The Actor’s Equity Association (AEA) is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, and one of its initiatives is to provide members with fancy new gold credit card style membership cards, replacing the former paper-based version. My reaction, when I heard this, was one of disappointment. Every initiative taken by an organization today has consequences and implications that reverberate across multiple sectors. In this case, the AEA failed to take advantage of a priceless opportunity to enhance member services, increase member engagement, and exhibit a very simple but impactful degree of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility).
More than 7 years ago, the Census Bureau determined that there were nearly 1.5 billion credit cards in use in the U.S. A stack of all those credit cards would reach more than 70 miles into space — and be almost as tall as 13 Mount Everests. If this number of credit cards were thrown away every three years, the stack of credit cards would reach almost 43 Everests high after a decade. These plastics do not biodegrade in landfills. Not so fancy.
Actor’s Equity is not a lone offender, though. When SAG and AFTRA merged, the new union had an opportunity to revisit its longstanding use of plastic credit card member IDs, but opted to stick with the short term functionality of plastics, long-term sustainability be damned. The Producers Guild and other industry organizations are equally guilty. My frustration would be less justified if there existed few alternatives. However, companies such as Discover Financial services are offering cards made of BioPVC™ and other biodegradable alternatives; well-established technologies such as mobile apps present a plethora of creative and operational opportunities; and other technologies such as NFC offer yet more potential, as their adoption becomes more widespread. So why the lack of innovation or sustainability best practices? Is it an absence of imagination? Aversion to change? Financially motivated obduracy?
As current Chair of my city’s Sustainability Commission, I have benefited from the past four years, learning about the negative consequences of unsustainable practices (both in business and personal life), as well as about the positive implications of Green and other more sustainable commercial and community options, be it through renewable materials sourcing, alternative energy programs, commercial district redesigns, and many other areas. Many initiatives in sustainability offer up more than a single-pronged benefit or solution. It’s not just about environmental conservation, or clean air, or recycling. It’s about positioning ourselves, our businesses, and our communities for a more environmentally, socially, and financially robust future.
Had the AEA decided to explore options for member identification, other than the current plastic card tradition, all sorts of exciting avenues to member engagement and empowerment might have been revealed. Imagine a mobile app (what actor does not have a mobile phone?) that represents not only the individual’s union identification, but also a resource for direct connection to their credit union, membership affiliate discount programs, health insurance tools, personalized pension and 401K insights, dues status (and mobile payment processing), and much more, besides. The cost savings to the AEA and their members alike would be enormous, the raw materials no longer needed (plastics, papers, etc) would be mountainous, and the ability to connect more dynamically with membership would elevate the usefulness, value and – by extension – collective bargaining power of the AEA.
To those who would argue that they would not wish to entrust such data to a mobile device that might lose power, break, be stolen, or otherwise be compromised…I suggest they note that more wallets are stolen and lost than mobile devices. The Baby Boomer generation may not be able to acclimatize themselves to the notion of a cardless society, but I personally am quite excited by the idea of saving money, time, and materials – simply by aggregating the contents of my wallet into a well-protected, institutionally insured, cloud-based ecosystem that poses no more risk to our identities than we currently face today. The promise that lies in such innovation far outweighs the risks, and I can think of no better collective to act upon this promise than Actors themselves. This opportunity seems to have been missed, but I sincerely hope that other organizations might think a little more expansively about each initiative they take, going forward. The smallest tweak might offer far greater rewards (and savings) than they might imagine.
I was recently messaging with a colleague, discussing the finer points of republishing content posted on a Facebook Page, when we got on to the topic of crediting sources. The conversation got me thinking, and following are some of those thoughts, for what they’re worth:
Sharing content is cool, giving credit for the source is even cooler.
Illegally sharing hundreds of films or music tracks online is not cool, no matter how you cut it. Everyone uploads or downloads a song here or there, or surreptitiously catches an episode they missed of their favorite series, but wholesale mass theft of content is just that – stealing.
Trolling is for idiots.
Flame wars are for fools.
Cat pictures should be limited to Furcadia.
If you’re redistributing a Twitter post that someone else made, it’s called a “retweet”, and there’s a button for that. It is not called a “cut and paste and pretend I thought of it”.
Don’t tweet, post, or otherwise publish content just to be the first, coolest, or any other attention-grabbing reason. For most of us, High School ended a long time ago. Try limiting yourself to publishing content which you SINCERELY believe will Inspire, Challenge, Educate, or Empower (my version of Tony Hsieh’s very compelling ICEE philosophy for tweeting).
Empire Avenue, Klout, and Kred are Casual Games. They have no other functional value (with the exception of advertising). Don’t pretend otherwise. This may change one day, but for now it’s all just about as useful as milking a virtual cow. Enjoy the diversion, but don’t make any more out of it than that.
Your follow count – be it on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, or elsewhere – has no metric value other than to tell you how many people clicked “Follow” or “Like”. Relatively few of them actively read your content, so suck it up and get on with your REAL life.
Once in a while, something you post will publish at *just* the right moment, and the content will resonate at *just* the right frequency with the community in to which it is launched, sufficient to go viral (for whatever short period and distance it does so). Take a moment to enjoy the moment, and then get on with your REAL life.
