to take a break from putting yourself first. Personally—I'll take the opportunity.
We needn't look much further than our everyday lives to realize that the way we consume, share and produce our own media has changed drastically. The major forces in this evolution are largely a combination of hardware and software (mobile) combined with connectivity (social) all accelerated in the context of time which gives the impression of immediacy (real-time). When it comes to marketing and communications in this real time business environment it is forcing us to re-think the notion of both content and distribution.
It was these thoughts that have been driving much of my own thinking (and doing) in the space and recently I gave a talk in Montenegro to attempt to string much of this together in a presentation. Yes, we're steadily transitioning from an era where messages would be the primary focus of the marketing world—to a future where storytelling (custom tailored for the media it is delivered in) pulls people into the narrative. We've gone from push to pull to pull and distribute where "news feeds" of all shapes and sizes become a primary way we inform ourselves. Below is an expanded version of the presentation I gave at Spark.me along with a few specific points I called out:
Real-time Marketing Is A Tactic, Not a Strategy As I've stated before, it's time to re-think real-time especially in the context of marketing. We've reduce it to a set of tactics but in reality the notion of being more agile in a fast moving environment means that all operations within marketing (and beyond) will eventually have to evolve to something that can be more adaptive to changes as they happen. So if real-time marketing is the thing that introduces change into our organizations—so be it. But it cannot be the strategy that drives that change.
Content Marketing—Beyond Social (The Five Content Archetypes) We're at a pivotal shift in our business where much of the momentum we benefitted from in social is now shifting and expanding around "content". Which means we need a more holistic way think about content as it pertains to our strategies and tactics. I've introduced the "The Five Content Archetypes" as a straight forward way to categorize content in areas which included owned properties such as Websites and apps. This can also be a tool for us as clients come to us with content problems/opportunities which need solutions.
Content As Currency This is a way to think/speak about content which takes social behavior into account. Many marketers want to view content as "king" or "queen" which is looking at it from our business perch. If we look at it from the "content consumer" point of view we lead with the insight that people today treat content as a form of currency which helps them build reputations etc. This translates to brand reputation as well which is increasingly becoming a blurred line which the consumer does not distinguish.
Social + Search + Content = Visibility and Viability A simple formula to think about how search, social, and content are all playing complimentary roles to what we see and share with others. Visibility equates to the most relevant content bubbling up to the top when we search for it and viability pertains to the disposition content has to be shared.
All thoughts I've started some time ago and are constantly evolving as I collect my own data points both from an industry perspective and personal experience.
You should stop what you are doing and read this piece on Native Advertising by Andrew Sullivan, in which he asserts "journalism has surrendered" on the topic of native advertising. Specifically the form that seamlessly blends marketing with editorial in a publication. Aside from it being a wonderful and brutally honest assessment of native advertising and its influence on media, Andrew is both right and wrong in the piece when he says this:
"At one point, the reputation of that journalism is going to tarnished by the fact that you’re not sure if it’s done out of a commercial interest. I have to say I don’t think it’s sustainable. It will collapse when the readers figure it out. It should have been front-page news that Time magazine reporters were to begin reporting to the business side."
What Andrew gets right (maybe) is that the reputation of journalism is going to get tarnished. But we have to ask ourselves for who will it really matter? It will matter to the highly informed—the one percent of media consumers you could say. To the others, we must get a reality check and really digest what's happening in the world of media consumption for the average person. There are a few forces at play:
Time: There's a finite amount of time we have and it's increasingly being chipped away by technology and a surplus of media stimulus. We simply don't have enough of it.
Attention: Sorry, but most of us can now be clinically diagnosed with ADD. Maybe we weren't born with it—but again, technology has taken its toll. We have so much information coming at us, it's increasingly difficult to focus. Watching a two minute video on YouTube now seems like a massive commitment.
Relevancy: Blame social media. We are all so consumed in our own worlds that if media/news doesn't seem relevant to us—we ignore it.
Currency: I've said it a million times. Content is currency. Ignore this sociological reality at your own peril—people now use content as a way to build their reputations and credibility with peers.
Status: It's what comes after currency. Share the best content that your peers and friends value—see your social status rise.
Mobility: If your content can't be consumed or shared via mobile—don't even bother. Our context for media consumption is now "on the go".
Snackability: We've been trained to "snack" on media all day long. It's becoming harder to carve out time for media meals which can't be consumed quickly. Do you have teens? Watch their media consumption behaviors.
In short, we are the reason native advertising exists. We're the reason cat videos on YouTube are popular. We're the reason that in depth journalism is becoming an endangered species. On that note—I'll end here before I hit 500 words. Because you won't read more.
Recently, I attended an industry roundtable alongside a variety of marketers from different industries, all on the brand side. These are smart and accomplished individuals who gathered together to discuss real time marketing and what it means for their organizations. When asked what their favorite example of real time marketing was—most deferred to the obvious answer: Oreo's "dunk in the dark!" With much respect to the brand that got the real time conversation started—it's time to move on.
From Real Time Marketing to Building Responsive Brands Real-time marketing is indeed a real thing, but we're going to have to stop chasing our own version of the Oreo moment if we're going to make progress in this area. First we have to really get our heads wrapped around the foundation to understand what we're actually trying to do—and what we're trying to do is build brands differently. We essentially have two tools at our disposal: content and engagement. This is where many of us miss the mark. We underestimate how difficult it is to use these tools. A recent article featuring Coke's content efforts underscores how arduous a task it is for a brand and organization to create, curate and publish a regular stream of valuable content. In the race to real-time, we've over simplified this. Secondly—when, how, why and how often a brand engages has become an art and science. The NYPD learned this lesson the hard way when they wanted to simply promote their cause.
Re-Thinking Our Core Teams Before we go any further down the rabbit hole of real time marketing, we must take into account that the core team needed to actually take on the role of planning & producing content as well as partnering with third parties and coordinating media purchases looks a little differently than the traditional core teams whether it's an advertising model or other. Editorial sensibilities must be combined with creative instincts and craft. Social aptitude must be core to engagement strategies and tactics. Media spend is increasingly becoming difficult to separate out as it becomes part of the content strategy and analytics must be more agile than ever.
Enter The Content Strategist Content strategy or content marketing for that matter isn't new—but there aren't exactly thousands of content strategists with years of experience under their belts sitting around waiting to take their rightful position as key member of today's responsive brand building team. Content strategists will also look differently from how they may have operated in the past with a holistic view of the way content can live, breath and flow across paid, owned, earned and shared properties and media. They will need to partner closely with media counterparts and be intimately involved in the connections planning.
Having put this thinking forward—there's much to be said about in regards to culture, talent and pure ingenuity. When it was my turn to say what my favorite example of "real time marketing was", I gave a recent client example because I was close to it. If I had the chance to answer again—I would have said Honey Maid. Take a look—now that's a responsive brand.
“Real-time marketing”—just uttering the phrase evokes images of hastily photo-shopped images and ham fisted attempts to join online conversations. The stakes can be high—last week’s big winner in the responsive category during the Grammys was of course Arby’s to which the spoils of considerable earned media coverage and over 6000 new Twitter followers were awarded. Many other brands weren’t as fortunate.
But for all the hype and baggage associated with real-time marketing, it doesn’t seem to be going away. Perhaps that’s because real-time marketing is already on its way to simply evolving into a modern day extension of integrated marketing. Think about the dollars spent by advertisers on premium venues like the Superbowl—can they afford to sit out integration in not only digital spaces, but also social second screen activity? (Just watch how many people will be on mobile devices at your party).
No, they can’t.
And so, this year’s Superbowl will be a moment of truth for what brands do in the social- mobile space before, during and after the big game. Budweiser for example has already been encouraging consumers to post pictures of themselves and their four legged friends using the #Bestbuds hash tag as a compliment to their campaign. They also have @Budweiserpuppy talking to people on Twitter. In similar Fashion Chobani brought their 30-second star to life on Twitter in the form of @Chobani_bear who started doing real-time video responses on Twitter, most recently with Katy Perry. Mysteriously, the Chobani Bear Twitter account has recently been suspended—a real-time marketing mishap?
* Update, Chobani contacted me an informed me that @Chobani_bear was not a Chobani account.
Whether you are on brand or agency side, at minimum you should be watching this space and learning. Mobile will only continue to chip away consumer's attention away from the “first screen” and while many brands are still learning the ropes of responsive marketing integration, it’s a sure bet that this will become part of the modern marketing mix. On that note, there are a couple of simple ways you can watch and learn: A public Twitter list of all brands advertising on the Superbowl was published by Marketing Land, and I’ve also created a hashtag for marketers to follow examples (#RTMBowl). What brands will win? It’s anyone’s game.
Today, the talk of the town amongst marketers is the potential for brands to act as publishers and media companies, going direct to their customers or consumers in the fight to earn attention. It's a lofty ambition but worth pursuing as there are three drivers changing how we spend our time and attention.
