One of the most visible effects of the social media revolution is the relative power that is now in the hands of an individual consumer when it comes to spreading a positive or negative experience with your brand to hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people. Shoppers have a voice and it is now far stronger than the occasional review on Amazon or comment on a blog post. As the new holiday shopping season descends in the US, at least one organization is starting the season with an open call to consumers to make their voices heard.
Today Consumer Reports placed a full page ad in the USA Today asking holiday shoppers to "bite back" against retail practices that they hate. In an announcement about the campaign, the Consumer Reports team shared the following stats from a survey run on the Consumerist (a popular blog that is now part of the "Consumer Reports family") about what consumers dislike the MOST:
72% Stores that never open all of the checkout lanes
68% Fake "sales". If something is always 20% off, it's not on sale
67% Coupons that exclude almost everything in the store
52% Pushing store credit cards at the register
As we head into this holiday season, watching out for your shoppers biting back isn't just a lesson for those of us who work in retail sales. Consumer opinion will continue to drive purchase, and this will take the form of everything from idle tweets to wall posts on a fan page. Listening to conversations about your brand, products and industry and participating in the conversation is consistent advice from those who "get" social media. This holiday season for many brands, it may be even more than good advice ... it may be a necessary survival tactic.
Yesterday I hosted a conversation on Twitter all about authenticity and what that truly means. It's a buzzword, to be sure, but it was interesting that the 140 character based conversation yielded many different perceptions of what authenticity means. For most honesty was a big part of it, as was having real one on one conversations with people and not taking yourself too seriously. As I thought about my own use of social media both in building my personal brand as well as what I do for clients working my day job at a big marketing agency ... I realized that I'm not a social media guy. Social media guys (I use this term collectively, as many are girls too) are becoming easy to find - and not all that respected (warning - this video has crude language).
Social media is just one of the tools that I use on a daily basis. To focus on just that and make it my identity would be like calling a runner a "sneaker guy." They might love their sneakers, but it's still the method they use to get from where they are to where they want to be. The way I use social media is similar ... I use it for marketing. I'm a marketing guy first and foremost. It's why my blog is called Influential Marketing and why you won't ever hear my introduce myself as an expert in social media. I use it often, and do know what I'm doing - but my expertise and my career is in marketing.
I happen to believe that the future of marketing is increasingly going to require some level of knowledge and expertise in social media. But it's not the only thing. This fact completely dawned on me last night as I watched a video review about my book from a very interesting guy I met at the Blogworld Expo last month. His name is JB Glossinger and he is the creator of what is usually ranked the #1 audio podcast in the self-help category on iTunes. His use of social media is perfect to deliver his message, and on a daily basis he exhibits a mastery of using social media that many so-called "experts" simply could not. JB is not a social media guy either - but he uses it brilliantly to share his content and vision of the world.
Perhaps the real future of social media lies with people like JB. Not people who master the use of various tools and declare themselves experts of that domain, but those who have a real expertise or vision and simply use the tools that are available to them in that moment to share it with the world.
Just about every week I see an article or have a conversation with a client about the potential risks of social media and how to manage them. Quite frankly, there are many ways that social media can go wrong and cause problems for a brand, and as someone who shares advice on using social media for marketing - I can readily admit that. What I haven't seen as much discussion about is how social media could be used to protect your brand. Not fighting back after a crisis happens, but proactively as a tool to prevent people from hijacking, corrupting or negatively impacting your brand. What if you were to see social media as a way to prevent these effects instead of a potential conduit to increase them? Here are a few ideas for how you might use social media to protect your brand:
Register domain names and usernames. Among the most long standing of brand protection "techniques" - typically this involved registering branded domain names and ensuring that people couldn't register words or brand terms important to you and then use them without your consent. In the world of social media, where it seems a new site pops up nearly every day, how can you best manage your brand not just on the obvious social networks or popular sites like Facebook and Twitter, but the many sites that are just beginning and might be big one or two years from now? One way is to use services like NameChk or Knowem - which both allow you to check on username availability and bulk register on multiple sites. This doesn't mean you need to use every site, but sometimes just having your own terms registered so no one else can have them is half the battle.