Social media is engaging, immersive, sometimes even addictive. However, it is counterproductive when it becomes anything more than a utility. If you manage online communities for a living (or as an important aspect of your identity), then social engagement (a term I coined in 2005) will understandably hold a central place in your daily life. Everyone else, look upon it as you would the telephone or television: a game-changing innovation that serves to bring the world closer together, and facilitate communication, education, information, and commerce. Used in moderation, it represents an extraordinary leap forward in personal expression, global connectivity, and cultural rapprochement. Used to excess, it erodes the intellect, dumbs down the conversation, and reduces us to yabbering consumers of junk, and little more.
Great tools and platforms have been (and continue to be) developed. Let’s use them with a modicum of wisdom and restraint. The promise they hold is immense, but only if we use them responsibly.
The value of news in the digital age runs in inverse proportion to the amount of time since its release.
If a news item is published at 1:00pm PCT, it has half as much value by 2:00pm, as it did when it was first posted, and only a quarter remaining value by 5:00pm. Obviously, a more accurate measurement of shelf life would take in to consideration the online network on which the news was published, the original posting time (early morning posts tend to get wider reach than early afternoon), and several other factors.
Some media companies, such as the New Yorker and Wired magazine, have recently determined that this is largely because they are giving their news away to 3rd-party providers for free, unreasonably diluting the brand value of their offering. Their solution is to terminate those relationships (as they did earlier this week by removing access to their content from such renowned platforms as Flipboard).
Other media companies are laying off reporters in droves, as they desperately try to save their way to prosperity, under the same “bricks, mortar, and paper” model as ever. talk about lunatics running the asylum…
I think there’s a much simpler solution and, as ever, it all comes down to content.
Consumers don’t place the highest valuation on a distribution channel, platform, or app, but rather upon the content itself. Flipboard may well fail, if too many content providers remove access via that platform. The UX is unquestionably appealing, but who cares that the library is pretty, if there’s nothing to read therein? That said, if content providers restrict access to their content too zealously, minimizing consumer ability to share and spread the appeal of that content, they will effectively squander the “early release” value of their content, and vastly diminish its value, by extension.
Before I propose what I consider to be an enormously simple solution, let’s accept and agree upon some basic truths:
Good news comes from good reporters. Not (bless ‘em) good printers, nor good truck drivers. Journalists such as Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) and Lisa Napoli (@lisanapoli) are demonstrating that direct connection to their “readers” vastly increases the spread of their content.
The Paywall method of news delivery is a clumsy protectionist system that works only in the absence of better paradigms.
People will get their news, and entertainment, one way or another. If you stand in their way, they will work around you. If you develop a solution that is a win-win for everyone, they are more than likely going to work with you.
Taking in to account the aforementioned and obvious fact that news has highest value early in its lifecycle, and marrying this with the fact that netizens place high value on content that raises their network visibility, it stands to reason that those wishing to take on the mantle of “influencer” will be prepared to pay for “early access” to compelling media content. If it costs $4.95 to have a big headstart on the rest of the web, when it comes to news and other media, I know many who would gladly pay. The difference between this scenario and the current paywall system is that my solution does not exclude all other netizens from access to the content. After a sufficient time delay, content could be released to the wider public, free of charge. It’s an exercise in transparency and digital openness, with a nod to commercial necessity. If you want to access content in the first hour of its publication, you need to be a subscriber. If you want access within the first 2 hours, you must be either a subscriber, or have access to the link via a subscriber (further elevating the viral power of full subscribers, and cementing their loyalty to your media brand). If you are willing to wait until the end of the day, so be it. The model needs refinement, but the concept is sound.
Take for example Nicholas Kristof’s latest Op-Ed piece, entitled “My Iranian Road Trip”. As is usual with his work, the Twitterverse and Facebook ecosystem have exploded with activity, as this video goes viral, and spreads around the web. The New York times has a paywall up on their site, so only subscribers can see the video. However, because this is the ONLY option offered, someone has kindly reposted (at least until the NYT reports it!) the video, free-of-charge, on YouTube:
The New York Times gets no love nor revenue out of this scenario. Nicholas Kristof gets his story out. The readership share the YouTube link, and ignore the NYT site altogether. Were my solution in effect, nobody would likely be compelled to waste their time extracting the video content from the NYT site, and reposting it, knowing it would be freely available in a matter of hours. Instead they would be focusing on positioning themselves as first line influencers, sharing the NYT site link and thereby their subscriber access with their own network. Subscriptions would rise, content “piracy” would be mitigated, brand value would be strengthened, and the value of viral media would be elevated in a manner consistent with both the ideals of an increasingly transparent society, and the realistic needs of any business. My scenario recognizes the need to shift from a “control” mentality to a “collaborate” one, recognizing that the core value is highest at point of publication and readership (journalist and consumer), and everything in between is either conduit or obstacle.