1. Mobile Increasingly, we are getting our information from the smaller screen. It's always on us—it's portable and connected to the Web. It plays video and all other sorts of media and apps have transformed how we interact with it.
2. Social Specifically newsfeeds. In addition to e-mail, we increasingly get our information in a newsfeed format (arguably e-mail was the original mobile newsfeed). Today it's Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, Twitter... the list goes on. What each one of these has in common is that it's dominated by content and sharing is only a button tap or click away.
3. Search Google continues to tweak its algorithm to favor quality content vs. redundant links and phrases which try to trick it. Because of this, it favors quality over quanity and becomes more difficult to game.
The first wave of social was dominated by engagement and how to engage at scale. The second is dominated by engaging at scale plus content distribution and integration with marketing programs. To fully realize the promise of brands as media companies—we must first understand and classify content. There are five ways I've been thinking about content:
Curated Media companies have always curated the best information available and customized this for the audiences they want to grow and keep. For brands, it's no different and is one of the most practical places to start. Take IBM's Smarter Planet Tumblr for example which curates some of the most interesting stories around intelligent technology. By doing this, the brand becomes an authority on the topic.
Co-Created The biggest mistake I often see brands make when thinking about content is to forget that even content can be a participatory experience. In contrast, take AMC's Dead Yourself app which combines the aforementioned game changers (mobile + social) and empowers fans to zombify any picture they can capture on their mobile phone. Where does the content end up? Social newsfeeds. Take that display ads.
Original Brands now have the opportunity to create original content that is own-able and can't be found anywhere else. This requires a great deal of planning as the content needs to be naturally connected to the brand. Original branded content can be useful or entertaining or both (see *Skylanders Boomcast). It can also be done in a semi journalist tone. We recently worked with Kellogg's on this type of "Brand Journalism" as part of their Olympics sponsorship. In this example the brand is part of the story but does not play the leading role.
Consumer Generated Personal publishing which arguably came before brand publishing has empowered millions of people to post an infinite amount of content into the digital realm. Consumer generated media rivals that of media created by the professionals and when tapped appropriately can authentically reinforce what a brand stands for. A recent example that I really like is what Disney is doing with their consumer generated content contest, Disney Side.
Sponsored Likely the most hotly debated form of content, sponsored content also goes by the name "native advertising" or specific to social, promoted posts. Simply put, there are three versions of sponsored—the traditional version (like display ads) or paid options from digital platforms like Facebook or Twitter and sponsored editorial working with a media company ranging from Buzzfeed to the Atlantic.
It's time to move the "brand as media" discussion into more actionable territory. As attention shifts to newsfeeds and mobile streams—the stories we tell there need to be all the more compelling.
History has a way of repeating itself. I still remember the heady days of the original digital agencies. They were built on the market demand for Websites ranging from the complex transactional to the marketing microsite. The smart agencies however knew that they had to diversify by bringing in "traditional" talent in the form of planners, art directors and copywriters. These new additions to "digital" teams often times didn't even know how to code, push a pixel and many were not considered digital. But they knew how to tell a story.
Today, even the most talented art directors and writers aren't enough. Neither are the social-savvy digital types. Alone, they may be able to push their craft—but working together surrounded by planning and analytics they can operate as the heart of the creative engine behind any campaign. A few thoughts about how these roles should operate:
Art Directors Today's art directors as always should be able to drive a concept and bring it to life. Ideally, in a digital world they possess a healthy amount of interaction design sensibility meaning they can think not only in "ads" but also in experience. It's a rare combination but not impossible to find. Some can even code.
Copywriters Able to use harness written word in all its forms whether it be in headline, script, or crafting the big idea into tangible communication—copywriters are also drivers of the concepts. Today's copywriters articulate concepts and when it comes to the craft of writing for an audience understand the difference in medium (television, print, web, mobile).
Social Engineers The least traditional of the three—this role focuses on the social viability of the creative. Social engineers can come from backgrounds like community management or social strategy and know instinctively what levers to pull in social spaces to ensure an idea has legs there and does more than translates but is social-centric at the core.
Madison avenue creative was built on the legendary relationships and teamwork of art directors and copywriters. Much of that chemistry is still relevant today, when it comes to great creative. Add in a "social engineer" to the evolved version of those two disciplines—and watch the magic happen.
Social media has been good to me. It's re-defined my career, opened new doors and enabled me to make connections that would have been impossible had the Web not gotten connected. I started blogging in 2006 and in less than a year found myself in the pages of BusinessWeek. From there things only got more interesting, not only for me personally but for the business world at large. One by one, brands, organizations and even governments had to come to terms with the connected Web and subsequently the rapid evolution of mobile. It all makes me wonder what's next—and I've been thinking a lot about it. Here are a few not so random thoughts. Many of them fall under the lens of marketing and communications, where I spend a lot of my professional time. Consider it thinking aloud:
Social Increasingly Becomes a Paid Game The early days of social under the broader context of the marketing function was organic by nature. Facebook, Twitter etc. weren't even thinking of monetization models—for them it was about building an audience around the platforms. Today, it's increasingly difficult to reach an audience through your social channels without leveraging a paid component.
Content Isn't Enough Anymore The problem with content is that it can be anything. Text. Photos. Video. It's not enough. People don't share content but they do share stories which resonate with them and their friends/connections. Telling really good stories is hard. Today, we have to be able to do it in a single Instagram sized image and in a six second Vine. We also need to be able to make marketing feel like something bigger—something with a larger purpose. It's the reason we see Dove and Guinness and instantly want to share the story. This is not content—it's a narrative. Narrative which stops us in our tracks and breaks through the noise to earn our attention.
Integrated Marketing Becomes Mandatory One of the stories I love to tell about Oreo is how they launched Instagram. "Dunk In The Dark" is a diversion—a one hit wonder, but Oreo is a masterful integrated marketer and incorporated social and digital into their Superbowl advertising, leveraging paid dollars and creativity to build a sizable audience on Instagram literally overnight. Why this story doesn't get told more is beyond me. Smart integrated marketing is the future, while social one hit wonders will become a thing of the past.
Art Director + Copywriter + Social Engineer: The Creative Team of Tomorrow As someone who works in the "Public Relations" industry, I can reflect upon how we were quick to hire social savvy individuals who knew how to manage and grow communities. Now we hire creatives and planners who must figure out how to partner with these social savvy individuals. Madison avenue was built on the duo of art directors and and copywriters. Tomorrow's creative team will be a trio at the core (and don't forget analytics).
ROI Becomes An Efficiency Play The early days of social revolved around proving out a specific ROI (did you sell more X?) for example. But in the maturation phase that we are in today—under a marketing lens, it becomes about proving out that metrics like reach and impressions were achieved at a cost reduction, or even better, cost reduction combined with qualitative benefits like better targeting (did you reach the right people?).
Yesterday's disruption was digital. It created a new economic model and dominant players (Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.). Social came next followed by the infusion of mobile—we consume information and participate on demand, anytime, anywhere. But none of these things can be viewed in isolation. I've talked about the responsive marketing model recently and some even talk about the responsive organization. Even marketing in an iterative and more agile fashion has to be a connected part of a bigger machine. I believe what comes after social looks more like the aggregate of many pieces vs. the single view of one or two which have dominated the industry discourse for years. It's time to elevate the role of digital, social and mobile as core elements of a bigger, complex and integrated machine.
Brands that insert themselves into relevant cultural events is now becoming a norm in marketing. Did you know that May 4th is considered Star Wars Day? These brands did, and they inserted themselves in the conversation by producing content which reflected it. Here's a few that went to the dark side:
Pop Chips went the simple route and used an action figure to do the heavy lifting.
Harrods did some subtle and clever Photoshop to go over to the dark side of marketing.
PayPal traveled to a galaxy far far away and kept their branding intact
...while Red Bull played it safe and stayed closer to the Milky Way.
Oreo went old school (see original Star Wars for blue drink reference)
...and tide skipped Photoshop school altogether
If Motorola didn't do this, they would have gotten decimated by a death star.
USA Today made their audience do the work for them with a contest on Vine that asked people to make Wookie noises in the six second video format.
Marketing, content and cultural relevancy continue to merge together fueled by digital social and mobile channels. Now it's just part of how brands seek to remain relevant to their consumers, customers and in some cases audience. Have you seen any good Star Wars Day content produced by brands?
I'm in Lake Tahoe this week combining some business and down-time and recently spoke at "Snowcial"—billed as "SXSW for the snow sports and hospitality industry, it attracts a really cool cross section of people who span marketing, technology and even journalism. If you love skiing or snowboarding and marketing/technology, it's worth considering for your event calendar. I kicked off day one yesterday with a short talk about content, convergence and connectivity. Below are a few themes from my talk:
Content As Currency
There's a good reason everyone is talking about the role of *content these days but you have to understand the psychology of it all. Thanks to social networks, people share interesting, entertaining or even informative content because it makes them look good. There's a reason why the word "meme" has "me" in it. So it's not enough just to produce content—your content has to be designed for sharing. I like to think of content in today's hyper connected world as being "snackable"—sending out bits and bites of content which can be digested and shared rapidly. The reason why we're seeing a revolution in visual content which is designed for social newsfeeds and mobile is based on this core understanding of why people like, share and engage around content.
