Influential Marketing Blog

Innocent Drinks Introduces Their First "Annual Grown Up Meeting"

One of my favourite examples of a brand with personality is Innocent Drinks, the smoothie maker from the UK that has built their business out of doing things a bit differently. From their annual charity drive called The Big Knit where they support Seniors knitting little hats for their smoothies (to be sold supporting a group called Age Concern), to the way that they approach all of their marketing and communications ... the brand is the ultimate example of how to build your business by having a unique identity. That even extends to their product, which lives up to their simple tagline: Fruit and Nothing Else.

So this past weekend, when the company decided to hold their Annual General Meeting and release their first annual report, it was sure to be a unique experience. Throughout the day on Saturday you could follow along with the proceedings through Twitter, Flickr and the official event blog.  Innocent Drink enthusiasts were invited to participate in this meeting, abbreviated AGM so it could also be called "A Grown-up Meeting." If you check out the archive of materials, you'll see a particularly interesting conversation that came out of the event, and one that was captured through social media tools for the world to share. The blog has everything from photos of their annual report to videos on a YouTube Channel answering questions such as where the founders of the company first met.  The event altogether offers a tempting thought ... what if your annual general meeting (or whatever you call it) was actually a chance for your most vocal customers to get together and share their passion for your products or services with the world?  What if  your annual report could be described as "lovingly prepared" and actually lived up to that promise and was entertaining and reflected the best of your brand, as well as all the results for the year?  That's what having a personality means.

Be Part Of The Personality Not Included Book Launch On March 28th

There are a lot of ideas for how to launch a book online. As I head toward launching* Personality Not Included this Friday, I've looked at most of them. Some authors create a group and ask all their contacts to all hit an online bookstore like Amazon at one time to create a surge in sales.  Others coordinate big launch events in the real world and aim to use those to propel interest in their book. Bigger books might buy advertising to announce a launch and, of course, there is the old PR method of blasting lots of press releases at people who may or may not be interested in the book. There is one big problem with all these approaches: none of them are very conversational.

A conversation does not start instantly with a big spike and then trail off. A really good conversation builds momentum steadily and eventually turns into something more powerful. So my aim today is not to create a short term spike, but to start a conversation about the central idea of the book - which is that personality matters, and continue it over the next few weeks and months. To jumpstart this conversation, I'm asking for your help - and offering you something in return.

My idea is simple: if you send me five questions that you want to know about the book or personality, I'll write you a response on Friday that you can publish on your blog. Let's call these virtual interviews (ie - interviews by email). You choose whether to post the interview on your blog or not after you get my responses, but I am essentially offering for ANY BLOGGER to send me interview questions and I will respond with answers that are NOT cut and pasted, but specific to your questions. I will send all my responses to you on Friday in the order that I get your questions, and I will link to all the posted interviews on Friday.  On Monday, I'll be running a competition on my blog to let readers vote on the Best Interview. The winner will get a signed copy of my book and a gift certificate for $100 from Amazon. Here are a few reasons you may want to do it:

1. For relatively little effort, you'll get a customized post by me that you can use exclusively on your blog
2. Your blog will be featured in my follow up post compiling all the interviews (getting you more visibility)
3. You have a chance to win a signed copy of my new book and a gift certificate for from Amazon.com if your post is voted "Best Interview" by the readers of my blog.

That's about it. I'll be answering review questions in the order that I get them, so please send me yours soon at rohitaustralia [at] gmail [dot] com and I will add you to the list. If you don't have a blog, you can still ask questions by leaving a comment on this post - there will be a prize for best question from the comments too. For the latest news about the book launch and access to exclusive content which you can't get anywhere else, be sure to join my Facebook group for the book if you haven't already and also follow the launch in real time by adding me to your Twitter follow list (Twitter ID - rohitbhargava), or friending me on Facebook (which republished my updates if you are not a Twitter user).

Update (3/26/08): Up to 25 interview requests in less than 24 hours ... thanks to all the bloggers for your interest - I'm hoping to make it to 50 request by Friday!

* The book bindery date is this Friday, which means the book is complete and printed and they will be shipping out to those who preordered over the weekend or on Monday (so you should have your copy by early next week). The official date when they will be in bookstores across the US and Canada is likely to be around April 14th - and the book will be released internationally about 4-6 weeks after that (across Europe, Asia, Australia). If you have a specific query about your country and when the book will be out, please send me an email and I can let you know.

Announcing The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore

Several months ago I participated in the LitLiberation Blogger Challenge launched by my friend Tim Ferriss to try and raise money for DonorsChoose.org (a site which allows teachers to submit funding proposals to ask for help doing something they don't normally get the funding for).  Around the same time, I started playing around with Amazon Affiliate links and made more than ten bucks on links by just using a few links on several blog posts.  That's only a small amount of money, but it got me thinking about the potential of using an affiliate program to generate money for charity in the marketing world.  Over the time that I was away from blogging, one of my side projects was to start contacting several influential people to see if they would be willing to participate in a new kind of bookstore - which I called The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore.  Today I am launching it (although I will resist the temptation to call it a "Beta launch").  Here's how I described the purpose of the site and what makes it different:

This site is different because it features all the reading lists of marketers that you already know and respect in one place.  From CEOs to marketing directors to top marketing bloggers - The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore lets you see and shop from all their reading lists ... and all for a good cause.

The way most of us find out about great marketing books is the same way that we learn about great products ... through recommendations from people we trust.  Most online bookstores are just categories of books selected by one or two people.  They are great if you trust those people, but they are not comprehensive. 

