Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

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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Being a Visceral Business and your Brand’s Eu IQ

Monday, June 20th, 2011

There are a lot of people trying to put their finger on the special sauce that makes a social brand succeed, to seek and find the Holy Grail as far as where all this wired up connectivity is headed.

We think in a nutshell it come down your brand’s EU IQ. A brand’s or organisations EU IQ is a combination of Enjoyment and Usefulness. It’s how well the brand’s proposition offers this and how well it connects, communicates and stimulates conversation around it.

The big win in raising any brand’s profile is to amplify the sense of purpose, mission and cause it has, and that’s a strange muscle for many brands to flex because logos have mostly been badging devices and the ticket of entry to transactions.

Social brands ask for involvement and the fostering of relationships, where the intangible value of gathering around a cause to support a cause, to solve a problem and to pursue a goal has a big part to play.

And then there’s the enjoyable part. It’s got to be fun right? Social brands can work out how they enrich and add something to the quality of people’s lives through sheer interest and enjoyment, especially when brand moments are throwaway conveniences and utilities that you’re using but it isn’t going to change the world. Unless you want to compete on price and convenience, a brand’s Eu IQ is a core differentiator.

We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at where the business drivers in today’s markets are headed and think it’s time for new models of organisation to push the boat out beyond what Sara Roberts calls Qwerty thinking. As I said in my TEDx talk last year, there’s progress to be made by moving away from a mechanical approach to a biological one and reframing organisational transformation so that it promotes the organic strengths and capabilities within the brand and its essence.

The acid test, we think, consists of 5 markers for successful social organisations.

1. They’re Networked, incorporating network principles into their behaviour and operating via a
 distributed model, either in terms of how they’re structured and/or how they reward people.

2. They’re Seamless. Community blurs the lines between the inside and the outside of the organisation 
and collaborative, two-way dialogue’s built into all interaction.

3. They’re Open. The business model demonstrates transparency and user-centric perspectives.

4. They’re Compelling and the brand is congruent and credible. It has social and commercial
 value, comprised of people, rituals, symbols, values and behaviours that create competitive edge
 beyond the logo, that are the platform for a sustainable business.

5. They’re Beyond Profit. Their operating framework’s neither ‘for profit’ or ‘not for profit’, it’s ‘beyond
 profit’, satisfying a triple win for the business, the quality of life of its people and for the planet. They recognise social currency includes time, money, love and attention as part of the mix.

The blend of this may vary, depending on the business and the type of business its in, but as conventional business models find it harder to sustain business margins and deliver returns in value, hitting the mark on these is becoming a good bet for investment, participation and buy-in.

What do you think is the special sauce of social brands? Could it be the visceral connective tissue of people coming together around brands they understand and believe in? I’d love to hear your point of view.

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

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Social brand curation: How are you doing yours?

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

Brands are moving on from being labels and concepts, packaged and sold to others.


Social brands are collaborative exercises, created from user-centric approaches to business planning embedded into the core of the organisation.

Social business applies emerging technologies and organizational, cultural, and process changes to improve business performance, and in an increasingly connected global economic environment this means collaborative workings that flex together, creating synaptic action potential, right through to the fingertips of customer service.

Social brands are collective experiences too, to some degree or another, where everyone’s memories matter, the sum total of the moments that shape them, that make an impact.

What matters isn’t just how many click throughs or likes a brand gets; a social brand has traction because events happen in which people learn something about themselves, they’re iterative in nature and value is co-created. Gamification is a hot flavour at the moment because these moments that tingle are being recognized as part of the collective experiential value of a brand.

It’s also why data aggregation tools like Intel’s Museum of Me are fascinating. They help us see things in a new way.

As human beings, we’ve an innate need to see ourselves reflected in order to know who we are. This is a fundamental part of how me make sense and meaning, a strand of social anthropology that’s been going on since ancient man first picked up a shiny stone or looked upon its image in water.

As organizations coming together socially, the ‘collective we’ in the social brand has the same urge in it.

For individuals drowning in information, brands can create significant value by curating their stories, the purpose beyond the profit, the place where collaborative management makes sense in exciting and visceral ways.

All brands and organizations have a story in their soul and a whole set of stories within their collective culture. As has been mentioned before in this blog, there’s an opportunity for these stories to be told in highly compelling ways by brands, ways that help them to become distinctively social. Point of differentiation 2.0, if you like.