I’ve been invited to a private event at the Los Angeles Times building tonight, hosted by Muck Rack (@Muckrack) and the LA Times. It’s been labeled as “a casual cocktail event for a few select journalists, PRs and news junkies to talk about journalism in the age of social media”. I’m eager to see what this constituency makes of my “crazy idea”…
I was recently invited to participate in a webinar with a variety of colleges and universities around the country and, despite the fact that I was seriously in need of more green tea, I managed to spend a good hour answering some very good questions exploring marketing careers in today’s economy. It starts off kinda dry, but as the tea kicks in it warms up nicely!:
{EAV_BLOG_VER:833d5130113b8052} My friend, Mike Brown recently posted a short piece on his own blog, entitled “Who is creating social media content in your organization?”, exploring where the departmental responsibility for social media (or “social engagement”, as I prefer to call it) lies within an organization. I added a comment to the posting, which drew some very flattering responses via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and email – so I thought I’d post my comments here below (as much to remember what the heck it was I wrote, as to keep the conversation going!):
Perhaps above and beyond the obvious impact Social Media is having, in terms of offering new opportunities for brand evangelists to introduce and moderate their platforms in existing or new constituencies; for product and solution marketing teams to try and launch “campaigns” via new channels; for corporate representatives – be they CRM, legal, or otherwise – to try and cautiously bring their brand and offering connection closer to the end-user, in response to an increasing demand by consumers and clients to participate in the valuation of offerings, further up the value chain….above and beyond these and other immediately evident opportunities, benefits, or enticements (presented across the still primordial social engagement landscape), there is growing one even larger opportunity that has been only tangentially addressed here, and deserves to be directly examined:
Instead of attempting to qualify which existing department should or does own or lead social engagement activities, within traditional corporate infrastructures and silos, the real question of deepest worth may be “has the advent of social engagement, greater organizational transparency, transversal responsibility for failure and success alike, and deeper demands from every part of the process (including consumers) for collaboration in development, innovation, productization, distribution, and iteration (breathe here) created not just an opportunity, but a demand, for organizations to review their org. charts, and functional infrastructures, in order to best respond to and manage new models and ecosystems in customer and client relationships, product sales and management, and other aspects of B2B and B2C business?”.
Perhaps the answer lies not in shoving social media activities into one or the other pre-existing pigeon hole, but instead taking this opportunity to stir the pot more than just a little, and take some time to divest ourselves of 1950′s functional structures..?
This is the moment to loosen our grip on the past and present, and see this undeniably disruptive practice of social engagement as a chance to reinvigorate and possibly reinvent the way we manage innovation, human resources, market penetration, customer service, and so much more. Let’s not get carried away with a presently rather shallow tide, but let’s recognize that the tides have nevertheless shifted, and the currents are moving in compelling new ways which will certainly change the landscape. Where your ship lands depends on how well you learn to navigate these currents and tides, and how efficiently you reassign your crew.
My fundamental suggestion is that corporate and organizational models are ripe for transformation, reflecting massive evolutions in internal and external communications, operations, personnel management and education, marketing, and customer relations – to name but a few areas that are both deeply impacted by and – in turn – heavily influence hierarchies and processes within organizations. The way social engagement permeates an infrastructure could prove invaluable in effecting valuable transformation: watch the practice as it flows through the organization: something akin to a corporate blue dye (BDT) and modified barium swallow (MBS) test! Should Marketing and Communications continue to be lumped together (“MarCom”)? Is the skills set of Marketing best maximized as a Sales support function, or is there a more strategic opportunity therein? Should Communications really be a satellite support function, activated only whenever a Business Unit or other department determines there exists a need to “push” information outward, or is more potential just itching to manifest itself? The communal nature of social engagement gives organizations the priceless opportunity to move beyond legacy charts, developed to manage the 19th Century industrial revolution. Several revolutions have taken place since then, and this latest one – effectively disrupting how we connect, communicate, and transact with one another – presents an opening that should not be overlooked.
As professional reviewers and taste-makers find themselves increasingly marginalized by the aggregate insights and observations of “the crowd”, one wonders whether the demise of printed news may actually be beaten to the punch by the obsolescence of the once-all-powerful critic.
It used to be that we relied on Patricia Wells or Brad A. Johnson to guide us from one fine dining experience to the other. Indeed, reading their restaurant reviews in the Herald Tribune or Angeleno (respectively) represented something of a tasty appetizer, prior to the main experience of visiting an emerging “hot spot” discovered by their renowned palates.
Today, we are far more likely to turn to the legion of self-anointed food critics that live on Yelp, and – by parsing their experiences – so determine our choice of venue.
Of course, this trend is not limited to food: IMDB, Metacritic, and rottentomatoes.com are but a few of the resources available to moviegoers seeking to crowdsource their entertainment choices; a slew of new apps and engines, such as Weddar (location-based, people-powered, social weather reporting) and Fflick (twitter-based movie recommendation engine, recently acquired by Google), to name but a couple, are rapidly making anyone with the inclination a “retail influencer”.
It seems that for every institution, industry, and brand, there’s an app or a site ready to offer up a plethora of user-generated reviews. Amazon’s main value proposition is arguably not so much its products or pricing, but rather the fact that every one of those products is accompanied by a rich diversity of opinions from past shoppers. Groupon and Foursquare give users the opportunity to share “tips” and other product insights, and what’s Facebook if not one big moshpit of “Like/Unlike”? From PCs to software downloads, cars to cancer treatment, the experienced insights of trained professionals or deeply experienced specialists are being usurped, in favor of the massed choir of “fellow shoppers” in whom we prefer to somewhat blindly place our faith – jaded by a glut of advertising, and suspicious of prognosticators that seem less perfectionist and more political…a classic case of “quantity trumps quality”, based on the assumption that a sufficiently large aggregate of diversified opinions and reviews will yield a more truthful mean insight than one or two “professional” perspectives.
