Archive for December, 2011

How will you make your mark in 2012?

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

Picture credit http://bit.ly/vafRYw

One definition of genius we really like round here is genius is ‘the ability to connect two seemingly unconnected things’.

Truly successful social businesses do this, they make connections between ideas and people. They also stimulate responses to create action potential, like synapses do when they fire. Social businesses make things happen, powered by affinities and the connective tissue of networked technology. And there’s no doubt that 2012 will be hallmarked to no small degree by the impact social business will have on it.

This raises some significant considerations for marketers. For social marketers that concentrate mostly on the ‘media’ part of social media, the ultimate aspiration and the holy grail of social, is to go viral. Social contagion’s the big win, the coup. The crucial key performance indicator is to make things shareable.

What social media like that thrives on however, and not entirely healthily, is often a shareability based on the open-mouthed factor of things that are either insane or incredible, spread out of disbelief, or momentary pleasure, and not much more.

Are we shattering an ecosystem we can all thrive in by doing so? As this mildly amusing article in 2002 accurately predicted, and Nick Carr’s book The Shallows has covered since, our attention spans are getting shorter.

We’ve slowly been turning into digital goldfish where everything competes with a ‘best ever’ or ‘awesome’ kind of hyperbole for share of mind, in the place of simply being interesting and sustainably relevant to a particular group of people with a shared interest, purpose or sense of communal identity that has longevity.

If the two chief gratification buttons in life are ‘fun’ and ‘meaning’ what’s relevant in this context is how, as Thomas Friedman and the historian Walter Russell Mead have both observed, after the 1990s revolution that collapsed the Soviet Union, the Russians had a saying that seems particularly apt today:

‘It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.’

Have a think about that for a moment. It’s the essential reason why some viral social media campaigns can actually be unhelpful to brands. The sticking plaster on a short and increasingly unpredictable sales cycle, social media campaigns that are designed to go viral can end up fostering audience relationships based only on instant and temporary engagement in a similar way.

In 2012, social media tactics unconnected to core social values can serve up content that at a deep level devalues rather reinforces the impact of a social brand and its sustainability. Social business brands need a purpose beyond profit or product and a core sense of the big picture.

The good news is here though. Beyond going viral, is going scalar.

To make a mark in 2012, the genius of making connections between two seemingly unconnected things is the kind of social media integration that can quite literally scale your business. Going scalar is pulling people into your business who are advocates beyond the act of sharing.

Scaling business through the harnessing of participation and deep insights that go beyond likes, +1’s and unique views can mean walls can become permeable membranes between a brand and its users, that business becomes designed around connections instead of divisions, that being ‘on brand’ can happen anywhere by anyone, and that talent can be brought into the business; that target audiences can be replaced by shared experiences that have lasting impact.

There’s no internal and external in the social organization, so the costs of managing another marketing channel (as social is so often seen as being) or of outsourcing your voice (as agencies so often encourage) become part of a leaner, more connected and more empowered constituency of committed users that can co-create the future fuel for business strategy with you.

It’s a sustainable strategy for how a brand’s or organisation’s social voice can get bigger, and have lasting impact. That’s why the two words embedded into Visceral Business are ‘is us’. We really believe in enabling the kind of social business that can create shared value, long term stakeholders and sustainable cultures.

If you want social business success in 2012 going viral’s not necessarily a bad aspiration, but going scalar’s possibly going to be a better one.

So the question is your business sufficiently adapted and suited to scalar, or will it rely on the flash in pan of short-term virality? Can deep authentic connections help you make your mark in 2012? It’s a genius opportunity.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business model, Business performance, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Neuroscience, Social business design |

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The 4 P’s of Social Business

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

It used to be the case, when marketing first became a profession, that the 4 P’s held sway. The 4 P’s were the shorthand to make sense of the plethora of activity that sales and marketing was becoming; they led to a code of practice of sorts that made sense, reference points in a unified framework able to guide a brand’s overall sales and business development.

They were the firstly ‘product’, the tangible good or an intangible service that’s mass produced or manufactured at large scale with a specific volume of units.

Then ‘price’, the amount a customer pays for the product which the business increased or decreased the price paid if other stores had the same product.

‘Promotion’, representing all of the communications that a marketeer used in the marketplace and finally ‘place’, the way of getting the product to the consumer and/or how easily accessible it is to consumers.

That was then and this is now, and as marketers think about how to corporate social business into what they’re doing there’s arguably just as much of a need for a framework, for the same kind of sense-making.

If we’re doing it all again, what might the 4 P’s look like today? Well, here’s a suggestion:

People. Your core asset. Whether they’re inside or outside the business itself, in social business people are number one, they’re both the creators, and the carriers, of your media and messages. As things turn out, no amount of viral agency cleverness comes close to doing the job without them; so get to know them, connect with them, create relationships with them in and across the communities in which they exist. The people are the new product that powers any form of social organization.

Platforms are the conduit of that connectedness. Platforms can be proprietary, like Facebook, Twitter and Google +, they can be bespoke as your own communities inside and outside the business, and they can be shared, as places of connected interest, the places of old, where people will gather.

Protocols. Old processes may still be in place in many organizations, culture change takes time, and neither people, platforms or points of connections can do much without being enabled by them. Social businesses depend on the cohesion generated by protocols, that is the ability to feed information through the pathways that can be easily understood and taken for granted. Softer and more fluid than processes, protocols are ‘how we roll’ the collective, intelligent, agile and learning ways the organization puts in place the means to grow and become more effective.

Points of connection are the pulse points that move people when brands are experiences. They’re the moments that matter, the values that are shared and everything that people come into contact with as the touchpoints of the social brand. As social business fundamentally changes how we ‘do interaction’, that thing we used to call marketing becomes a series of points of connection, a purposeful exchange between you and your people around shared social objects.

Many brands and organizations are just at the start of incorporating social business and media into the way they do things. The four P’s may have changed, but the idea of finding a framework to make sense of what’s needed remains the same, a kind of connective tissue that can unify and help frame what social business means. Ideas people can buy into create elegant transitions. It would be great to hear what you think – does this resonate with today’s networked business needs, what’s missing?

Posted in Brand, Business, Management, Marketing, Social business design |

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