This Guardian timeline of modern music’s a really good example of the opportunities available in social brand curation and part of the excellent work in data journalism the Guardian data team are doing.

With data dashboard and performance management front and center as part of a brand story, think what your organisation’s next annual report could be like. There are immense opportunities for adding value through social brand curation.

What could your social brand be like if it was based on a wiki of collective experiences that you gather, as a movement? Thta’s the kind of brand people want to be part of, either as a fan, employee or an investor.

Social brand curation’s a good way of creating a contribution economy, where there are levels of sustainable participation built into the brand. It can help deliver the kind of brand experience that can boost value and differentiation around what brands do.

We think how brands tell their stories is going to be a cornerstone of future operational success. Good social brand curation creates compelling and credible stories based on the logic of the data and the magic of the people. What’s your approach to social brand curation?

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business model, Business performance, Corporate development, Curation, Economics, Identity, Marketing, Self development, Social business design, Society |

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When the consumer’s the connection

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

At a fundamental level, business dynamics are up in the air around how brands can build their business models and market themselves.

It used to be that it’s the company that’s the distributor, that’s the long-held assumption. Distribution‘s been the bedrock of an entire business model.

So what happens if that changes and the customer is the connector?

To give you an example, I’m a bit partial to Rude Health’s Morning Glory porridge. It’s great with raisins and keeps for a week in the fridge. Camilla Bernard is one of the two founders of Rude Health and someone I’ve met at a meetup which helps. She’s the one that gives Rude Health its social voice. I like what she and the brand stands for, that the brand has a passion around it, that it’s healthy and full of authentic value. I especially like how Rude Health responds and joins in with social conversations.

As a result I’m prepared to be part of Rude Health’s contribution economy, and I’ll speak up for it as an advocate, not because someone pays me to do it, but because I want to.

I also like Waitrose. I shop there regularly. I especially like the way John Lewis partnership’s building on its impressive trust credentials by being open about its sales data.

Good or bad, I’m rooting for them for that, it helps me build a belief in them, I’ll maybe shop there more if I see they’re struggling.

Like any customer, for me supermarket retailing’s about ease and convenience, but I want to get as much bang for my buck as well. The trust that’s in the equation and Waitrose’s values and personality are at least as important as the ability to transact with them.

At the moment my local favourite supermarket doesn’t stock my favourite breakfast cereal. Disaster. This messes up my user experience! So I’m happy to connect the two brands together via social media.

Everyone wins in this scenario. Waitrose gets information about a Key Value Item on the shelf that virtually guarantees my weekly food spend goes to them. They also get to understand more about their local demographics at no cost. Rude Health hopefully gets a listing. I get the breakfast I like more easily.

Businesses that understand social commerce principles and the network effects of social media can do a great deal to create lucrative and compelling user-centric business models around that.

As a new kind of distribution model though, it asks brands to organize around the fact that the customer has become the connection.

When the customer is the connection, you’re really looking at the prospect of marriages made in heaven. The game’s no longer about brands pushing out product through a variety of (expensive) communications channels but about playing a proactive part in a mesh of demographic interests, powered by social media.

How well many are prepared for this change though is another matter. Are brands really making the most of this shift? Are they realigning themselves and their business processes and competencies around it, and how much are they losing by not doing so?

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business model, Business performance, Data, Human Relations, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Social business design |

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What’s your social worth?

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

Warning: Stocks may go up instead of down

 

 

Picture credit from New Think Inc

Beyond the vanity search on Google and the thrill of the Klout score, a new sense of social worth is emerging, significant and long lasting.

And despite the litigious dramas being played out at the moment on Twitter and elsewhere, it’s becoming more possible for social brands to be in naturally in command of their reputation more than ever before.

Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, is the head of a very hierarchical sense of the law and he’s dealing with a networked jungle. The Lord Judge says social technology’s out of control and it is, by its very definition.

The social web is out of control because what matters in the social mindset is not what a Fleet St proprietor thinks but what a friend does. This is frightening to many still wedded to industrial-style marketing management and that’s the mindset that will keep brands back.

The golden ticket to this nirvana of social brand goodness comes through developing a slightly adjusted sense of worth. The currencies of social worth are not the same now as they’ve always been. What we’re seeing now is a convergence of mobility, technology and value that radically affects the genome of reputational systems fundamentally, of brands as organisations and of brands as people.