Spot problems/crisis before they happen. By now it is probably not news to tell you that social media can be a great way to track conversations that matter to your brand. More and more companies big and small are realizing that watching the conversation online through real time tools like Twitter or by putting a social media monitoring program in place with a software based solution like Radian6 can help to identify potential issues before they expand into full blown crisis.
See who's copying your stuff. One of the things that can cause major problems for any brand is the ease with which anyone can cut and paste your information into their own site or reformat it for any purpose. This may seem nearly impossible to track when it comes to the vast expanse of the web, but tools like Tynt can help to find content that is being used without your permission. Once you find it, the ideal way to deal with this content is to not go after every "unauthorized" use, but to have a smarter policy to determine whether the use is significantly harming your brand. That way you can avoid going after the customer who illegally used your logo to start their own fan club, and focus on the real usurpers of your brand who are trying to harm it in some way.
Have your own place to respond. If you have ever heard the saying that the best defense is a good offense (or maybe I have that backwards), you'll understand the point of this suggestion. Often when it comes to responding to attacks or negativity in social media, the best way to respond is through your own social media sites. A press release will never be able to counter a blog post. Matching the communications channel puts you on an even playing field with those who might try to negatively impact your brand and gives you a soapbox from which to share your own point of view that can be the most effective way to get your message across.
Get verified and trademarked. More and more social media sites now are allowing real brands to pass through some sort of validation process in order to demonstrate that their accounts are "official." Facebook lets brands protect trademarks and Twitter has their verified accounts feature. In both cases, the sites are allowing companies a way to demonstrate to their audience on that site that the account they have is real and official. Don't underestimate the value of having your official presence on these sites as a way to have trusted interactions with your customers.
Find and support your biggest fans. Through sites like Ning customers can create their own online communities that relate to your brand. These are activities that your customers will likely do anyway, so why not offer them some tools and support for these communities? Doing so will not only help you to protect your brand by having some involvement in what they are doing, but often you can end up with better branded assets if you help because you are not forcing a real fan to go and grab assets from a web search and use them to create a substandard experience.
What if you only had to do your job once or twice per year? Apart from the tempting thought of how great your life would be without work, imagine the practical fact of how your skills that you use on a daily basis might be affected by only using them once or twice per year. How much would you forget in the time between using your skills? How much of what you do could be like riding a bike - just inherent knowledge that you'll always have? Now imagine if you were a surgeon doing procedures on patients. Seems like a fairly complicated thing - and we generally tend to trust in the surgeons that operate on us. Would it surprise you to learn that 78% of surgeons who perform ACL knee operations, for example, only do 1-2 per year? Or that of the 50 procedures an average orthopedic surgeon does per year, 30 of them are procedures he or she only does once per year?
These were some of the most interesting data points shared by Robert Winder, the CEO of VuMedi - an online community that allows surgeons to share videos of procedures that they do with other surgeons. Winder is one of the speakers at the FDA public hearings that I have also been speaking at today, all about how pharma brands should be able to use the Internet for promotion. Because these hearings are the first in over a decade, there is a lot of attention from everyone in the medical community. People have been invited to speak to share opinions on how the FDA should or should not be regulating this industry.
Whether or not you care about the hearings, the simple fact is that just about everyone in any sort of medical company is paying attention to these hearings. Thinking like a marketer, this is a dream audience for anyone who has a product to sell to the pharma industry to get in front of. As Winder shared his slides on why VuMedi is a great tool for surgeons, he also shared how pharma brands could work with his site. His presentation was on topic, but was also a very smart way to promote his site. Now just about every pharma brand that is paying attention to these hearings (which is nearly all of them) have heard about his site and how they can work with it.