Everyone Can And Will Publish
I shared a recent experience I had with Jeep where I tweeted for help and was not only responded to but had my issue resolved through their customer care service which was facilitated through my initial interactions on Twitter. This is by no means a new model, but clearly Jeep had a process in place and was able to close the loop with me efficiently. This is an area brands will continue to grapple with as people move from traditional ways to initiate contact with brands and go directly to public forums. The obvious follow up question is how does this scale? My answer is figure it out because it's not going away. And yes, my car is working just fine now.
Insights > Influence
For all the hype around influence—we've still largely got it wrong. We should be looking at analyzing who and what are driving conversations in the same context as we might run a focus group. Technologies that allow us to analyze conversations and how they spread and who influences them can provide great insights if we know what we are looking for. For example in working with the association that represents US dairy farmers—we analyzed conversations in forums and found these emerging. As we audited the content the organization was producing—we identified opportunities make future content initiatives more relevant to what people were talking about. You Don't Not Need An App For That
There's no doubt that we are living in an App economy, but it's time to step back and ask ourselves if we need an app for every idea. Unless that idea involves significant functionality, it might not need to be developed as a stand alone app creating yet another format to maintain. My team has been developing content solutions using responsive design techniques so the design reacts to the format it's being viewed it. It's not a perfect solution for every development issue, but worth tapping where it makes sense.
It's All Converging
Lastly I talked about the convergence of media models and marketing tactics. First from a broad perspective inspired by Altimeter's model of converged media, but also ad it applies to new digital advertising formats which blur hard lines. Facebook sponsored posts are a perfect example of how paid, earned, and owned dynamics all come together. You can read more about that on the unofficial All Facebook blog who covered my talk.
Looking forward to hitting the slopes again before I leave!
Somewhere in the debate to define what was hot or not as a worthy "real-time marketing" example during the Oscars, we lost sight of the bigger picture. We're not really talking about the benefits of marketing in a timely fashion as much as we are talking about the birthright of an organization or brand to produce, circulate and curate conversations around valuable content.
I had to take a pause recently to remind myself of the bigger picture and consider other activations we have in play like working with the organization who represents the US Dairy industry. In this approach, we've gotten to point where we staff an onsite newsroom who is focused on producing content and engaging with the industry. Before any of this happend, we had to begin with a strategic approach—a content strategy.
Planned & Responsive Content
A good content strategy starts with the basics—which are built upon developing content narratives around planned activities which are either ongoing (like a drumbeat) or are responsive (in reaction to current events). Both have their place and they can and should work together. Content strategy often is the starting point before getting into the nuts and bolts activities which support it, like developing a content calendar, putting an editorial process in place or supporting content production with writers producers and creative talent. While newsrooms and war rooms can serve as places content activation happens in concentrated form—these tactics are not the strategy.
A war room setting enables teams to centralize content production and operations
These are still early days for organizations who are building their audiences directly via social channels, or partnering with media companies to circulate or co-produce their stories. There are some great examples where brands have already begun regularly producing their content (Intel IQ, Coke Journey, AMEX Open Forum). In each of these programs and the ones to come—whether it be formal or not, there is strategic thought being applied to content development and distribution.
I'm not surprised, but that doesn't mean I'm not concerned. I witnessed something sad last night, while the Oscars were going down. As I anticipated, there was a great deal of activity by brands and their partners who took a shot at producing content connected to the Academy Awards. Some of the content was just OK. Some wasn't. And to be honest, some of it was pretty good even if not earth shattering.
Because I had a feeling there would be a great deal of activity going on—I set up a simple hash tag, because I wanted a way to organize what brands would be doing. So, I set up #OscarsRTM (Real Time Marketing) on my own as a way to keep track. And I invited others to help. And perhaps discuss.
What happened next astounded me. First—the "marketing community" debated the term real-time marketing back and forth. At least this was somewhat intellectually stimulating. Then what came next was something not unexpected but still astounding in it's intensity. A constant stream of snark, dismissal, critique and a never ending barrage of "not impressed."
Really? When did it come to this? Take the below image posted on a Tumblr created for the sole purpose of trashing the efforts from brands last night.
It's the "newsroom" US Cellular set up and was using as their mission control for branded content which they published throughout the evening. I watched most of their content and I enjoyed a few of the posts. And frankly, my first thought was that this particular organization is ahead of many because they are TRYING to provide relevant content vs. just doing straightforward advertising. Does your company have a newsroom ready to go? Do you have staff and partners coordinating and working together to produce content? Are you experimenting AT ALL?
According to the genius who took liberties with the above picture, the team at US Cellular should be fearing for their jobs. And this—this is why I am so concerned. If the marketing "community" is successful at tearing itself down in the pursuit of building up the profiles of individuals too fickle to be bothered, then we all lose.
Nobody tries. Nobody fails. Nobody wins.
Yes, my team was working with a brand last night as well (Kellogg's), but even if we weren't and if I had created the hash tag just to perform objective research, I would still be concerned. And despite that, I have a prediction for you. Brands will eventually figure this stuff out. They will get better and it will become integrated (JC Penney did a nice job of that). It will just become part of how brands build equity (through content). And no level of sarcasm will be able to stop it.
This train has already left the station—so we now choose to get on and guide it to the right destination, or we can sit on the sidelines and wait for the next one, hoping it comes soon. I'll choose the former while others debate the latter. And trying will only make it better.
The above video documents some of our recent work with the Cars.com team where we planned (in advance) to support a new campaign that launched during the Superbowl. With the Oscars right around the corner—you can bet that the topic of real-time marketing is going to come up again as brands seek to remain relevant during periods of time where everyone seems to be talking about one thing. Recently, the Harvard Business Review featured an article stating that "advertisers should act more like newsrooms"—in it, this stood out for me:
"The traditional campaign model is rigid. Ad units are created at a point in time and don't generally adapt to emerging themes in culture. In contrast, the newsroom metaphor suggests that content has to be produced and delivered in a continuous stream rather than through a ponderous, slow-moving process of months of campaign development."
It makes a point salient point that's worth digesting—traditionally advertising has been planned well in advance and that planning doesn't often leave room for improvisation. But don't mistake improvisation for lack of planning. If you watch the video above, you see the team working together in the "command center" which required advanced planning. It was no easy feat to mobilize a centralized group working with multiple teams offsite to upload content, respond, track and measure results and engage in real-time. It is well planned improvisation. Below is a sample from the planning process that went on behind the scenes:
To pull it off requires forward thinking organization (we had this with Cars.com) and alignment with multiple partners (other agencies). It requires the ability (and permission) to improvise once the planning is in place. It requires both flexibility and a focus on staying on brand. While "Real-Time" and "Content Marketing" seem like buzzword overload, it is simply an evolution of marketing triggered by modern day behaviors. In other words, not a fad—In my opinion.
The real winner of this year's Super Bowl might just be real time marketing—or at minimum the ability for your marketing team to be nimble. The lights go out at the big game? Get creative about it as they are being fixed. Have a copywriter ready to craft a headline, a designer who can whip up a compelling visual, and don't let your media buying slow you down because you will need to promote that post on the spot—and in my opinion the best people who are in position to do this kind of media buying is the team working in the "newsroom" who have access to all the analytics. The future of marketing will move at the speed of now. Kudos to the Oreo team for once again nailing the execution.
We had our own team mobilized in a newsroom setting (our SICC) as we supported Cars.com who launched their new campaign with a spot that debuted during the game. More on that later, the pictures below capture the activity level as we monitored social mentions, sentiment and coordinated posts and responses:
We also addressed the power outage during the game as it unfolded (above)—working it into our evening, but the creativity shown in the Oreo example is something that should make you stop and think because it's not easy to pull off. But while the Oreo example is well executed, I still think this game is in it's infancy, and as if the real time creativity wasn't easy enough to pull off—as I mentioned earlier the media buying is really going to create headaches. Here's a simple illustration of the basic flow of the real-time marketing model.
It begs the question: Can you really do real time? Do you have a content team ready at a moment's notice? Can you promote a Facebook post as quickly as it takes to develop the content? Can you measure what's working and what's not as it unfolds?
Thinking about my own career path since the beginning, I realized there's a pattern. I've always been drawn to industries in the midst of change and disruption. I landed my first job as a graphic designer because I had entered the workforce with a valuable skill at the time—I had learned the essentials of desktop publishing and the company I went to work for was in the process of overhauling how they produced their marketing materials (migrating from traditional tools to digital). It was a huge change and for those who were resistant to converting their skills to digital desktop publishing—they faced early retirement.