To riff badly on a John Lennon line for a moment, happiness today is no longer a warm gun, it’s a warm digital footprint. The social internet involves thinking about how your brand is creating network effects in the long term.

So getting a quick thrill about a Peer Index ranking is one thing, but if you aren’t maxing out the opportunities for your brand that this intersection of mobility, technology and value provides, then it’s arguable whether you’re doing much good at all.

Celebrity today is not a steady state. Attention is moving too fast and too far for that and influence is being increasingly grown out of inter-action. That makes it inherently more fleeting and strategies have to therefore become more self-sustaining.

In parallel to this, with mobile money coming on-stream and the creation of Empire Avenue, the last few weeks have ushered the birth of micro-credit.

This kind of social technology allows people to contribute in many possible forms. It allows for a ‘contribution economy’ to become possible, one with several components to it.

If you ‘follow’ me you’re giving me attention (thank you). Attention is a commercial currency and part of the contribution economy.

If you ‘Like’ me, you’re spreading a good word about me. That like raises my stock and is precious.

If I give you a hat-tip and credit you for doing, saying or producing something valuable, I‘m strengthening our connectivity and networks by doing so.

If you donate money to me by buying my stuff or supporting my cause, or if I pay you for your time, another investment has been made. The one we’re most familiar with, the money economy. The master/slave economy.

The social web is not based on master/slave relationships, it’s based on target moments, not target audiences.

So if, as an employer, that contract ends for some reason? Well, it’s more in my interest than ever that I maintain some kind of social contract with you; after all, we’re connected on LinkedIn.

As a consumer, I might not need you today, but if you create target moments and I like them I might just hook back in again with you sometime in the future.

All these kinds of relationships become valuable. This is the power of weak ties.  Weak ties allow for the possibility of many different kinds of social economic contribution to be made, contributions that can support your reputation far better than pure monetary gain, plus they can indemnify you to be able to deliver again and again over time.

Child’s i Foundation, the netroots charity run by Lucy Buck that I am a trustee of, has been grown on recognizing social worth of others and everyone’s contribution.

That combination of giving time, money and love is one that’s very important to us, and something we really focus on recognising. Just recently, our first babies home, Malaika babies home, had its first birthday. The value that went into creating this milestone is enormous and wonderful to see.

It means a great deal to us that David Tait, our chairman, is walking up Everest and is such a big part of what we’re doing at a personal level instead of just running a meeting.

We accept and depend on donations, but Child’s i shows it’s cool to be involved via love, and time and attention as well. That what makes everyone involved in Child’s i matter to one another and propels us.

Network law and these emerging senses of social worth mean that weak ties tell us more about our investment opportunities and whether what I’m doing has value or not. My Empire Avenue metrics tell me in what ways I’m contributing and creating value.

That’s a significant step towards looking at the reputation of brands in a whole new way.

One day, employers will look at it this way. They’ll look at how much money than can saved by not having disconnected players, how much brand traction can be created by finding the people that care about what they do and by bringing them deep inside the business, and in recognizing much the people dimension does affect their stock in trade.

This is an operating environment that some may consider to be a lawless networked wilderness that must be controlled and contained. The reality is that it’s an evolutionary environment in which free will, choice and relationships are increasingly augmenting utilitarian marketing and transactions where everyone creates the brand. I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that the investment darling of the social network world this week has turned out to be LinkedIn, the network for professionals that contains the biggest asset base in the world for personal worth. Scammed for profit or not, what people ultimately won’t budge on is their own sense of self-certified integrity as vouched for by others.

The social web is out of control. The law that’s emerging is a networked one. Because what matters are what friends think, your weak ties, the way your reputation is something crafted online. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

 

 

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Posted in Authenticity, Business performance, Corporate development, Human Relations, Identity, Marketing, Society |

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Dialogue is authenticity

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

The best ideas come out in conversation.

Have you experienced how ideas often tumble out when talking with someone, or in the shower, or even talking to the voice in your head?

It happens a lot, collectively and individually.

It’s only when we engage iteratively in that way that ideas get honed and polished, stimulated by the prism of different perspectives.

What happens is that in dialogue, we engage more than our brains. The interaction sets off our sympathetic nervous system, the power ingredient that creates a better solution.