What's the lesson in all this? Well, one lesson is that anything can be an opportunity to promote your brand if you use it well - even a moment as dry as an FDA hearing. The other lesson, of course, is to do a bit more research before selecting your surgeon for an ACL surgery ... :-)
For the next three days the World Bank here in Washington DC is hosting a world changing event that few people know about. Called the Development Marketplace - it is a gathering of organizations behind 100 innovative ideas from 50 different countries on how to save the planet. The ideas can affect everything from a small village of 60 to a large population of millions. The only requirement is that the funding request from organizations participating must be less than $200,000. As I went through the list of projects that are being featured in the marketplace, there were 10 that stood out to me not only for the creativity of their solutions, but also the lessons that anyone might take away from the idea.
The best ideas solve big problems, but also offer a lesson that could apply to much more than just the situation at hand. Reading the stories of all the innovative organizations presenting at the Development Marketplace gives you a sense of hope about the world that can sometimes get lost in our daily lives. Check out the stories below, and the rest of the great projects from Development Marketplace 2009 ... these are stories and ideas worth sharing:
1. Wave Energy Converter to Mitigate Ocean-Wave Damage and Beach Erosion Country: Dominican Republic - Project #4949 Organization: Universidad Nacional Pedro Henrique Urena (UNPHU) Description: Waves currently cause a large degree of the devastation from storms, including destroying bridges, roads and other vital infrastructure. This project is about using wave energy converter (WEC) technology to lower the power of waves and convert some of this power into usable electric power. Lesson: Your greatest source of energy can come from the same thing that also causes the most destruction.
2. Rate-and-Shame Project Would Raise Media Pressure On Public Officials Country: Ukraine - Project #4886 Organization: Resource and Analysis Center "Society and Environment" Description: Local governments in the Ukraine tend to rely on central government to take adaptation steps to deal with climate change, however the results of action (or inaction) are most felt at the local level. This effort involves creating a public rating system for climate change initiative and rating local officials on their performance, in an effort to use transparency to shame inactive officials into action. Lesson: Giving people someone to blame can encourage action.
3. Saving Glaciers: Artisanal Industry Aims to Stop the Melt and Save Water Country: Peru - Project #4311* Organization: Glaciares Peru Description: Increases in global temperature are causing the world's largest freshwater reserves -- glaciers, to melt. Tropical glaciers are most at risk, which includes those high in the Andes. This project is to build a production facility that will create a paintable white cover material that can be applied to existing black rocks near the glaciers so they do not absorb as much heat and the glaciers melting will slow. Lesson: The best way to deal with a problem is to sometimes focus on what is right beside it.
4. Global Voices: The Vulnerable Make Videos to Speak Out on Climate Adaptation Country: Bangladesh, Colombia, and Sri Lanka - Project #3768 Organization: Institute of Development Studies Description: Use participatory video (PV) training to allow people without strong voices in the community to share their stories and thoughts about climate change through video to the world. Lesson: Video can help amplify voices that are usually silent on an issue.
5. African Pastoralists to Play Out Climate Drama On The Airwaves Country: Nigeria - Project #4556 Organization: The Smallholders Foundation Description: Empower smallholders to produce and broadcast a 20-episode climate-change radio drama featuring a series of climate risk management strategies in the local lgbo language to air on five statewide radio stations over a one-year period, reaching more than 15 million listeners. Lesson: Dramatizing a serious message can help it to reach your target audience.
6. Medicinal Tree Farms to Reduce Malnutrition and Malaria Infection in Cambodia Country: Cambodia - Project #4229 Organization: Green Earch Concepts Description: There has been a sharp rise in malarial infections due to flooding in Cambodia. Also, flooding and drought affect crop yields. Moringa trees have leaves with 25 times more iron content than spinach and high levels of beta carotene. These help increase hemoglobin levels in the blood and strengthen the immune system. The seeds may also be used for water purification. The project is to raise Moringa trees on 10 hectares of land to harvest the leaves and seeds, and conduct three clinical trials on the effectiveness of Moringa. Lesson: Exploring a new discovery can be the best way to create hope.