During the early days of this trend, the notion that one could turn to our peers for honest pre-purchase evaluations was both compelling and valuable. Sites such as Epinions.com and eBay fostered communities of idealistic shoppers, keen to ensure that their fellow consumers benefited from their prior experiences with a brand or product. As with most movements, the early days were a refreshing and invigorating alternative to what had admittedly become a somewhat stuffy status quo of entrenched, predictable, and unimaginative thinking. However, with mass adoption comes an exponential raising of the volume. The signal-to-noise ratio has diminished so swiftly that I believe the “great experiment” risks expiring, gorged on the fat of its gluttony. Opinion aggregating sites such as Yelp are working frantically to develop and perfect algorithms that will mitigate the mess, but code often confounds the issue (many Yelp users – consumers and businesses alike – are complaining that their bona-fide reviews are being filtered for no apparent reason, and Yelp representatives explain that they have no control over the automated process of removing reviews that its algorithm deems “suspicious”).
This leaves us at the proverbial crossroad: either engineers or programmers discover and develop a stronger mechanism for managing the overwhelming pool of reviews attaching themselves to every book, diaper, TV, ointment, and car available on the Web; or we begin to find ourselves gravitating toward, and eventually anointing a select few regular reviewers, and making them the professional critics of the 21st Century, hired by their readership/viewership, and empowered to guide us all once more, as we seek out – albeit a little more frugally than our parents may have done – the next great meal, deal, or wheel.
What is certain, IMHO, is that crowdsourced review pools are fast reaching their saturation point and, unless someone begins to refine and maximize the resource, it will be as appealing and nourishing as sitting in a pool-full of marshmallows: the idea was thrilling, and the initial experience inspiring, but eventually the reality proves somewhat mind-numbing, and perhaps even a little sickening.
If you happen to be in Seattle in a couple of weeks, you are warmly invited to attend a panel I am moderating at this year’s National Film Festival for Talented Youth (the world’s largest youth film festival). The panel will take place at 11:30am, Friday April 29th, in the renowned SIFF Cinema (located at 321 Mercer Street at 3rd Avenue, McCaw Hall, in the heart of Seattle Center’s Theatre district).
Keynote Panel: Sharing Your Vision in the Digital Age
Financing, distribution, intellectual property, platforms and channels – these are but a few of the considerations facing today’s filmmakers, living in a world that experiences entertainment and information far beyond the confines of a theater, with all the opportunities and threats inherent in this shifting paradigm (multiplatform distribution, day-and-date, elimination of physical reel, concentric campaigns, GoogleTV/Hulu/Netflix/YouTube, streaming media, content piracy, interactive storytelling, and so much more).
This panel will comprise renowned professionals with a variety of viewpoints along the expanding content spectrum, together exploring how the modern storyteller can best ensure that their story has the greatest possible impact and value.
Panelists:
Hayden Black
Hayden hails from Salford, England and created, produced and co-starred in the original version of “Goodnight Burbank” back in ’06. The webisodic version was nominated for a Best Comedy Webby ’08, and won numerous other “Best Of” awards from iTunes and others. His production company, Evil Global Corp, has also been behind two other hugely popular online comedies – “Abigail’s Teen Diary” and “The Occulterers”. All three series have been met with critical acclaim and views number collectively in the tens of millions. His latest version of Goodnight Burbank, co-starring himself, Laura Silverman and Dominic Monaghan, is the first ever half-hour comedy to be created exclusively for the web. Hayden’s also spoken and/or keynoted at a variety of conferences, including NAB, Digital Hollywood and NATPE and received a Groundbreaker of the Year Award in March 2011 from the LA Web Festival. You can follow his musings at @haydenblack but be warned.
Valerie Van Galder
Valerie had a very successful ten year tenure at Sony Pictures, joining to launch Screen Gems in 1999, and subsequently rising quickly to take on the challenges of President of Marketing for Columbia Pictures, and co-president Worldwide Theatrical Marketing for Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as, at one time, President of Tristar Pictures. Since leaving Sony at the end of 2009 she has been consulting for such clients as MARV Productions (Matthew Vaughn), John Wells Productions, Summit Entertainment, Vendome Entertainment and the Walt Disney Company, where she is now heading up the marketing campaign for next month’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.”
Van Galder has launched an impressive list of hits, including such blockbusters as “The Da Vinci Code,” “Casino Royale,” “Quantum of Solace,” “Hancock,” “Spider-Man” (TM), “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” “The Full Monty,” “The Ice Storm,” “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” “Underworld,” “Resident Evil,” “Apocalypse,” “Boogeyman,” “You Got Served,” “Pineapple Express,” “Vantage Point,” “Superbad,” “Ghost Rider,” “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “Click,” “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” “RV,” “The Grudge 2,” “Gridiron Gang,” “Step Brothers,” “The Pink Panther,” “Monster House,” and Sony Pictures Animation’s first full length CGI feature film “Open Season,” among others.