Listening to an excellent talk by Tim Wu at the Royal Society of Arts yesterday on the Rise and Fall of Information Empires made me think about this too.

Tim highlighted an obvious but at the same time profound insight. It’s the acid test you can use to see whether an organization or person is generating new value or protecting expiring value. It’s done by watching whether a company is devoting its energy and focusing its behaviours on innovation or defence.

An innovation mindset will spread to others, as the sympathetic nervous system reacts towards it; a culture of defence will spread fear and propulsion away from that mindset. This is a basic survival instinct.

Collaborative dialogue however, one in which both parties adapt a little, will create solutions. That is why and how organisations benefit by adopting the behaviour of leaning into situations and becoming lean and agile in terms of working across silos. As with contracting pairs of muscles, in partnership with others they’ll also generate power.

I’m bearing all this in mind when it comes to reacting to the news today in the Guardian that ‘the US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media using fake online personas designed to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.’

It goes on to say, ‘the contract stipulates each persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 controllers must be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries’.

The article itself sparked a little conversation between Katie Smith and myself that led to this tweet -

Which led in another way, to this post – the observation that I want to share being that the grand shuffling of old protocols that disruptive technology’s creating is having quite a profound, but manageable, effect.

It’s having an effect across a number of management forms – across forms of government, upon business models, and upon marketing and communications. They all face having to accept a re-arrangement across traditional flows of power, and how to augment the duality of new power relationships into their businesses.

Even technology requires bio-feedback to work well, as the stricken Japanese are finding.

In all contexts, that feedback’s the single greatest reassurance one can have. Open data allows and enables this.

All this means that the value of win:win social contracts is ascending, whilst competitive power, based on I win:you lose management principles aren’t.

In communications and marketing terms, then, the implication is that dialogue’s never been more important to a successful operating model. We need to consider this and how to build dialogue into organizations through new processes.

It’s not enough to simply broadcast content using social media. Even if it’s done by as many people as possible within the organization who are ‘social communications’ literate, there has to be interaction and ongoing dialogue, as well as conversation which has the potential to be asynchronous.

Social media is about doing more ‘human business’ than has been done previously in the past. Increasingly, brand authenticity in this social media context is dialogue.

The kind of authenticity that breeds dialogue will be where relationships connect at a deeper level, that generate collaborative conversation, because the sympathetic nervous system will also be engaged at that point. Ultimately, this way of marketing and communicating will be more productive.

The challenge for organizations however isn’t small – all the triggers that reinforce the old ways of being have to be looked at as well as assumptions that can sit within a business model or marketing strategy.

This is one of the things we look at when going deeper into organizations to switch on dormant performance.

In real life and on-line, sock-puppets don’t do dialogue. A good volley of questions and answers and co-created conversation is where insight, ideas, value and satisfying user experiences are to be found.

Dialogue is authenticity. It’s also sustainability  – could this be something it’s now time to embed into an operating model and marketing strategy? What are your ideas on it?

 

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Business, Business performance, Corporate development, Data, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Neuroscience, Self development, Social business design, Society |

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The State of the Social Brand

Sunday, March 13th, 2011

Picture by the brilliant Paul Clarke for Headstream

Steve Sponder, Chris Buckley and the great team at Headstream have pulled together an index of Social Brands for the first time this year, the Social Brand 100.

They kindly invited me to be a part of the process and judging panel and discuss the findings to an invited audience on Friday and this post is a collection of reflections and observations from both the event and the report itself.

The Social Brands 100 was a crowd-sourced project in part, with nominations coming in from across the Twitterverse initially that were then assessed by the judging panel and researched by the Headstream team, with Brandwatch as monitoring partners.

It follows in the wake of some significant league tables, most notably Altimeter’s Engaged Brand Index and iCrossing’s Connected Brand Index. I think we’re still only taking the very first steps to where social brand assessment will ultimately lead and the opportunities for data curation and social performance are wide open given the scope for real-time reporting, destructured organization, storytelling and new parameters for value and business management.

As an addition to these resources and the latest statement on the state of the social brand, Headstream’s The Social Brands 100 Index makes for interesting reading for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it tends to suggest that for many social brands the emphasis is still primarily on social media rather than social business.