7. Mobilizing Community Journalists For Participatory Disaster Risk Management Country: Mongolia - Project #3502 Organization: Press Institute Description: Rural residents of Mongolia are particularly vulnerable to advese effects of extreme natural events. Risk-management plans are rarely communicated to herders and other stakeholders because of the lack of extension capabilities. This project considers rural journalists as part of the community and stimulates direct involvement of journalists in risk planning and management and supports them using traditional and new media tools for disaster education. Lesson: When you lack resources, work with those already in the community who have a similar skill set.
8. Flood Threat Launches Self-Sustaining Green-Concept Floating Village Country: Cambodia - Project #3457 Organization: Green Earth Concepts Description: The Tonle Sap Lake, the biggest natural lake in Southeast Asia, poses a danger due to irregular floods from the Mekong River. Floods wash out houses make from local timber and villages have no access to safe water. This project is to build 12 houses to form a self-sustained floating village equipped with utilities that conform to the climate change and lead to the independence from traditional energy forms. Lesson: When faced with a recurring flood, the best solution is to find a way to float.
9. Rice Farmers Look to Fish Farming to Cushion the Impact of Climate Change Country: Philippines - Project #3053 Organization: Farming Systems and Soil Resources Description: Rainfall patterns are unpredictable in the Philippines, which results in flooding or extreme dry spells. If water from previous rains can be stored and used during dry periods, crop failure can be avoided. This project includes a number of innovations, from digging deeper and wider rainwater storage to water pumps powered by humans. There is also a "fish for fuel scheme" that allows farmers to use part of their fish harvest to pay in kind for the expenses involved in excavating the reservoir. Lesson: Barter of "in kind" products can make progress happen where money is short.
10. Clearing Timber Blockages from Rivers Would Help Communities Progress Country: Colombia - Project #1434 Organization: CAMIZBA Description: Increased intensity of tropical storms and deforestation of the river basins produces immense avalanches that erode the river banks. This produces palisades that block the rivers and impede the passage of people and products. Consequently, 15 indigenous communities are left isolated. For this project, a method of using winches, pulleys and expansion bolts will be combined with ethnoeducation to make a difference. The education for indigenous communities will happen through traditional oral communications (songs, storytelling, dances) to disseminate messages about protection of the river basins through groups of women. Lesson: In a traditional culture, the form and teller of a message are paramount.
*Disclaimer: This project is one that a member of my extended family is working on, but I have no involvement in the project. It is one of the reasons I first heard about the Development Marketplace, however.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall and people across the world are focusing on this momentous day. Last week I was in Berlin and spent an afternoon looking at remnants of the Berlin Wall and its defining place in German history. As the German chancellor from the time (Helmut Kohl) said, "we [Germans] don't have many reasons in our history to be proud, but as chancellor I have nothing to be more proud of than German reunification."
Seeking to see if an experience I had written about some time ago still existed, on a free afternoon in Berlin I headed to a place called Checkpoint Charlie, a highlight among the tourist destinations that commemorate (and commercialize) the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the war there were 300 of these "checkpoints" spread out across the perimeter of the wall. They were manned by soldiers whose job was to make sure that people did not try to cross the wall - often using deadly force to carry out their duties. Estimates range in the hundreds (or thousands, depending on whom you talk to) for the number of people who were killed by this checkpoint squad during the 28 years the wall was up. As is often the case with some of humanities worst moments, today the three remaining checkpoints are all tourist destinations.
At Checkpoint Charlie, the most frequently visited of these checkpoints, outside of the main museum on the street is a guy who will put a stamp in your passport celebrating the former separation of Germany. You usually carry your passport with you for ten years, and through that time you collect stamps from countries you visit, visas from exotic places, and a living record of where you have been and what you have seen. Most international travellers use their passports as the ultimate travel keepsake. For those travellers, getting a unique stamp from a now defunct destination is an appealing idea. For some, it may even be their sole reason for visiting.