Next, I spent about a year working in cable news—but it was an intense year as I worked with the Fox News Channel team helping launch the 24 hour cable news network. Fast forward over fifteen years later and that network is thriving, having tapped consumer demand in cable news and niche media coverage. I've worked at the Chicago Tribune in digital news media and witnessed first hand the differences in how the "digital" team and the veteran employees viewed their work. I spent nearly six years working for one of the original digital agencies which back then was expected to transform the agency space and now doesn't exist anymore (agency.com)—the remains have been swallowed up by corporate entities.
It was at the tail end of my experience there that I discovered "social", first through the blogosphere and then Twitter and Facebook and I did stints at other digital firms and even a start up—hoping these organizations would lead the way in the transformation from traditional digital to a more connected form of digital communications. Eventually in 2009, I found a home with Edelman because it seemed the culture prioritized and valued everything that was changing because of the emergence and disruptive nature of social media. Back then, it was the PR firms that seemed to understand best what was changing. Today, it's not the same story.
I believe search, social and mobile are the three most disruptive forces in modern communications and they are working together to wreak havoc on organizations and their agency partners. Because I work for a public relations firm—I feel a sense of urgency to start here and lay out what must evolve. The people (stakeholders) we want to reach move effortlessly across a media landscape often times making no distinction. Increasingly they spend time on mobile devices skimming content in "streams or feeds". The average consumer of media has the attention span of a squirrel on ritalin and getting them to pause to read anything more than paragraph is becoming increasingly difficult. The media industry has been disrupted and thereby public relations is an industry in the midst of change. Here are a few areas I believe PR must aggressively embrace and do differently.
Creative Most PR firms will say they have creative talent, but we have to ask ourselves if it's the right creative talent. Can we produce apps that live in Facebook or mobile? Are we working on the next Nike Fuel or are we in position to just do the media outreach for it? My most recent hire is a digital veteran who has spent most of his career at advertising and digital agencies. We aren't going to just get people talking about things—we are going to create the things they talk about.
Analytics Analytics in Public Relations has to move beyond just counting "placements" similar to the act of pulling together traditional media clippings. Analytics in public relations has to integrate with the other measurement functions of an organization (like connecting earned to owned properties). It also needs to go beyond measuring and move into data collection and analysis. And analysis needs to evolve beyond merely analyzing into deriving core insights to inform decisions like how to spend media dollars and what the tone of messages should be. I'm currently hiring a senior analytics lead for my team and I describe the ideal candidate as part measurement wonk and part digital planner.
Converged Media Public relations was built on the notion of "earned media" which differentiated it from advertising. Today, it's all just content as part of the vast quantity we are able to digest on a given day thanks to the deluge we are subjected to. It was Google that began infusing ways to "pay" to help raise visibility with the search engine. It is Facebook that has introduced to the mainstream a convergence of media through things like the promoted post—and it is the media itself that is offering more ways than ever to make advertising feel like it's a part of the editorial universe. This convergence defies both traditional advertising, marketing and public relations constructs—yet poses great opportunity for any of the disciplines who are nimble enough to master.
This brings us to today and tomorrow. Here's what I am seeing in the industry: PR got a head start on social but it's been rapidly eroding. Companies who value customer service have moved beyond how many PR professionals think about social and are gradually evolving how they service customers. The advertising industry which has always held "creative" in high regard no longer sees social, digital or mobile as add ons but rather core to their business. They are bent on not just talking about the digital world but rather they want to help build it—and they also understand how to leverage creative communication to get people's attention. The partners who handle media transactions do so in bulk, but increasingly it will need to be done in real time. In short, it is the marketing and communications industry that is being disrupted and for those of us on the "PR" side—we must act quickly and decisively to re-invent ourselves in a way that looks more like the future and less like the past.
From a media perspective—marketers like to align strategies and tactics along the lines of how things are done at scale. The popular framework goes something like: Paid (advertising), Earned (Word of Mouth), Owned (Corporate) and everything else falls in a somewhat more grey area and from my perspective this is where the action will be for 2013 and beyond. As outlined above, Altimeter calls this area of overlap "converged media" because it's a convergence of different media dynamics coming together. If you ask me—from a marketing perspective this is the future of what, to this point we've called "social".
You see an image in your Facebook news-feed shared by a friend. The image was generated by a brand. You saw it because your friend shared it. They shared it because they liked it. They liked it because the content resonated (and they saw it). They saw it because the brand paid Facebook to promote it.
Paid? Earned? Owned?
All of the above. A social platform merely powers the engine and the above could have all been done in a mobile context. I'm doing a lot of thinking in this area as I build out my team because I don't believe that anyone has the "converged" part completely figured out yet. From a talent perspective I've already begun importing folks from the ad agency side of the house who get both social, digital and content. Mentally, I've been thinking about the dynamics of how different teams function:
Traditional:
A television centric marketing approach is still fueled primarily by the dynamic duo of a creative team composed of an art director and copywriter supported by an infrastructure of scale which fuels the teams with insights and has a small army of media service individuals who determine how the money gets spent so that the campaign oriented marketing message is seen and heard.
Digital
Similar to the traditional team but digital teams often "build" things (apps, sites, platforms) which add an experiential layer to the marketing initiative. Copy for the digital team is somewhat more complex as the things they build can often contain much more than what can translate through offline marketing tactics and so a comprehensive approach to content is required.
Social-Digital
The newcomer to the mix. Many brands are now taking the nuts and bolts of social in house—but the above model whether in house or agency side (or blended) is designed to merge the basics of good marketing (valuable content) with the more real time nature of social news-feeds (timely relevant bursts of communication supported with dialogue). Again, looking at teams from a media perspective—a core social-digital team that targets the converged media space must bring creative, community management and a newsroom-like sense of editorial savvy together.
I think 2013 is going to be the year that things feel like they are all blurring into each other more than ever and is going to create a lot of challenges for both brands and their agency partners as they work together to figure out how to address the overlaps. In addition to bolstering our creative, strategic and measurement capabilities—I've also put someone from my team in charge of thinking about the overlaps between paid, owned and earned and how this all evolves for our clients (a director of converged media services). I think that especially for digital, this is going to be where the action is.
If your company doesn’t have the above model in place a year from now, you may regret it.
You’ve probably felt it for some time, but now the roadmap is becoming clear—companies must build their own media empires. And if they don’t, they risk missing a window of opportunity that provides myriad benefits, whether it’s telling their own stories or becoming more efficient with the media dollars they spend.
Trends in media consumption point to the convergence of savvy marketing tactics combined with a real-time newsroom approach for brands to be seen and heard in a collectively social, digital and mobile world.
Facebook: Engagement Isn’t Enough
First, let’s start with Facebook which, thanks to an alleged algorithm change, has been at the center of controversy in the marketing world. Though it’s cited as the reason brands have noticed their content reaching a lower volume of Facebook users, the caveat is that there is much a company can do to increase the odds of being seen and heard on Facebook. But, it relies on a brand doing a few things really well.
For starters, it’s not enough to solely engage on Facebook. A company now has to provide a steady flow of high-quality content, which then relies not only on organic content sharing from Facebook users but also on subsequent media purchases with Facebook in order for that message to spread.
Sound familiar? It’s how advertising has been done in the past, only with a big difference. Much of the content that tends to do best is oftentimes associated with current news or highly relevant social issues. Take for example whatOreo has done with its Daily Twist initiative, where in honor of the cookie’s 100th anniversary, agency teams get together daily to decide how to riff off of relevant, often newsworthy, subjects that, by day’s end, produce a new piece of clever, highly shareable visual content that’s sent out into the digital ecosystem. This type of approach makes clear what most pundits miss when challenging the notion of “ROI” in social media—the reason a company wants to amass followers in social media is to build their own marketing/communications network, which bypasses the middle man and goes right to the source.
The end game in social media won’t be accumulation of fans but rather your ability to reach them and potentially inspire action.
Marketing Meets the Newsroom
The middleman in question could conceivably be media agencies. Why spend millions on media purchases when you can consolidate some of that spending with Facebook? This is where it’s going to get really interesting because most big companies like to clearly divide their needs with partners who handle tasks at scale. Creative agencies do creative and media agencies do media. The problem with this model is that a real-time newsroom-meets-marketing model requires community managers who understand not only how to manage a Facebook page but also know when to put a dollar behind high quality and timely content that will spread. This model jumbles up what was once a clear divide between content, media purchase and engagement.
Becoming media companies may not be optional for brands. Felix Baumgartner didn’t do his stratos jump alone—he had the backing of a major brand (Red Bull), a team of ex-NASA scientists and Red Bull’s media team who covered the event, creating an infinite amount of media coverage that generated a nonstop wave of publicity. I’m not even sure how to estimate the value of this type of coverage, but suffice it to say that it’s significant and leaves a mark on a Google-friendly Web.