There are a few notable exceptions of course. Dell, the No 1 brand ranked on the list, took up the social brand mantle in earnest as a result of a public outage of poor customer service from Jeff Jarvis in a tweet in 2007. That moment created a successful turnaround of its business and of brand perceptions, the kind of turnaround Dell would have had to have previously spent a huge amount of advertising to buy, but that word of mouth has fueled instead.

Dell is a good example of social media success and deserves to be at No 1, because without network effects and a deep-level business reappraisal, Dell’s social brand reputation would not have been possible.

Giffgaff, the brand that CNET’s been quoted in the report as describing as ‘O2’s bonkers-barmy crowd-sourced network’, comes in at No4 because it’s reinventing the way a social business can run itself. Starbucks is worth another mention for the way it has been embedding incoming conversation and co-creation into its business model.

Having said that, the vast majority of brands on the list cannot yet be described as businesses that have integrated user partnerships into the way they structure and appraise how business performance is being developed.

Social media is still skin deep for many, and the big tussle at the moment is whether social media will be subsumed into the way things have always been done, (one panelist describes it as ‘just another channel’, for example) or will it be a pivot for the emergence of social business models that offer thicker value in the longer term?

So here’s a question or two: What’s the appropriate blend of transactions and relationships when it comes to doing business in the 21st Century, and how does that vary sector by sector?

One of the key audience moments of the launch event was when during the Q&A Virtuous Bread met MuddyBoots during a conversation exchange. It was a real-time demo of how people as brands are enjoying connecting with one another. So it’s worth considering to what extent is that kind of affinity going to create a world-wide mesh of collaborative business interests in the future and will automated non-friendly transactions still be done by people? Ted Hunt wisely raised the issue of ‘socialwash’ about how deep many brands will allow the impact of social media to be.

The next line of enquiry is how only one charity was mentioned in the Index, the brilliant netroots charity Child’s i Foundation of which I have to disclose I am a Trustee (shameless plug – if you aren’t aware of what we’re doing, please check us out.)

How could this be, that only one charity is nominated, when such a core part of a not-for-profit is its volunteering base? It’s puzzling that this is an entire sector dependant on social and philanthropic participation, yet none of the major charity brands seemed to be recognized as socially engaged ones. One possible explanation is that charity brands have to work that much harder at being recognized for raising the quality of engagement and performance using social media. In a way, there’s a similarity to the Big Society argument, the people involved have always participated. Perhaps this is something for not-for-profits to bear in mind, and public sector organizations; when it comes to being seen to be engaging with people, they themselves have to be the change.

Retail, FMCG and consumer product brands on the other hand (which between them made up 54% of the overall index) are more noticeable for stretching beyond their conventional, transactional ways of inter-acting when they become more social. The move away from broadcast is more palpable. This may be only a temporary state of affairs though, as notions of value shift beyond consumption and, economically speaking, this is highly likely. With no health or pharmaceutical brands in the Index at all, it certainly appears that social definitions of well-being may be changing.

What’s heartening about the Index is that, firstly, it shows that established brands with brand equity and a heritage built up over the years can sit equally well and side by side with young, digital and quintessentially ‘unstructured’ brands like giff gaff and Child’s I and be social brands. The objective for all brands then is how to make the transition as effectively and elegantly with as minimum an amount of operational disruption and as much reputational value as possible.

The second element of the Report worth highlighting is that inclusion within Headstream’s definition of a social brand is that a social brand has a ‘moral centre to its purpose’. By including a crowdsourced element within the nominations, this Index has looked at brands from the user’s perspective as well as from the brand’s point of view. For them, it’s not all about the money even though, when it comes to adopting social media, the CEO might like it to be. So this is an Index that illustrates how social brands require a set of operating objectives they can defend with ‘blatant integrity’ able to handle interest in them from all quarters in order to develop the kind of quality of engagement that makes them stand out for being social.

Of course this touches on the visceral issues of social brand fitness and the critical point of friction in social brand management, the one that every social brand must now incorporate: To what extent will social media start to shape the creation of strategic business opportunities and how social brands develop their business models?

Developing business from this perspective is going to be key in helping social media managers go beyond the channel management of social media into areas of organizational development in a way that brings enhanced value into each and every brand in this Index, and beyond.

Posted in Brand, Business performance, Charity, Corporate development, Management, Marketing, Social business design |

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How distinctive are your social markings?

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Who are we? We’re the sum total of things that make an impressions on our lives.