Dana Brunetti
Dana is a feature film and television producer, President of Trigger Street Productions and long time business partner of company founder Kevin Spacey. Some of Brunetti’s credits include 21 (the story of MIT students who perfected the art of card counting and took Vegas for millions), “Fanboys,” the Emmy and Golden Globe nominated “Bernard and Doris,” “Casino Jack,” “Recount,” and others. In 2009 Brunetti produced the film “The Social Network,” and his role as the producer of the project won him numerous accolades, including eight Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe for Best Picture. In 2002 Brunetti and Kevin Spacey founded TriggerStreet.com, an innovative and prescient social network for emerging film and writing talent. More recently he has been involved with several new initiatives to push the boundaries of digital distribution, including a groundbreaking deal with Netflix to distribute Fincher and Spacey’s House of Cards as well as in-house production of dynamic and original live and video-on-demand content for the web.
Stan Emert
Stan Emert is the creator/producer/president of RAINMAKERS.TV, a documentary TV/video series in partnership with a PBS affiliate, that celebrates the successes of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid; NGOs; and donors, who collaborate to improve the world. Emert has spoken on corporate social responsibility before the American Film Institute, the World Bank, and to many other significant audiences around the US. An adjunct faculty member of the University of Washington, Emert is the author of two books, and the ghostwriter of five others.
Timothy Dubel
Tim is Microsoft Corporation’s Director of Global Community Affairs, responsible for development of strategy and implementation of global philanthropic programs. His work focuses on community based citizenship, and enabling changemakers to impact society, be it through technology, social initiatives, or through the act of telling and preserving their stories. Prior to Microsoft, Tim was with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), where he managed private sector development programs in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The notion (and practice) of community driven consumer activity is, as with so many other things, cyclical.
For years, people lived in small microsocietal enclaves, relying on one another for word-of-mouth news and shopping recommendations, and sharing health and nutrition tips as they were discovered. Local gossip spread locally, and all was well in the Middle Ages.
As the world expanded, so did communities, becoming less microsocial, and more macrosocial. Urbanization supported mass technological, scientific, and industrial evolution, but at the cost – arguably – of social health. Social dynamics experienced a metamorphosis, from one reliant on group dynamics, to more individualized and self-centered ones.
In the latter 20th and very early 21st centuries, this self-centered societal infrastructure reached its zenith and, in keeping with the aforementioned cyclical nature of things, began to reverse its arc, affected by both internal and external influences.
Recently, driven both by personal impulses and available tools, platforms, and supporting business-models, individuals have begun practicing an exponential degree of community-thinking and action. No longer do all people rely so heavily on corporations for their information, news, and activity choices – preferring instead to rely on their peers for suggestions, and themselves for determinations. Admittedly, some corporations and agencies are attempting to co-opt this trend, but the most successful brands are those that have engaged WITH these new paradigms in media engagement, as opposed to those that have attempted to dominate them for their own short-term ends. Good case in point, Ford just posted record profits, and is the automaker with the most successfully manifest social media strategy (kudos to Scott Monty)…
We are cycling back, as a society, to an almost medieval microsocietal infrastructure of consumerism, wherein we form smaller enclaves, or networks, and assign to those networks values, depending on the context thereof. What used to be the medieval “guild” is now our professional network; the erstwhile “pub” or “inn” or street corner now manifest as our social network; and a slew of other networks have risen up to mirror, to one degree or another, the sewing circles/ curanderos/ mother’s groups/ secret societies, et al.
No longer can large corporations confidently “push” their products or services into a population, en masse. The population has become too diversified. While it may not yet be firmly evident, I believe that the world has become less homogeneous, as individuals seek out smaller communities to match their interests and skills, and become empowered to act as participants in the establishment of market trends, rather than followers. It has been a long time since Main Street Michael was invited to share his opinion about a major brand. Average Joe is beginning to get the hang of letting companies know what he thinks via Twitter and other feedback channels, and these companies are responding! Plain Jane loves the idea that she can be discussing her love (or hatred) of a particular product on her blog one day, and have the creators or distributors of that same product invite her to speak to their product development team the next day.
The quality of any particular demographic is now going to be as crucial a measure of its value, as much as (if not more so than) the size. It’s not enough anymore to rely on Nielsen numbers. While a certain audience may be smaller than another, it may practice a more intense form of brand evangelism, creating a wider grassroots adoption than can be tracked through conventional means. We are currently experiencing a “shakeout” period, wherein marketers are evaluating, through experimentation, to what degree it is advisable to bow before the consumer and listen more than talk. It is clear, however, that “brainwash” product marketing can only manifest itself if the target consumer is willing to brainwash him/herself in the face of a supremely well-positioned enticement (see “iPad”). It will be the consumer network that drives adoption, not the seller. The local guild will share their preferred mobile business apps, and your friends on FB will parse the news for you. Expertise will percolate by mass vote on Quora, Founders Space, and elsewhere, and – in the short period we are currently entering, when the advertiser has not yet fully determined how to manipulate the landscape to their advantage – we will enjoy a dynamic and somewhat tumultuous period of social behavior not unlike the marketplaces of hundreds of years ago, when we developed a stronger sense of what we wanted and needed BEFORE we went to the market; and yet relied upon our fellow citizens to recommend the best vendors, and turned to the recognized experts for additional guidance.