And how does all this media spread? This is where players such as Pulse come in.
Whether you are mobile or on the Web, Pulse allows you to have all of the media you can digest and share at your fingertips, served in a usable experience. And much like other media models, some content is promoted organically due to popularity and some can be bought for featured placement.
It’s all going to come down to this: content, quality, frequency and relevancy. If companies are to become media, they must master the art and science of merging marketing with a real-time news cycle. The content a company produces must be compelling and built for an audience with an itchy “like” finger.
And it’s going to take time. Most companies don’t have full-time editors and newsrooms that work hand-in-hand with their marketing department and partners, but in a few years they might.
Now that some of the dust is settling around Facebook's massive acquisition of Instagram this past week, we can all take a step back and think about the bigger picture. Yes, Facebook understands the critical role mobile will play in how billions of people interact and communicate but they also understand that interactions, engagement, consumption or whatever you want to call it generates one thing.
Data.
Facebook wants it. Google wants it. And all businesses will want to understand it. There is huge, big business to be built around all kinds of data. Targeted marketing is the first salvo and it's a pretty big one. But that's likely the tip of a gargantuan iceburg. I had some fun recently chatting with Richard Quest from CNN on some of these issues. It's only a few minutes, but you get the idea. The Web is going social, mobile and local. All of this will generate a lot of data, and that's going to be valuable in a lot of ways. What do you think? Where is all of this going?
Klout has dialed up their marketing efforts, this time placing agency individuals in a March Madness bracket style competition they are calling "Agency Insanity". Critics will scoff at it as another attempt to get individuals to pump up scores, but in actuality the effort is a straight forward marketing initiative aimed at raising awareness, generating buzz and getting Klout to show up in people's social streams. A while back, Klout's founder Joe Fernandez and I discussed something like this as part of a brand initiative and it's interesting to see it in action under a different context.
I'm playing along as are my colleagues Steve Rubel and Michael Brito. Speaking for myself—if I end up winning, I'm going to figure out how to give the grand prize away (a Vegas get away) perhaps to a couple who could really use it. Our team will still get the free Pizza party. Don't like the tactic? Get used to it. Social marketing techniques are increasingly designed to get others to compete while leveraging their networks in the process (gamification leverging social currency). It's actually taking an old model and updating it for a social era.
What is Location-Based Marketing? While an official definition doesn't yet exist for location-based marketing, we (Mike and Aaron) like to explain it as the art of engaging your customers and prospects using services like foursquare, Yelp, SCVNGR and Gowalla to drive loyalty, word of mouth marketing and referrals. These services are mostly available on smart phones (mobile phones that are web and GPS enabled) and allow users to "check in" to a physical location such as a restaurant, bar, print shop or dentist's office. Some of these services allow the businesses to reward their customers for checking in with special discounts, prizes, experiences and recognition.
Because more and more people are starting to use smart phones, it's becoming easier for software and application developers to take advantage of knowing within a tight radius, where someone is assuming that "someone" doesn't mind revealing their current location. The key here is for marketers and small business owners to provide enough value (discounts, prizes, recognition etc.) for customers to want to check in so that customers will share their data with them. Over time, marketers and business owners can leverage this rich data (age, sex, past check-in behavior, frequency of checking in, etc.). Even better, if the location is cool enough or the offer compelling enough, marketers and business owners can count on their customers sharing their "check ins" with their networks on places like Facebook, Twitter and Google +.
How Does a Business Get Started with a Location-Based Marketing Campaign?Knowing that people like lists, we've put together a straightforward blueprint for companies to help them think about how they might go about building a location-based marketing campaign. This isn't everything you need to know, it's a good primer for getting started. If you're really interested in digging in, we hear there is a good book to help you get started (shameless plug, we know).
Set goals: Are you looking to drive foot traffic? Loyalty? Sales? Engagement? Think about how to measure this.
Claim your location: simply put, search for your business across the top LBS (foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and SCVNGR) and put a "claim" in on your business's location(s). In most cases, this is a ten minute process. While you're at it, make sure you take a look at your location on Google Places.
Pick a service (or two) to support: Find 1-2 services to use (hint: if you’re in the travel and entertainment industry, Gowalla is a great choice). One way to decide which service(s) are right for you is to see how active your customers are across each service.
Reach out to your Influencers: Find out who your influencers are (the mayor, ambassador or the person at the top of your leader board is usually a good place to start) and get to know them. Heck, invite them in for coffee, lunch, a wine tasting.
Pick a great offer: Note that “great” doesn’t equal “expensive.” Sometimes, a sign in your store/venue honoring the “mayor” might be enough. My co-author, Mike Schneider, and I have what we call the “Ben & Jerry’s Rule” named after one of the first successful campaigns ever to roll out on foursquare. They offered 3 scoops of ice cream for $3 for everyone that checked in (cost for 3 scoops is normally $5.50). And even better, the mayor got a free extra scoop.
Measure, refine and optimize: This one is pretty straightforward. Have a plan and execute against it.
Gamification FTW: Don’t be afraid to leverage the “game dynamics” of some of these platforms as appropriate. For instance, on SCNVGR, you might give extra points for a picture with the store manager. Or if you sell coffee, a bonus for the best drink recommendation.
Let people know about your campaign: Remember to let people know about your program by putting up signs, telling them in your newsletter, including a mention on your “on hold” music, etc.
Operationalize, operationalize, operationalize: This means that if you are going to run a location based marketing campaign, train your employees. Train yourself. And make sure you have whatever it is that you’re promising. Not operationalizing is where many companies fall down.
Try out an API: If you are tech savvy (or have some tech savvy developers), try experimenting with some of the APIs these location based platform providers make available for free. You can jazz up your website or your mobile app.
Where is Location Based Marketing Headed?
We're seeing a lot of interesting developments in the space. The over exaggerated death of Facebook Places signals something that we have had our eyes on for a while. The audience that knows about and understands checking in its current form is a subset of highly technical (geeky) early adopters, gamers and social networking dynamos. These folks spend money, they're loud and they are worth activating, but that behavior on its own is not going to pay off the true value of location. Instead, there are other ways for consumers to use and express their location to get value.
Passive Checking In / Precision: Reward cards like Tasti-D-Lite's check people in automatically using the foursquare API, but companies like Shopkick are experimenting with sound wave emitters that can track people to specific aisles of a store and test whether they can get people to spend with targeted offers, but also see if they can get them to change behavior. I remember proposing similar technology to a pharma client which did the same using RFID trackers. They thought this was too icky, but Shopkick, according to some chats I've had with Forrester has 2.5 million users and 40% are active. That is huge and represents a seriously amazing opportunity to get to shoppers and interact with / influence them at decision point.
Intent / Future: Applications like Forecast, Plancast and Ditto have people telling where they are going to be. This represents a huge opportunity for merchants to use structured data to serve a group of people who need their services, or to attempt to change their intended behavior. The first ones into the pool get the advantage and I bet they get it at almost zero cost.
In a status or meta data: Facebook, like Google+ is using location as a feature and it's actually pretty brilliant because they are getting more than just a check in. They're getting personal and professional expressions wrapped around a location. The problem is that the data is still highly unstructured and difficult to analyze, but if anyone can figure it out, it's Google. Look for them to do cool things with the location data that you provide to Google+. I see recommendations based on what your friends or others like you like without you having to answer many questions.
Recommendation Engines:Bizzy and WHERE are the leaders in this category. Bizzy recently integrated with foursquare so they can pull in your locations and add places you have been to their recommendation technology. They also have a concept of "checking out" [BTW are the shenanigans at techcrunch wacky or what? start another blog Mike] where you rate your experience in a structured manner. They also just released a reminder notification that pings you 60 minutes after you check-in on foursquare to remind you to check out on Bizzy.
At Point of Sale: Screw checking in, just pay. Technologies like The LevelUp are capturing your location, but they aren't broadcasting it to anyone (yet). Instead they're quietly building a future-forward loyalty, cross merchant loyalty program that will have one of the most interesting sets of data anyone has seen. Look for them to possibly merge with SCVNGR at some point and connect the social aspects. For now, though, we'll take one step mobile payments and behind-the-scenes discounts on anything we want. You can leave your wallet at home!
Hopefully we've piqued your interest in location-based marketing. If you have any questions, please ask away in the comments and we'll do our best to answer them.
The following is a guest post from Joe Chernov. Joe is the Director of Content for Eloqua. Co-chair of WOMMA member ethics panel. You can read more about Joe here: http://www.jchernov.com
If you’ve ever suspected your social media followers are your best customers, your instinct was correct. The customers who choose to follow you on social channels are considerably more apt to promote your brand to others, at least, that’s what a recent internal study at Eloqua tells us.