Which leads to my marketing observation, that even in the midst of historic celebration of something as significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall ... people are always looking for a way to capture their experiences and share them with others. This is true of travel, or any other type of experience. When you travel internationally, your passport becomes your record of the places you have been and moments you have had. Stamps in that passport are usually official, and always significant. Sometimes the most important thing you can sell to someone is a memory they were there.
Note: If you recognized this post, it's because I wrote about Checkpoint Charlie two years ago. This post has lots more pictures and is based on a real experience (and today is the 20th anniversary!), so I thought it worthwhile to share a revised version of it again today. If you liked this idea, you'll probably enjoy my post on philatelic marketing too. And I promise tomorrow will an all-new non-recycled post!
Adrian Moore is the best concierge in the world. At least, according to British travel magazine Monacle, he is. He works at the Four Seasons in Paris, knows all the best spots and restaurants, is intimately aware of any festivals or special events in his city and is, by any account, an authority on all things about Paris. As a business traveller, I appreciate a concierge like this. Unfortunately, the majority of hotels never have anyone like Adrian. Instead, they staff their "concierge" desk with someone who was checking people in at the front desk just the week before.
In those empty cases, the so-called concierge is no better than an Internet enabled computer with access to city resources, a few travel blogs and Yelp (or another restaurant review site). The most interesting thing about Adrian Moore that I didn't mention, however, is that he also happens to be a blogger. And his blog allows him to explore his city and publish his thoughts about it. Which leads me to an interesting question - what if all concierges were bloggers?
Or, put another way to broaden this question beyond the hotel industry, what if the person who was most directly responsible for interacting with your customers used social media more often? This idea works out well for the Four Seasons in Paris with Adrian, but also has worked well for Comcast with Frank Eliason using Twitter as his tool of choice to actively and proactively help customers. Social media can help amplify the voice of any individual to help them bring a personality to a business. The concierge is a term recognized for hotels, but it is a role that many businesses could use in some way. If you had to point to someone within your organization who could be your "concierge" - who would it be?
Once you answer this, you can also answer one the biggest questions that many companies ask before starting to actively use social media -- who is the person (or people) within our organization that should start blogging, tweeting, conversing and responding on our behalf online?
It's the concierge, and if you don't have one ... go find one.
Deconstruction is a powerful idea. All it means is taking an experience or something real and breaking it down into its individual components. Deconstructing helps you to understand something. Deconstructing tells a story. I remember the first time I saw the movie Amadeus, the Oscar winning dramatization of the life of Mozart, there was one scene that stayed with me. It was the composer Salieri describing (and deconstructing) the music of Mozart:
It helped me to understand classical music in a way I had never thought about. This weekend, as I watched the memorial documentary of Michael Jackson's planned concert tour, This Is It, I thought about that same feeling. The moment of watching something that was deconstructing a vision and a story that I hadn't quite realized the significance of until that moment. This Is It has been getting rave reviews since coming out last week and has already crossed the $100 million mark. Some are already anticipating that it is Oscar-worthy. Here's the preview, in case you haven't seen or heard about it:
What made the film most powerful for me was one moment when Michael was working with his band and rehearsing the length of a pause in a song - encouraging them to "let it simmer." Then the music was brought together with the filmed visuals that were done on a green screen and you saw how the pieces interacted. The film deconstructed the concert that never was, and gave you a vision of what it would have been.
It would be easy to write a marketing post about how this movie has been promoted and perhaps even criticize how it is turning Michael Jackson's death into a venue for moneymaking. The most powerful marketing idea I will take away from the film and experience, however, is the real power of deconstructing an experience to give people an inside look and emotional attachment to it. Deconstruction helped me understand the power of classical music, and the genius of Michael Jackson. The same concept could work equally well for deconstructing a cause such as the fight against Pneumonia and World Pneumonia Day, or sharing the vision behind an inspired marketing campaign. How could deconstruction help your marketing?