Communities are helping to clarify the value of marketing as more than just a product pushing mechanism for increasing sales figures. Marketing should never have been relegated to the status of “sales support”, “collateral creation”, and “Press Release spewing” that it was in so many companies. Identifying the nature and need of the customer, and connecting it with impact to the identity and value of your offering is far more than just sales, advertising, PR, or branding. It is these things and a panoply of intangibles, sprinkled with a big handful of common sense, and served upon a bed of freshly grown business acumen. It’s no longer about making sure that the customer gets it, but rather reaching that moment when the customer understands that YOU get it. Enlightened marketing today must engage and activate specialist communities to become evangelists for your offering. Today’s customer is too busy sharing their views to adopt something about which they have not had the opportunity to establish an opinion. I want to believe that most companies and marketing agencies will embrace the notion of sharing the responsibility of developing awareness with their target customers, but I’m afraid – in time – some agencies will find a way to manipulate customers one again, and where companies used to tell people what to buy, unscrupulous brands will find ways to tell people what to think, and the cycle will continue, moving in and out of moments of rightness, as the poet Wallace Stevens once put it.
For now, we should revel in the short period surrounding us, when marketing is able to exercise its full range of capabilities, respectfully connecting the offering to the market in a manner that reveals a relationship between brand and consumer more fruitful than has been evident for a long time.
It’s been quite a while now that “gurus”, “pundits” and “experts” have been bandying about the term “Social Media”, proffering it as the catch-all for market penetration and business success, without honestly having any sort of traditionally measurable proof of merit in hand.
There’s no question that Social Media is an exciting activity sector, promising diverse new and enhanced points of connection with customers and clients. Quite how those connections will translate in to the type of metrics favored by traditionalist CFOs and shareholders is still under debate.
While the aforementioned experts continue to find ways to align this new engagement paradigm with traditional Cost/Benefit analysis modeling, I suggest that such ROI measurement is perhaps something of a fool’s errand, (1) because marketing has never been measurable in the manner that so many companies historically demand, and (2) because the commitment required to successfully maximize the potential of today’s emerging platforms and tools for customer engagement is far less measurable than ad or PR campaigns have been, in the past.
Social Media is more than a marketing campaign ecosystem, wherein one might deploy emerging product offerings or test possible brand evolutions. In fact, I would love to get rid of the term “Social Media” altogether, because it brings with it an unfortunate sense of frivolity that has been compounded by the visible (yet relatively small) part of social media, known as Social Networking (domain of Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, et al).
From a business perspective, the notion of “Social Media” stinks too much of an ongoing teenage chat session, with no goal in site. Many social media gurus will argue that this is quite so, and crucial to a business’s success in the 21st Century. While I strongly concur that engaging in a more open and collaborative dialog with consumers and users is an imperative in the contemporary marketplace, I also feel strongly that there exist few businesses that can afford to invest time and money in open-ended discussions with their prospects, “just because”. In the end, a business has something to sell, and its activities should be focused on this goal, as well as the post-sales services necessary to ensure the new customer becomes a de facto account executive for the brand. Smart marketing is a strategic endeavor, managed at the C-Suite level, and designed to position a company’s offering(s) as impactfully as possible, with the ambitious objective of turning salespeople into customer relations advocates.
By all means let’s call it “Social Media” when we’re reconnecting with old High School friends and sharing photos with cousins across the world. With respect to B2B and B2C connections, let’s expand the term, and call it “Social Engagement”. That is, after all what it’s about, isn’t it? The more measurable activity is whether and how we might engage with and activate our end-user community to become partners in the enhancement and advancement of our brand (and its varied offerings). In some instances this will be sociable (Facebook Pages, Twitter feeds, comments threads, etc), in others more buzz marketing oriented (viral branded content, competitions, internal communications, polls, etc), and in yet others wholly functional and tactical (SEO, brand monitoring, bookmarking, corporate HR, medical resource sharing, media asset management, and so on).
There’s a lot we can do with the tools, platforms, and channels available to our businesses today, but we need to think of our Social Engagement strategy as more than “getting on Facebook” or “starting a blog”. It is a commitment – both online and offline – to connecting with our users, employees, and clients in a more dynamic and potentially rewarding manner than ever before. It is a far more organic and open-ended engagement than we are used to (and perhaps comfortable with). However, it still merits careful strategic forethought and measured management.
To begin, despite that fact that she uses the term I have renounced above(!), I am thrilled to introduce our latest contributor, Pam Dyer, a marketing consultant from Seattle. Her article below offers up a dozen arguments in favor of Social Engagement in the online space. I know that you and I could together come up with an additional 12 reasons, specific to your particular situation, so and I therefore challenge you to make your own list of 8 more, just for the fun of it (and DON’T limit yourself to online opportunities). With 20 compelling reasons to activate your “Media Engagement” endeavors, you will soon be leveraging a previously confusing array of ever changing networks and tool sets, in service to your brand and, more importantly, the long term health of your business.
Social media is fast becoming an essential part part the marketing mix for brands. Companies are increasingly using social tools to monitor conversations about their products, competitors, and industry, and engaging with their customers to build strong relationships. According Forrester Research’s most recent Interactive Marketing Forecast, social media marketing will grow at an annual rate of 34% -– faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17% for all online mediums:
And new research from Access Markets International Partners shows that almost 70% of small and medium businesses actively use social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to promote themselves. But simply posting what your CEO had for lunch isn’t going to help much with your branding efforts — it’s important to strategically use social media tools to increase exposure and reach your target audience.