Inspired by a conversation with SiriusDecisions VP Jonathan Block, we decided to shift our focus from the number of people following us and instead concentrate on the nature of our followers. Who exactly are these people who’d gone out of their way to “Like” us, tweet about us and join our online communities? What are they most apt to talk about? And, most importantly, are they good for our business?
We looked for patterns in the most recent 500 tweets mentioning Eloqua, the dialogue on our 1,500-member Facebook Fan page, and the chatter in our LinkedIn Groups. We uncovered some compelling statistics – data that supports the instincts of many social media marketers.
Those who engage with us on social channels have a much higher Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a popular, albeit controversial, measure of brand advocacy – than our “average” customer. Over all, the NPS for customers who engage with us on social channels is more than 450% higher than our total customer base. We had assumed the NPS for our Facebook Fans would be the highest – after all, the type of content our Fans prefer is more “personal” (staff photos, party updates, employee profiles) than what’s shared on Twitter or LinkedIn. But although Facebook Fans registered a staggering 700% higher NPS score than our total client base, it was Twitter that stole the show. A customer who tweets about Eloqua is nearly nine times as likely to be a brand promoter as our average user.
Before completing this post, I chatted with social media A-lister Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group. Owyang has blogged in the past about NPS and social media, so I figured he might have some insights to share. He certainly did. He told me, “NPS doesn't take into account that customers already are making referrals. To get a holistic view of customer sentiment, referrals and word-of-mouth, brands must also include measuring the organic opinions of customers happening every second of every day around the globe.”
In other words, NPS tells us if a person says they would promote a brand; social monitoring tells us if that person actually did promote a brand.
Yet having run communications at word-of-mouth marketing firm BzzAgent, I can tell you that most brand-related conversations still occur face-to-face, and no listening platform can (yet) monitor in-person discussions. So while I agree social media analysis should incorporate sentiment, I still believe the correlation between NPS and social engagement is valuable in that it speaks to the likelihood of brand endorsements in real world conversations as well online chatter.
Certainly, this study only begins to address the correlation between social media and brand advocacy. It doesn’t touch on causation. It’s unclear if our best customers engage with us on social channels because they like us, or if the act of engaging with us induced them to favor us. That’s a question we plan to tackle soon.
What else did we discover in the process of analyzing our social followers? Lots. Here are a few gems.
The company’s blog is the #1 trigger for customer tweets
Although social CRM and support are, justifiably, hot topics in the media, calls for support account for only 1% of all tweets
SMB clients are nearly 2.5 times as likely to create online content than enterprise clients
The more engaged the company is a particular social network, the higher the NPS of the customers who are active in that community
Does this analysis affect the way you will approach social media? Have you conducted any studies that advance or contradict these indicators? We’d love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, the next time your CEO, CMO or Board asks if any of this social media stuff truly matters, you no longer have to trust your instinct. You’ve got data on your side.
Everyone is talking about influence, so I added my perspective (based on personal experience) in my latest contribution to the Harvard Business Review. In the article, I lay out six critical "pillars" (not to be confused with metrics) which I find are significant factors when analyzing influence from both a traditional and digital perspective. They are:
Reach: The most obvious, this relates to the size and potency of an individuals "social graph", or if you are looking at it from a traditional perspective it's the "platform" an individual has which helps them be heard.
Proximity: This is likely overlooked with the exception of those who study network dynamics. Proximity indicates the relationships between people and how they are connected. Close proximity or ties typically indicate friends relatives etc, while loose ties have less proximity. Both ties however can be effective in influencing behavior.
Expertise: Perceived expertise in topics or subject matter establishes influence as well though is difficulty to pin down and measure. There are correlations between reputation and authority here as well. But if an individual establishes themselves as having expertise (validated by trusted sources) this becomes a major factor.
Relevancy: The relevancy of influentials to their communities, networks or audiences is also a significant indicator which affects how much influence one has the potential to yield within that group or community.
Credibility: Established by the activities of individuals through their thoughts, actions and what they generate. Indicators of credibility are tied to reputation, word of mouth, referrals etc.
Trust: Often a result of several of the above factors but extremely critical in the effectiveness of influencing a thought, behavior or action. Friends and peers can be trusted sources in cases while in other cases, known or unknown entities with perceived expertise.
While there are likely other important factors—these are good indicators though some are difficult to quantify (such as credibility). However the amount of times an individual is mentioned by others on a specific topic and the link to how much visibility is generated are metrics which can be measured. So how are you thinking about influence these days?
While the current trend in all things social is demonstrating ROI (did Old Spice Increase sales etc?) There remains a lack of emphasis on actually executing well in social spaces with the assumption that this is simply where customers, consumers, employees etc. will go to seek information and interact. That's why I think Altimeter's recent report listing out 8 success criteria specific to marketing initiatives on Facebook is a breath of fresh air. I was fortunate to help inform the report as an ambassador for Edelman Digital, and was happy to see best practices featured from brands we work with such as AXE (client). That aside, the report is worth reviewing and digesting as it goes through the 8 criteria in depth backing it up with examples:
With the above criteria in place, Altimeter has drafted a simple framework for brands and organizations to keep in mind as they build out their digital embassies in the Facebook ecosystem. Using this criteria, Altimeter then selected a few brands to evaluate calling out specific best practices and areas for opportunity. Here's how the brands fared when compared with each other:
At minimum the report offers a few choice insights and examples of brands to look at and learn from while you are developing your strategies and tactics for this space. Specifics such as being inconsistent or not addressing angry comments serve as early indicators to learn from as companies develop their rules of engagement for Facebook and other digital embassies. While other studies focus on devising formulas that assign dollar values to Facebook connections, reports such as this offer a few high level guidelines for how to best navigate through social systems such as Facebook. Have a read and chime in. What are your best practices?
My colleague Steve Rubel and I wear many hats at Edelman. One of
those hats is keeping an eye on the trends unfolding in real time and
deriving meaning from them as they pertain to organizations and brands.
Attached to this post is a slideshow where we identify what these trends are and at a high level how your organization needs to plan accordingly for them. They are:
Marketing in the age of streams
Your customers, consumers and employees are no longer only visiting
static Web pages but participating in conversations which increasingly
occur off domain in “streams” flowing from Facebook, Twitter and even
apps. In order to catch them, you must be highly relevant in their
streams.
The Googleization of media
Quality Content and potent social connections in addition to
traditional keywords are influencing how visible you are to the search
engines. Everyone is media.
The data decade
Data is increasingly becoming available to anyone and everyone. From
it we can derive insights into behaviors. We must become “data junkies”
to fully harness this trend.
Business becomes social
Moving from designated spokesperson to employee engagement at
scale—business itself is beginning to look more social as organizations
start to engage all stakeholders in open and mutually beneficial ways.
Location, location, location
Where you are is becoming the new what are you doing as multiple
platforms begin to adopt the new geolocation status update generating
new kinds of data.
Private becomes public
Despite privacy concerns, applications and behaviors which support
social sharing are still going strong as what is considered private
becomes re-defined as we continue engaging in networks.
We believe these trends are not future gazing but what’s happening
at this very moment and that they will cause organizations to adapt to
change, adopt new practices and innovate accordingly. For more industry
insights, ideas and perspectives you can visit our newly created “branded channel” on Slideshare.
When Aaron Strout approached me about participating in Movember (through the Movember foundation which facilitates donations for Mens health issues such as testicular cancer), I was a bit apprehensive. I mean, I do a lot of talks/work with clients and it's hard to be taken seriously with a 'stash that came out of nowhere. I also thought about how much work it would take to hit up my network and raise funds for a great cause. It's never easy to ask people for money.
Then the "marketer" in me started thinking. Wouldn't there be a brand out there who would want to get involved with this? What does a traditional sponsorship get you? A few banner ads? Those don't work—everyone in the industry wants to figure out how to get in the social streams in a meaningful way.
I typically don't do what's known as "sponsored conversations"—but this is a conversation worth sponsoring. So I dialed up my friends at P&G. And they dialed up their friends at relevant brands. And The Art of Shaving, stepped up and said:
Yeah, we will donate $5000.00 to Team Austin (who by the way is going to decimate team Boston). Well, in the spirit of full disclosure—they said this exactly:
1) The Art of Shaving will donate $5,000 to Team SocMed Austin’s fundraising efforts for the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Livestrong, & Movember Foundations.
2) The Art of Shaving will provide you and 9 of your teammates a gift pack of our products for you to use as you shave throughout the month. The pack will also include a DVD & a brochure with information on our brand and products.
3) In any subsequent communications, you & Team SocMed Austin will be sure to acknowledge the Art of Shaving donation of money & products transparently to your readers & followers.
And just like that—the folks at The Art of Shaving are now part of this conversation as they should be. I mean, it's all about growing and trimming facial hair for a good cause. So thank you to the folks at The Art of Shaving for your support of Team Austin. Will I reference the products they send me? Of course I will. They helped me and I want to help them back. It's a "sponsored conversation" but I'll also be honest about the products, though at first glance they do look fairly high quality. And instead of a few dollars going toward a media purchase, it goes somewhere better. If you feel moved to help as well, you can donate to Team Austin here. Thanks for even considering.