Our natures don’t exist in a vacuum. Collectively and individually, we’re the things that make us – those formative experiences, the times of achievement and transcended challenges when new levels of experience were reached or we had memorable moments with others we can recall years later.

On a personal level, there’s huge value in the memories and the objects that remind us of these moments.

And on a corporate level too, it’s really no different.

For any organisation thinking about how to become more social, the key is becoming more collaborative. And for any organization thinking about their brand, an important question now is to what extent, and how, does its social identify reflect this?

Brand identities, as signifiers, are a combination of identification and communication. They’re the necessary redux needed to get a sense of something in one easy sitting.

The easy fix then would be to include people more obviously, much in the same way as brands added the word ‘Direct’ after their logos when online presences first appeared. That’s a crude and potentially short-sighted articulation of what being a social brand can be.

In the age of the factory, all one had to do was hang a sign over the door and people would come marching through it, ready to produce and consume, because there were few other choices on offer.

Things have changed, and brands have multiplied. Over time, competitive pressure has demanded that brands have embarked on a journey to develop an individual look and feel; to be more recognizable, distinctive and preferred.

Today it doesn’t matter where you’re a large corporate or a company of one, if you are actively social then it follows that you have a digital footprint, and it follows then that footprint should have some clear markings that create a trail, that leave a clue as to who you are as a distinctive species of value.

At Davos, Goldman Sachs was cited by Edelman as a company that aces social media. Goldman Sachs doesn’t have a great social reputation. It aces social media but it isn’t a social organization.

If you’re a valuable social brand, people will want to follow and participate in what you do, and you’ll let them. So if the biggest social compliment anyone can pay is they seek to include others, how is that being reflected in the unifying thought of your organization and your social identity?

As part of the possible answer to that question, thanks go to Johnnie Moore and Euan for pointing this out recently:

‘We are conditioned by what we eat, by the economic pressures, by the culture and society in which we live. We are that culture, we are that society.’

Our online social environment is often regarded as primarily a technical and digital phenomenon, but if you dig a little deeper what you’ll realize we connect with in social communities in actual fact are our authentic selves and each other’s native spirit.

Picture by Liddy Napanangka Walker ‘Wakirlpirri Jukurrpa’ (Dogwood Tree Dreaming).

It’s time to bring these to life as part of your social brand’s assets.

Data visualization and story telling are both very powerful ways to articulate social identity, and we should be looking at data visualizations that take data closer to art.

Novo Nordisk has done a great job of telling it’s story online in its integrated Annual Report, but it’s a shame that the great content isn’t brought to life with animated datasets, a visual story, interactivity and rich media that can be an essential part of communicating the social dynamic of a brand.

For food and FMCG brands, the opportunity is to tell useful data stories about food provenance and product journeys as part of being a sustainable brand.

Unfortunately the nature of datasets today is one where the ability to customize information so that it’s part of an organisation’s collective graphical, verbal and behavioural identity is missing. Tools are largely proprietary. This is something we’re seeking to address. The telling of the Microsoft journey below is a good step in the right direction, as are these about Foursquare and Old Spice.

Social brands communicate best when they have clear and recognizable cultural watermarks.

Picture by Quasimondo

They need their art to be seen as well as their output to be engaging. As data journalism comes more adopted, this is a big opportunity for future forward developers.

The challenge is on now to see who will tell the best stories for social organizations by blending data with visual art.

This opportunity to tell visceral stories is the way to develop more effective brand communication and social organization involvement, and if you have come across some powerful data visualizations about brands, please share them with us and we’ll add them to our Tumblr blog of them here.

As Steve Moore has described it, convening, curating and narrating the progress of the collectively smart social organization, and telling stories about ‘the net worth within the network’, and doing it your way, isn’t this all a part of who you are, if you are a social organization?

We’re looking for developers who can collaborate with us on developing powerful data stories for brands. We think that’s one way we can help the artistry of how social organizations develop. If you’re interested in being a part of it, we’d love to hear from you.

Tuhoe Isaac by Ashley Daws. The face of an individual and his identity, honest, unique, full of integrity.

Posted in Authenticity, Brand, Corporate development, Data, Identity, Marketing, Social business design, Society |

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Yahoo: An Unfortunate Exclamation

Friday, December 17th, 2010

So 2010, the first full year of mainstream social activity between brands and users, is coming to a close.