Here are 12 compelling reasons to use social media to help grow your business:
1. Own your brand’s social presence: If you don’t create official channels online, it’s only a matter of time before your fans do it for you and create their own profiles and communities around your brand. It’s important to claim your brand name across all the major social media platforms. Here are two sites that will help you do this:
KnowEm: KnowEm has the highest number of sites (over 350) available for checking username availability. Simply by entering your desired username, you’ll be able to find out instantly if it’s still available. KnowEm also offers paid plans, from just signing up and registering you at 150 sites, to a full-featured plan which also fills in all profile details, complete with pictures, at 100 to 300 different networking sites.
namechk: Covering 72 major social networking sites, namechk is simple, fast, and easy to use. If your desired username or vanity URL is still available, you simply click through each one to claim it. If your brand isn’t consistent across the Web, namechk can help you by determining which usernames are still available on a number of the most popular sites.
2. Look like you “get it”: Your target audience is becoming more shrewd about leveraging social media sites as an integral part of their daily lives. If you want to appear relevant and in-step with the latest advances in technology, your potential customers will want to see you on these sites as well. If you don’t have a presence, you appear as if you’re not very savvy.
3. Brand recognition: You need to go where your customers are, and they are increasingly spending a great deal of time on social networking sites. Using social media enables your company to reach a huge number of potential customers. Getting your name out there is incredibly important — studies suggest that people need to hear a company’s name at least seven times before they trust and respect it enough to become a customer.
4. Take your message directly to consumers: Social media tools enable you to directly engage consumers in conversation. Be sure to build trust by adding value to the community consistently over time.
5. Increase your search engine rankings: Social media profiles (especially those on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) frequently rank highly with major search engines. Creating keyword-rich profiles around your brand name can help generate traffic for your both your social-networking sites and your company’s Web site.
6. SEO benefits: Many social media bookmarking sites use NOFOLLOW tags that limit the outbound link value of posts made on their sites, but there are still many leading sites that allow DOFOLLOW tags — including Friendfeed, Digg, and Mixx. You can also benefit from posting to bookmarking sites that use NOFOLLOW tags if people read your posts and link back to your Web site.
7. Social media content is now integrated with search results: Search engines like Google and Bing are increasingly indexing and ranking posts and other information from social networks. Videos from popular sites like YouTube can also be optimized for indexing by the major search engines.
8. Brand monitoring: Having a social media presence gives you a better understanding of what current and potential customers are saying about your products and services. If you actively monitor social conversations, you have the opportunity to correct false or inaccurate information about your brand and address negative comments before they take on a life of their own.
9. Generate site traffic: You can create additional traffic if you regularly post updates on social networks that link back to your Web site. Social media bookmarking tools like Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon can also generate additional traffic to your site if you create frequent articles and blog posts.
10. Find new customers through your friends: You shouldn’t neglect your personal social media accounts as potential avenues to promote the activities of your business. Posting regular updates relating to your business and activities can remind your friends about what your company does and influence them to use your services or make referrals.
11. Find new customers through your company profile: Your company profile is a great opportunity for you to post regular updates on your activities and about important news and trends in your industry. This will attract the attention of new customers interested in your industry and increase your reputation as an expert in your field. It’s important to post regularly if you want to increase your followers or fans and convert them to potential leads.
12. Niche marketing: Social media enables you to reach very specific subsets of people based on their personal preferences and interests. You can create unique social media profiles to target these audiences or create strategies based on addressing individual interests.
Pam Dyer has 14+ years of MarCom experience, in-house for a number of years at Northwest Nexus and Winstar, and now as a consultant. To read her other articles, please visit her site here.
An article on last week’s CNN website both amused me and pissed me off. The amusement came from the fact that my assertion, made last month, about the name “iPad” being a little “feminine hygiene oriented” is now borne out, by – among other signs – the word “iTampon” trending as one of the most tweeted topics for the two weeks following the release of Apple’s newest gadget. Apple has experienced a failure (however temporary one might feel it to be) in branding. That failure may have been driven by some factors that were beyond the company’s control (naming rights, etc), but it was a failure nevertheless.
Apple’s failure was a marketing failure, and may lead to a business failure, as they experienced with the Newton, original Mac Mini, and other such ventures. The failure was not a failure to push the right name forth, or advertise convincingly enough. These would have been promotional failures, and I would agree with Mr. Ihnatko: in those cases, the failure of a promotional campaign can be inconsequential, when the offering sells itself. However, a product only sells itself when it FULLY MEETS A PREVIOUSLY UNTAPPED NEED.
Apple may end up selling a healthy number of iPads, but I am left wondering how many more they might have sold, had they LISTENED to the consumer more than they are used to doing. Like all great designers, the company created something they “knew” was the best thing, but they based their knowledge on personal aesthetic and creative sensibilities and preferences. If Jobs, Ive, Forstall, and Schiller like it…let’s get real…if JOBS likes it, the world must like it. Thanks to the fact that Jobs has undeniably cool taste and is indeed brilliant (combined with the unquestionably genius skills of Mr. Ive and his team), the result has historically been some pretty darn exciting products…for a relatively small niche of equally specific consumers – People whose personal aesthetic and creative sensibilities and preferences matched those of Messrs Jobs and Ive, in essence.