Originally posted at Experience Matters We've been thinking about the current economic climate and the pressure, not to mention scrutiny digital (if not all) initiatives are currently under. Digital by definition is highly measurable, which can increase the focus of ROI (return on investment) for project before it ever gets off the ground. The challenge however is that there is so much to learn from initiatives that launch—insights can be applied directly to that project, or indirectly to something else. In addition to launching our own initiatives as organizations, we realize that companies may not see the advantages they can have simply by listening and potentially participating in what we like to think of as "The Collective". Every day, millions of people are talking about what they care about, and your products and services are most likely part of that story. Download our POV
on "The Collective Is The Focus Group" and let us know what you think about what we have to say about tapping the collective for insights. Is this something that can yield a real return? You can also see a version of this article on BusinessWeek.
Content: Quality content is a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping will to help build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask yourself. 1. Where will the content come from? 2. Does it provide indisputable value? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre Web 2.0 initiatives such as beinggirl.com, another P&G powered community for female teens grappling with relevant topics have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.
Context: Context means understanding how to meet people where they are up and serving up the right experience at the right time. Well designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context. For example, Facebook’s recently updated iPhone example is perfectly designed for contextual usage in the go. It’s my favorite way to stay in touch with my Facebook community which I prefer to do while away from the PC. Context means investing time in knowing how your users will want to engage with their community—then enabling them to do so.
Connectivity Communities thrive on squishy, hard to measure activities that are relationship based at the root. It’s not about a mass communications but more about the micro-interactions which I’ve talked about at great length. Designing experiences which support thousands of micro-interactions means you are making a commitment vs. trying to produce a one-hit wonder. Communities can in theory be the new CRM (Customer Relationship Management), but require people to be minding it. Community software platforms such as Liveworld software offer moderation services. This should tell you that if you’ve invested in building a community framework, you need to play host if you’re lucky enough for guests to arrive.
Continuity Communities which thrive often evolve over time to meet the evolving needs of users. As mentioned earlier, we launched Pampers Village which includes functionality such as a baby name finder, parent blogs, forums and a non-traditional navigation design which tags topics and references relevant products. Communities such as this and others need to be flexible to evolve over time while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained over time. Read the full article
Updates: -As of 8:00 CST, Motrin.com has been down for nearly 1/2 a day. -Motrin.com is back up and has been updated with the below message in an image format (should have been text you can copy and paste) -A "cosmetic surgery" parody of the original ad is now is now on YouTube
I am literally in the middle of watching what Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff call a "Groundswell". As far as I can tell, Motrin posted an ad on their Website (see above) which ignited a community of mothers who were insulted by it. Specifically it seems that many of the mothers use baby slings and objected to the tone of the ad which describes them as "in fashion".
Full disclaimer, I am not interested in taking sides, but I am interested in events like this and how they unfold, specifically as it relates to power consumers, online communities, brands and the digital trail all of this type activity leaves. Here's a few considerations for any business, brand or even individual to consider in similar situations: Motrin.com Website Unable To Respond Rapidly As of 9:30 CST on a Sunday night, Motrin.com is down for the count. Motrin customers have already reported that an e-mail went out apologizing for the tone of the ad and took it off their site. The big takeaway here for me is that e-mail was the default vessel for communication because it can be utilized rapidly, but the Website can't. It's possible that the site went down due to server traffic, but friends in the field tell me this is unlikely. In the not-so-distant future, business and brands will need Websites that are as easy to update as blogs. You can quote me on this one.
Google Results Immediately Influenced If you were to Google the words "Motrin + Mom" you will get results which look like the screen grab I took. Google has immediately picked up blogs and Twitters and organically placed them in spots from #2 down. It's possibly that it will go to #1 shortly. In the meantime, Motrin's purchased ads on the side make for an interesting comparison. The Community Organizes No, it's not slick, it's not marketing and ad people can poke fun at the music as much as they want—it's a real response. Direct and genuine, whether you agree with it or not. And it was put up more quickly than most marketers could ever dream to produce content. The unofficial "motrin moms" took matters into their own hands, and they were heard by the community, outside the community, the search engines and by Motrin itself. The Motrin Brand On Twitter The Motrin brand seems to have an official presence on Twitter. Ironically called "Motrin Moms" (can anyone confirm/deny that this is Motrin)?. Here's what the last few Tweets look like as the PR situation unfolds:
There's no mention of the upset moms, and in fairness to the Motrin brand, it's probably designed to handle marketing vs. PR. But of course those lines are increasingly blurring and presents an interesting dilemma for brands using Twitter which is how to leverage the presence in a communications crisis.
In Summary As I mentioned at the beginning, I'm not interested in taking sides, but rather I'm interested in studying the dynamics of case studies like this. I have a few recommendations for organizations if faced with a similar issue. They are:
1. Design Your Website For Rapid Response If your site has to be taken down in order to respond to a crisis, re-design it so that it can be updated quickly and easily without having to throw your organization and agencies into a panic. Worry about your response strategy, not the design of your site.
2. Think Like A Blogger, Tweeter, Community & Citizen Journalist Look at how quickly the mommy community organized and produced an authentic video. It's because they don't have legal guidelines holding them back. You probably do—but of you can figure a way around them, you can fight authenticity with authenticity, which looks less like a fight and more like a conversation anyway.
3. Have A Google Strategy In Place Aside from perhaps smoothing things over with the offended, the real incentive for any organization to engage in situations like this is to influence the search results and digital trail so that your organization presents well on them. The best way to do this is to have people saying good things about you which means you have to give them something good to say and can't force it. The end goal needs to be helping people. The ROI will be a much more positive long tail.
My 2 cents, for what's it's worth. Hope it's helpful.
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Above is a video recording from the panel I participated in at the WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas. My fellow panelists included Linda Saindon of Kraft, Kevin Dando of PBS, moderated by John Bell of the Ogilvy Digital Influence Group. All official WOMMA recorded videos from the event can be found here, but I really recommend the session which Featured Frank Elison the man behind Comcast Cares on Twitter, as well as Pete Blackshaw (recorded using the Critical Mass "beta cam"). It's really worth the watch as they both discuss the role of customer service in marketing and how it influences how positive and negative word of mouth spreads. Enjoy the videos and I'll have more thoughts on WOMMA 2008 in the days to come.
I'm off to participate at the WOMMA Summit (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) and it's got me thinking about what word of mouth is in the first place. In a simplistic kind of way, I like to think that word of mouth is essentially something that makes us want to tell others about it. Here's a few I can remember followed by what the first thought was that popped into my head:
Mini Cooper "cool"
Google "this makes finding stuff so easy"
Subservient Chicken 'how did they do that"?
YouTube "makes watching video online fun"
Dove Real Beauty "that was clever"
Craigslist "I'll never pay for classifieds again"
Twitter "not sure exactly, but can't stop using it"
Facebook "so convenient to stay in touch"
IPhone "i'll never go back to a regular phone"
Of course word of mouth can also be bad. AOL, Comcast, Microsoft (Vista), and others have experienced the wrath of customers who put considerable energy into saying things about the products or services that weren't flattering. To me the current state of marketing revolves this idea of "viral"—producing something that spreads organically from person to person. Not unlike some of the examples I've provided in the list. But we call videos "viral" before they ever have a chance to be. Is that putting the cart in front of the horse or is has the word viral become so overused that it's actually meaningless?
Maybe it's as simple as asking ourselves, would you recommend this to a friend? And if that's the case, we'll have our work cut out for us because there are so few things in this world that actually are. So what's on your WOM list? And why?
I recently recorded a fairly interesting podcast—really it's a three way conversation between myself, Gary Cohen and Jay Ehret. In it I elaborate a bit on what I call the "marketing spiral":
"Each time we act as evangelists for products, brands or services—then it becomes less about a purchase at the bottom of the funnel and more about perpetuating a constant state of “loops”. “Accidental marketers” have always existed, it’s just that the Web has given us more effective ways to influence our own consumer behavior—which makes things a little more challenging for those “professional marketers”.
As an individual, this blog is one of the most effective manifestations of "marketing" I could have produced for myself. I have a respectable audience that comes back as opposed to visiting it once, never to return again. People participate in through comments and the content is distributable. But imagine if I started it the same way many large organizations launch conventional marketing initiatives. What would that have looked like?
First I would have had to do several hundred pages of strategy documentation, including target audiences, marketing segments, competitive analysis—you name it. Then I would put some concepts together and test them in focus groups to see if representatives in a lab like A, B, or C, better. Next, I would take that feedback, make a few adjustments and plan a multichannel campaign—launching the blog with all sorts of advertising pointing to it. And since I painstakingly outlined the ROI in the in-depth strategy, I'd go about measuring the effectiveness against the ROI that was outlined prior to launch.
