Some more brilliance from George Carlin. For marketers and entrepreneurs alike it’s a great reminder of the value of language and how that can be used to create a benefit perception in peoples minds. Although, I’d recommend the picture we create is one of authenticity. Enjoy!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvhsJyecpLc]
So how do we leverage a human revolution from a commercial perspective? It’s a big question. And even though the web has gone a long way in deconstructing power bases, business and human evolution are still inextricably linked. So I thought I’d post a few things that matter in a digital world so all players (people and commerce) can create value for each other simultaneously.
Rules of engagement
Most of all, have fun doing it.
It’s easy to believe that owned and earned media (aka social media) is superior to the older paid media. We’ve been trained over the past 15 years of the GUI web to think this way. Anyone who regularly reads this blog knows my thoughts on traditional media, in that it is dying, or at the very least changing.
So what is the right media? The media that achieves the objective, within the budget constraints, and lastly fits the risk profile of the media investor.
Sure, it may be cheaper to vlog, blog and tweet ourselves to functional levels of brand awareness – especially in startup land. But it may be a smarter option to invest 1 million dollars advertising on TV if it results in 3 million dollars in revenue. I say this because I think entrepreneurs are being blinded by the zero cost nature of digital media. What we are better off embracing is an objective driven, performance based approach. This is especially true now that the lines between old and new media are blurring.
The best advice I can give is this: ‘don’t discriminate’ – don’t even think of digital as a channel. Instead think of making connections with audiences. Sometimes this may involve traditional media, sometimes exclusively digital, and sometimes only one or the other. Instead, think in terms of ‘Human Movement’. That is, what they do, where they are and how the communicate with them. Essentially we need to integrate our thinking into how ‘they’ (the people we want to have a conversation with) move. The important caveat is that we need need to be nimble enough to develop an understanding of new media channels as they emerge.
I promise this will be the last year in review video I post. But I do think it is relevant to all entrepreneurs and marketers to be across what people are watching. The one caveat that I’d place on anything which makes a hit list or a top ‘anything’ list for that matter is this:
When anything reaches a certain level of critical mass, the fact that it made it onto the agenda drives a large part of the subsequent popularity.
In the case of Youtube, the videos that make it to the most popular for the day, often make it to the weekly list… and so on. We end up watching, because people are watching. Not because it is actually worth watching. A few excellent pieces make it anyway – like the Old Spice commercial. You can check out the Youtube top 10 for 2010 here: http://www.youtube.com/rewind And the summary video is below. Enjoy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUzLhHH7gHg]
This is an amazing piece of creative work from H&M at a new retail store launch in Amsterdam. Check it out below.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W6Eabefezg]
The same theme shines through again. Creativity wins. The production costs are clearly much less that the creative input. I wonder what other startup brands could use the visual projection idea to make something worth sharing on the web?
You Can’t Control Social Media
Marketers and advertisers alike are largely aligned when it comes to their views on social media. We all know how to use it, and why it can be so valuable to brands. But there is one area which is most often the area of heated debate,
and that is this:
Can we really control the output of our social media?
It’s clear what big brands want – A single voice to represent the brand personality. On the surface this sounds reasonable, even rational, but the more I think about it I really believe it goes against what it is all about and here’s why:
The voice of a brand is the collective actions of all of its representatives.
Not the CEO, the Marketing Director or the advertising they put in the market. Just ask anyone about their opinion of banks in Australia. It has nothing to do with the voice banks project, and more to do with the customer interactions. The voice is what the people hear and experience on a personal level, not what the brand stewards say. Social media can’t be controlled. So why try? There is nothing worse than limiting the voice of your people. They will talk anyway. They’ll share links, write about your brand and talk about it on line and off. They will have real interactions with customers, and if what the authorised voice says (brand marketers and advertisers) doesn’t match the reality of the brand in action, then it all sounds contrived and is useless anyway. It’s more likely to have meaning and be authentic if it is the word of the people, not the King. So let your people participate. All brand managers should run twitter accounts for their brand, giving updates on what they are planning and doing, a sub-communications strategy of sorts.
Create culture, don’t control output.
It’s an errant assumption to believe we know better than our front line employees do. It’s just not the case. What we need to do is educate our people in various levels of the business on what we want to be as a brand, the persona. We need to give them some guidance boundaries within which they can play, and some no go zones, and then let them represent us, make mistakes and be human. People love dealing with companies who have a human voice and mistakes are part of the human experience.
Trust creates value.
I find it curious that companies trust their employees with the keys to the building and the cash register and not their voices. It’s best to approach it like a parent does with a teenager. Give a bit, let them prove themselves and then loosen the lead a bit more. Trusted people usually over deliver to expectations. People who are shut out and mistrusted often act in the opposite way to what we desire. In a social media context we need to trust the average human outcome, rather than block all for fear of a single bad outcome. But again, this is where the boundaries come into play. There needs to be augmented boundaries with clear repercussions for those who step outside of them.
The key point for brand marketers and entrepreneurs is this: if you want a controlled voice, then social media isn’t the right vehicle for a brand. More traditional media would be more suitable. The word social is the giveaway here, because social implies conversation, not lecturing or monologue. If we really want to create social brand value then all voices in the social value chain need to be heard.
This article was written for the Eye on Australia research program.
Today I sent this tweet which got quite a bit of comment:
There were over 400 video sharing websites when Youtube launched. Often it’s smarter to do it better, than build something new.
Immediately after the tweets started coming through about other businesses which entered the market late and taken a strong hold’.
The most recent example for me is Instagr.am
It’s ‘another’ photo sharing platform to add to the long list of mobile apps for doing just this, including but certainly not limited to Flickr, Twitpic, Yfrog, img.ly, Mobypicture…. I’m sure there are hundreds.
Next thing I knew all the photos being shared on my tweet stream had all converted to the Instagr.am format – so I had check it out. Turns out Instagr.am added a tiny twist which enabled it get busy with the ‘in’ crowd. By simply adding a filter feature, it made photo sharing a whole lot more fun. What filter does is transform the pic and stylise the look to give a retro feel, add few scratches and a white Polaroid frame and you’ve got the hottest new pic app on the entire web. It’s easy to use, and once again photo sharing has been reinvented.
So what’s the lesson here?
Design matters. In fact design is the thing that wins in the long run. Humans like things of beauty. It is coded in our DNA, we prefer the beautiful. Side note: beautiful is both usable and and nice to look at, it must have both.
Existing Market. Sometimes it’s easier to build a better version of something people are using, than to invent a new market. We don’t have to invest time convincing people it is worth participating. Rather, we just need to show them why we are superior. In an industry like we apps where the switching barriers are so low usability and design are often the catalysts for this to occur.
The question for startups is this: How do we sustain a leadership position against the next tiny twist?