When you’re trying to create a solution that serves a wider market, however, this doesn’t work so well.
Now to my irritation, which is not altogether unrelated.
Andy Ihnatko, a tech columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, is quoted in the article I mention above as saying “with the right device, marketing doesn’t really matter.” I’m not sure what else he said, because all I heard after that was a strange wailing, that I shortly realized was my own cry of frustration at yet another unwitting misinterpretation of the role and value of marketing, within 21st century business strategy and practice.
Having worked with and within a thrilling diversity of businesses and industries, I have learned a lot about, and practiced, an equally wide array of interpretations of the function known as “Marketing”. My experiences, perhaps more than anything else, have irrevocably confirmed for me that this function, when successfully leveraged and executed, is NOT an adjunct or additional engagement, to be activated “when the need arises”. One could argue (subjectively) that Public Relations, Advertising, and Promotions fall in that category, but Marketing is no longer, nor should it ever be, seen as an initiative designed to purely drive sales.
I am now picturing a bevy of Business Unit leaders and financial officers derisively snorting in shareholder-sensitive disdain and contempt at my apparent naïveté…but humor me for a moment longer, please.
For a long time, consumer products companies, consumer electronics companies, and even service and solution providers pursued the notion of “push marketing” with an exponential level of investment. For a longtime, their methodologies delivered equally, or at least satisfactory, returns on those investments. Make enough noise, grab enough eyeballs, repeat the mantra enough times, and you’ll make the sale. This worked in many instances, but no longer.
The consumer of today belongs to a complex society of social networks. In some cases these networks are consciously inhabited, while in others the consumer participates subconsciously, simply by dint of their purchasing habits or behaviors exhibited, when in possession of, or proximity to, the value offerings in question. To clarify my point, permit me to borrow from the Forrester research ladder metaphor, created four years ago, when social networking was still very much in its mainstreaming infancy.
Since 2006, Facebook has grown its user base by over 5000% (from under 8 million to over 400 million active users). YouTube has experienced a more than 3000% increase in content uploads since 2006. UGC (User Generated Content) and CDP (Consumer Driven Productization) are not fads. They are inescapable trends, and they are largely inured to the promotional efforts of “old school” advertising agencies and product marketing groups. Taking some of this data as a baseline, I can only *begin* to imagine how Forrester’s 2006 findings have changed in the intervening 4 year period…
In 2006, a full 48% of online consumers over the age of 21 were already actively involved in social networking activities. Consider the above growth curves of Facebook, YouTube et al, what can we imagine is the percentage of adults engaged in social networking today?..
Companies are still able to drive sales in to niche constituencies, simply by investing enough energy and money in the artificial creation of the “illusion of need”. This pseudo-holographic need is only experienced as long as the investment required to uphold that illusion is maintained. If brands truly want to CONNECT with larger market segments, and establish the type of brand recognition and long-term loyalty of which contemporary ad execs can only dream fondly, they need to grasp the concepts of social networking, crowd sourcing, and “Trust” or “Relationship” marketing.
I will delve into these at a later date. For now, however, I would like to offer up a taste of the power of crowd sourcing, and ask you to think how you might consider changing the way you develop and bring to market your next product/solution/service/self…
This is the 2009 album (considered her best, to date) from a songstress I recently discovered (her cover of Gotye's "Somebody I used to Know" is one of my newest faves):
Everybody
This one is going to take some work to appreciate fully, and that's how great music should be. It's been a while since a truly great and challenging contemporary musician has stepped forth. With "The ArchAndroid", Janelle Monáe picks up the legacies of Messrs. Brown, Prince, Jackson et al, and serves notice upon us that it is perhaps no longer a "Man's Man's World"!
SocialEyes is a social video service ("Skype for Facebook" with an extra value add), currently in beta, that instantly connects you to your friends and to groups of people who share your interests. Created by the founders of Real Networks, this
You can access SocialEyes at www.socialeyes.com and apps.facebook.com/socialeyes. The service also has a "desktop notifier, that keeps you logged in without the need of a browser.
"the first and only Twitter Follow Management with stats..."
All I know is that I can manage the value of my Twitter community very efficiently with this tool (currently in Beta). I'm not interested in being followed by thousands, but in knowing that my feed is actually providing some degree of value to its readers, and that I am engaging in a mutually beneficial exchange of data streams between my world, and the worlds inhabited by a few exceedingly well placed counterparts. Tweepi helps.
The Actor’s Equity Association (AEA) is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, and one of its initiatives is to provide members with fancy new gold credit card style membership cards, replacing the former paper-based version. My reaction, when I heard this, was one of disappointment. Every initiative taken by an organization today has consequences and implications that reverberate across multiple sectors. In this case, the AEA failed to take advantage of a priceless opportunity to enhance member services, increase member engagement, and exhibit a very simple but impactful degree of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility).
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SocialEyes is a social video service ("Skype for Facebook" with an extra value add), currently in beta, that instantly connects you to your friends and to groups of people who share your interests. Created by the founders of Real Networks, this
You can access SocialEyes at www.socialeyes.com and apps.facebook.com/socialeyes. The service also has a "desktop notifier, that keeps you logged in without the need of a browser.