Of course, this blog like millions or other forms of "social media" followed a path that looked nothing like that. In fact, it looked much more like the second flow. Sure, I put some initial thought into it before ever touching a pixel, but once I launched the blog it became a never-ending cycle of content development, template design tweaks, and learning curves based off of what was going on each time I did something.
For example, when I started posting visuals, I would check my stats and could see that people from all sorts of other sites and blogs began referencing them and linking back—so I realized that the visuals were providing something people wanted, and if I wanted to continue to build an audience, this was a good way to do it. Secondly, I had thought that my primary audience would be designers, when in fact the blog started attracting an eclectic audience of planners, marketers, librarians, even evangelists. After each cycle of launching content or even functionality in the sidebars, I was learning about who my audience was and why they were coming. This required me to periodically have more frequent checkpoints of "little strategy" where I would plan the direction of where I wanted to go and make the appropriate adjustments to get there. And it felt less like a straight path and more like a meandering one, because the "focus group" was happening in real time after the initial launch.
I've been thinking about this for a while because after having some exposure to large organizations, it occurred to me that there is a desire to do more "unconventional marketing" but the machine which is in place is actually "conventional"—all the things that have been done in the past. For example, it's common and understandable for the "what's the ROI?" question to be raised during an unconventional marketing initiative, but that question could derail the entire effort before it has a chance to ever get off the ground. Sometimes the ROI is simply insights and learnings that are gleamed from actually doing the initiative. Other times, the direction of the initiative changes midway through in in unexpected ways that could not have been predicted. Many times for the better—let's not forget that Twitter was never meant to be what it ended up being today.
Speaking from personal experience, I could not have predicted many of the outcomes I have had since launching this blog, but I believe following a much more "unconventional" path is a core reason behind everything that I've learned from it. For a couple of hundred dollars a year and a lot of dedication and effort it's priceless to me. And so as I think about how times are becoming more unconventional—with unpredictable financial markets and political change in the air, I can't help but think that it's more important than ever to get serious about what it takes to do these types of initiatives right. It just doesn't look like conventional marketing—it's different. And unconventional times call for unconventional tactics.
If there’s one type of headline that gets attention—it’s about claiming the death of something. Well, I’d like to proclaim the “un-dead” nature of a format which I think has the potential to become something more powerful than we are currently seeing today. The Micro-site first became adopted by the marketing community as a tool of convenience. It simply became too unwieldy to continue adding sections to our large company/product Websites every time we wanted to promote a new product, feature or service. And specifically for advertisers—well, they needed an online extension for their campaigns to live in the digital space.
And so the formula had begun. Launch a campaign, build a micro-site, buy online media to drive traffic to it. Everything was in it’s place—advertisers now had a presence on the Web, clients were happy about it and the big money was still being pumped into the traditional channels because that’s how it’s always been done. In the past year lots of us have had a grand ol time proclaiming the death of the micro-site, and with some validity. Fact is that the internet is littered with thousands of them, and the majority are either promotional in nature, designed to win awards vs. serving up value or simply provide no incentive to ever return to them. On top of that, most of the micro-sites I come across are difficult to use, take WAY too much time to load, crash my browser or use contrived marketing language written by professionals who have spent years perfecting their craft.
The reason micro-sites have come under fire is because the “amateurs” have provided more compelling experiences in many ways. Sorry, it’s true. If you Google a product name, it’s not uncommon to come across a blog which has reviewed that product and is ranked higher than the professionally produced micro-site. How do you think Engadget became so wildly popular? Still, I think the micro-site format has legs. Here’s why and here’s what we can do differently. Analyze Digital Behavior Where I see the opportunity for micro-sites lies behind simple human behavior in the digital space. Think about how the typical person interacts with digital media. My friends and family outside of the industry still send me links via e-mail. Simple copy and paste—the lowest barrier there is. Most “regular” people I know still bookmark WEB PAGES. They aren’t managing multiple feeds, readers and social bookmarks like I do. I am not a representative of mainstream digital behavior. I don’t have numbers to back this up, but going on intuition and personal experience, I’m fairly confident that this is the case. Think about how you use the Web. For all the talk about mobility, widgets and portability my guess is that you still spend a lot of time on simple, good old fashioned hypertext WEB PAGES. Micro-sites have lost some luster not because of the format, but because marketers and everyday people don’t often think alike. We the people are looking for something we can use, and instead get a lot of bells and whistles which don’t reward us for our time.
Offer Content, Context, Connections Next we have to ask ourselves why formats like blogs, social networks and other manifestations of emerging digital media have become so popular. Blogs look nothing like micro-sites. BUT, what they have in common is the delivery. Web pages—pages that can be bookmarked and e-mailed among other things. And they offer niche content, lots of links and of course the ability for people to talk back. Long form content is the new design language—I have become a convert. Debating the above-the-fold argument is a moot point—we should start channeling our energy into debating how we can provide VALUE to users who are clearly getting it elsewhere. I propose that we breathe new life into the micro-site format by fundamentally re-thinking it. Look at the visual above this post. What if micro-sites evolved into content heavy, long form Web Pages that aggregated not only your own content, but content from any place you could think of? Instead of being concerned about linking away from the “site”—that would be one of the primary objectives. I’ve found through my own experience in social networks that if you link to others and do the legwork of curating relevant content that people remember this, and guess what? They actually come back for more! Micro-sites can deliver this, simply because the format consists of Web pages and links. We’ve just over-engineered the whole enchilada.
Develop A Content Strategy of Distribution + Aggregation Take a look at Lenovo’s Voices of the Olympic Games. The content actually lives across multiple platforms—and it’s all about content. Producing it quickly, updating it, uploading it via the popular networks which fuel the long tail. It looks nothing like a micro-site but if you break down the components, it’s still a Web Page, or at least that’s one of the main components. The core difference is content and distribution, Traditional micro-site thinking has marketers writing the copy, designers and developers building the site and a launch date followed by a maintenance plan. But if micro-sites begin to evolve into more “blog-like” experiences, they can quickly be launched, edited, refreshed, and have all the flexibility in the world to pull in the open source 3rd party applications which are pervasive on the Web. Events can be live streamed, photo galleries can live on Flickr, video galleries, on You Tube. And there’s a tremendous opportunity to actually embrace users who are generating their own content about your products. You can make them the star—and they’ll probably link back to you in return. The difference isn’t in the technology as much as it is in the mindset. In order to pull this off, we’ll need to think more like bloggers, uploaders, journalists and mash-up artists than marketers, copywriters and designers. Take a look at what 37 Signals does when they live stream video—it take very little production value to achieve this and the result is a sort of direct engagement which users on the Web are craving. Ask "What’s Next"? Like anything else, what I’m proposing isn’t a silver bullet, and it would take big mindset shift for many organizations to pull this off. But, it’s worth looking into. I recently came across a micro-site for HP featuring Shaun White, and not being the demographic I really can’t judge if the site experience makes sense, but I did notice one thing. The site had clearly embraced a more “2.0” approach by offering multiple social bookmarks. But if you actually bookmarked a video, returned to your link, it took you to the first page of the micro-site where you are greeted by Shaun’s talking/dancing avatar. You have to dig up the video all over again. I’m not a 20-something but I have a hunch this would piss them off. But I don’t blame the format—if that video was worth sharing, a simple URL could have sufficed. Better yet, getting involved in the comments about it would take things a step further. It’s probably a good time to re-think what the experience of a Web page can be—I think the simple format has a lot of potential, if we just look at things with fresh, new eyes.
From my recent contribution to Ad Age, Digital Next:
"Old habits die hard. While consumers are out there spending countless
hours on social networks, file sharing applications, chat, community
sites, buying stuff, selling stuff and using multiple devices, some of
us tradigital old fogies are still reaching for our beloved toolbox of
the past in the hopes of getting their attention. While online user
behavior tells us that people respond well to simplicity, we labor to
create complexity in the form of experimental navigation and sites that
take forever
to load. When YouTube arrived on the scene, we responded by putting our
TV spots on them or -- better yet -- creating spots that looked like
they were made by amateurs. Little did we know that the real action
happens in the comments. Have we thought about talking back to people
or are we really just interested in telling our stories?" Read the full story
Here's a sneak preview from my next contribution to Ad Age, Digital Next:
"The problem with marketing is that it often times doesn’t allow marketers to go deep, to gain an intimate understanding of human behavior. We’re strapped for time, spread thin and torn between making our clients or bosses happy while trying to do what we think is right. We’ve got access to the latest trend reports, market segments, personas and metrics. We’re surrounded by smart, capable people who, like William Hurt’s character—know what they are doing. But there’s a question we need to ask ourselves. Are we making the time to walk in the shoes of the people we market to? Are we willing to swim in the deep end?"