As perhaps a timely summary, Carol Bartz’ CEO of Yahoo!’s decision to close Delicious, the bookmarking site, has managed to demonstrate 3 fundamental rules of what it means to be a social brand and a social organisation in spectacular fashion.

It’s what you might call an unfortunate exclamation. One that’s been uttered by many users of the popular site as a result of the leaked memo that’s confirmed Yahoo is closing it down.

When Yahoo! first appeared online in 1994 that exclamation stood for something. It stood for the exuberance of doing things differently, the excitement of being able to connect people together through sharing information and news on the web.

Now the exclamation’s coming from its users, and it’s the sound of people aghast. It’s a strength of feeling in defence of a brand people all over the world have invested heavily in, that they have put time, energy and digital assets of value towards. So what are the 3 rules that matter?

Rule No 1
You don’t own your brand.

Yahoo!’s stamping on Delicious as a large corporate. Struggling to rationalize itself and make good a raft of ill-thought through strategic decisions, it is finding this rule out the hard way. The unfortunate exclamation is not the one at the end of their logo.

Brands are amorphous things that live in the minds of the people who perceive them and the rules of brand power have been changed fundamentally and forever by the social web.

So a social brand is something that one’s permitted to have and its fortune is controlled by its users.

Carol Bartz has forgotten that. She hasn’t realized that corporate success for strategy-makers today involves practicing up on judo, as a metaphor, more than on karate.

Instead of making corporate decisions to chop a brand like Delicious to the ground, why not work with the force that’s coming towards them in the form of interested, passionate users instead? This is something GAP realized a few months ago when fans of the brand helped affect a reversal back to the old logo they loved that had been unexpectedly supplanted by something new from the management.

People often comment that management skill’s superseded by the baying voices of the mob at a time like this but in the flat world of the web that’s only the case if you’re not working with people as friends and are looking at them with contempt.

An interested audience is giving the currency of attention and interest. These are fundamental currencies. They enable a deep level of dialogue.

To be successful, social organizations and brands have to learn how to work in the space between what they know and what their users know, in that confusion, and to create solutions and mutual opportunities out of that interest. In doing so they can forge long-term relationships of trust.

Visceral Business works at this deeper level, looking at the core connective tissue of a business, helping decisions-makers develop nuanced skill in terms of interpreting what people are saying and cultivating social leadership into what HR might call a ‘core competency’. In terms of operational viability today social leadership is a skill every bit as vital to acquire as when the Guttenburg press meant we all had to learn to read and write.

Rule No 2
Social brands are experiences, and the more meaningful the better.

The reaction to Carol Bartz’ decision shows also that, more than ever, a brand isn’t even a logo. Increasingly that’s not where people gather. A social brand can be a hashtag, a Like, an experience that touches on every level, an expression that makes an impression.

The next generation of brands may well be hashtags. If you haven’t yet visited ‘What The Hashtag’ it might be an idea and check out #savedelicious on Twitter if you want to see what I mean.

Rule No 3
The people and who invest time and energy in it are the ones that matter and they often live well beyond the boundaries of the conventional organization.

This is what Yahoo must now recognize. For example, it must appreciate that in Thomas Hawk’s blisteringly good open letter to Carol Bartz lurks a highly knowledgable and talented man (the first person I ever connected with on the social web, via Flickr, incidentally, and thanks to Charles Arthur at The Guardian for the very excellent breakdown of the content).

Thomas Hawk isn’t part of Yahoo!, the company, but is one of the most influential people it knows. He’s passionate about the functionality that Flickr provides, socially smart, very connected and he cares about the sanity of Yahoo!’s decision-making because his own livelihood depends on it. He gets Yahoo! on both an intellectual and emotional level.

A great number of organizations are making the difficult transition between factory and network, they’re weighing up the pro’s and con’s of passion and compliance. Some organizations take it a little further than most, but whether an organization prefers to be closer to the Zappos or the US State Department end of the spectrum, a social organisation should consider how it harnesses enthusiasm, and how it does so before it’s bolted out the door.

It will be interesting to see what happens now that Delicious’ army of fans have been alerted to its cull, including me. In one fell swoop, Yahoo has destroyed a substantial level of social trust and opened up an entire new bookmarking market. I wonder whether that was ever a part of the business model. [Cue exclamation mark].

Posted in Brand, Business performance, Corporate development, Identity, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Social business design |

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