There is no denying that Twitter has had a huge impact on how marketers are thinking about using social media tools for marketing. One thing that is most interesting about it, however, is how the site has managed to avoid overcomplicating itself with more features. Twitter is simple, and it just works. Of course the one overused word that has been used recently to describe Twitter is that it is a "firehose" of information, shooting out at a speed and volume that has threatened to make it unusable for many people. So when I had a chance to try out Twitter's new Lists feature (which I had been looking forward to seeing for some time), I was not only surprised, but also excited about what this will mean for all of us who use the site. Here are just a few reasons why I think lists may revolutionize how you use Twitter.
You can segment your firehose. The #1 criticism of Twitter is that if you follow thousands of people and see all their tweets appearing in one interface, it's tough to manage. Searches in third party tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck have made this more manageable, but those usually only work based on keywords, which is inefficient. What if I wanted to just see all the tweets from my colleagues at Ogilvy? That was tough to do. Now with lists, I can create my own group of colleagues and just reference that.
Offers a more meaningful metric of influence. You'll notice if you have a Twitter account that in the spot where it used to just list the number of tweets you have done, it now shows how frequently you are "listed." This is a new metric of influence that sits somewhere between followers and retweets - but one that indicates how frequently other Twitter users who are creating their own lists are including you on their list. In short order, I imagine that number (along with retweets) will become more influential than having hundreds of thousands of robot followers when it comes to measuring influence on Twitter.
Allows you to easily follow a trusted group of individuals. One of the biggest issues I have had in the past with Twitter is that it is difficult to follow a group of users all at once. Of course, you used to be able to use services like Tweepml to do this, but that was incomplete and the lists were often anonymously posted and so the data may not be as trustworthy. Now with Twitter Lists, you can create a list of all the attendees at a particular conference, for example, and with one click anyone can follow them.
Lets any user of Twitter segment who they actually read. Up until now, the greatest compliment you could give someone who you follow and read on Twitter was to retweet something they posted. Now with Twitter Lists, you can add them to a list and not only make your own experience of reading content on Twitter better (see #1 on this list), but you can also send a subtle reminder to the person you are following that unlike the other thousands of accounts you might follow, their's is one you actually pay attention to.
Gives brands an opportunity to aggregate multiple accounts. Many brands have multiple accounts - for example hotel brands that have a master account and then separate accounts for separate regional properties. This phenomenon was becoming more widespread, but now with Twitter Lists, brands can aggregate all their accounts together in a list - and best of all, if each Twitter account does this, the lists will show up on the sidebar linking anyone who sees one branded account to all the others.
Clearly, I'm excited about what Twitter Lists has to offer for marketers. What do you think - is this a big deal for marketers or for anyone else?
If you have watched any television or been inside a retail store at any point this month in the US, it would have likely been hard to miss the omnipresence of pink where it wasn't before. From pink clothes, to laptops, to banners to shoes and gloves on your favourite NFL players, the marketing blitz of pink has just about taken over the retail landscape. The color and ribbon are the symbols of the fight against breast cancer, and may easily represent one of the most widespread cause marketing campaigns in terms of partners since the RED campaign offered custom branded products to support finding a cure for AIDS.
Here is a presentation that takes an inside look not only at some of the best marketing lessons that this massive cause related effort offers, but also a caution against what is commonly being called "pinkwashing" (corporations using "pink" inauthentically simply to jump on the bandwagon without any real contribution to the cause). Check out the lessons, let me know if you have any others to add to the list, and most important ... don't be a pinkwasher:
Rohit works at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, part of WPP - a world leader in advertising and marketing services. The views expressed on this blog are his personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer or its clients.