As I describe above, all the proceeds from affiliate commissions that this site generates will be donated to DonorsChoose.org on a monthly basis and I plan to try and spread the word in the marketing community about this new bookstore and will be adding new names on a weekly basis.  Here are a few reasons why I think this idea can work:

1. Collects a central hub of reading lists from marketers that are currently widely distributed online. 
2. Encourages marketers who are not sharing their reading lists to do so in an easy way.
3. Makes great marketing books easier to find and buy.
4. Creates a community of marketing book readers and allows them to contribute to a good cause
5. Offers a platform for new marketing books to get promoted to an interested audience

That's the initial idea, but I'd love to hear some feedback on what you think could make it better.  I am still reaching out to marketers to add their book lists, so stay tuned in the next few weeks as I will likely be adding lots more names to this list, and I plan to publish updates with money raised and associate this bookstore with a challenge on DonorsChoose.org so the amount raised (and what the dollars are being spent on) is highly visible.  Blog badges and other tools to promote the site are in the works as well.  Any other suggestions?

Note: A big thank you to all the people who responded to my LinkedIn question about which charity could be the best to support for this.  DonorsChoose.org was the most popular suggestion.

Guest Post: Virgin America safety video is worth watching

Congrats to Rohit on the new addition here's my humble addition to his guest post collection. This is a cross posting from experiencecurve so I apologize if you have already seen it. The key thing that I think is highlighted here is how much of a difference you can make to a customers experience by dramatically improving the unexpected, the un-asked for. I think it would be a rare airline customer focus group that actually complained about the safety video, because everyone already accepted the fact that they were boring, so what an amazing difference it is to have something fun, humorous, down to earth, dare I say human. I wrote about my Virgin America experience a couple of weeks ago and the one thing I searched for was the safety video, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Well Chet Gulland at their agency Anomaly just put it on youtube and sent me a link so here's the update. Airline safety videos generally make me want to poke needles in my eyes, so it's refreshing when a company tries to do one a little bit differently, and tries to make it a bit more bearable.

The message that they manage to get across here of course is "if we tried harder to make this video bearable imagine what we'll do to improve the rest of the experience".

The interesting thing about this as well is that i'm sure no one has ever complained about the safety announcements, most customers have probably accepted that they have to be boring and mundane. What Virgin has done here is make something better that you never expected, and that is even better than improving things that everyone already knows need improving. The other side effect of this amusing video is everyone actually watched it and who knows maybe even remembered where the life jacket is.

The Best Marketing Book You've Never Read

One day I am going to write a screenplay.  I used to write plays, but to finally write a screenplay and try to sell it to Hollywood is a great ambition of mine that I will probably chase one day.  But this blog is most definitely about marketing and not screenwriting.  So why bring up my Hollywood ambitions?  I'm glad you asked. The main reason is because I recently discovered that one of the best marketing books that I have ever read just got a sequel ... and they are both probably titles that you have never heard of, because they are not marketing books at all.  The first and second book are both called Save the Cat! - but have different subtitles, and each is focused on helping screenwriters to create, market, and sell their script in Hollywood. 

The author, Blake Snyder, is a highly successful screenwriter himself and subtitled his first book "The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need."  It's not an exaggeration.  Since that time, the book has gone on to be a best seller and has become the basis for screenwriting courses at Cornell University.  Blake just published a "sequel" called Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: The Screenwriter's Guide to Every Story Ever Told which I ordered a few days ago and am waiting for Amazon to deliver so I can get into it.  But why am I recommending a guide for screenwriters to you for marketing?

For one thing, because his first book provided a lot of inspiration for me as I wrote Chapter 4 of Personality Not Included last month (you'll know what I mean soon) and the book overall is one of the more brilliant insider books about any industry that I have come across.  He has a blog too and his latest post is a brilliant piece of irony about the next version of his screenwriting software which uses his formulaic approach to help aspiring screenwriters follow the proven model to selling their screenplay. 

If you have any interest in improving your marketing writing, understanding more about how the Hollywood marketing machine works, or just grabbing an entertaining book that will offer some useful marketing and storytelling ideas - I highly recommend picking up the first Save The Cat!  Especially because now that the sequel is out, you had better get cracking on the first ...

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Behind the Pages Of My Upcoming Book: Personality Not Included

UPDATE: The book is out! See www.personalitynotincluded.com for details on the book.

Since announcing some time ago that I will be writing my first marketing book, I haven't spoken much on this blog about it.  I have, however, adjusted my working schedule and relied on the patience and flexibility of my teammates at Ogilvy to spend some time steadily writing the book over the last few months.  Now that I am well into the project, it is a good time to start sharing more details about the book and more importantly, start to get some feedback.  The initial cover design is shown at left (still subject to change) along with a brief description of the book:

Personality Not Included: Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Companies Get it Back
Faceless companies don't work anymore.  In a world where consumers have more access to information than ever, and more power to share their voice ... a brand's identity is no longer controlled through marketing and advertising.  In this new era, what you say your brand stands for is no longer good enough.  What you demonstrate to your customers matters most.  This is the power of your personality.  Personality Not Included is an essential guide for brands on putting back the missing ingredient in their marketing to build loyal customers, foster consumer (and employee) evangelists, and create a connection that goes beyond profit.  The future of business requires new authenticity.  Personality is the secret weapon that brings authentic brands to life.

As you might expect, the launch of PNI (I can't resist a good acronym) will have a lot more elements than just the book.  Here is a sneak peek at some efforts already underway as well as some things to look out for in the coming months:

1. The Personality Project - In early 2008, I will launch a fantastic group contributed blog called The Personality Project which brings together the voices of 100 visionary minds from business, art, social media and many other industries, to all answer the simple question: what's your personality?  Some amazing contributors have already agreed to participate and the team assisting me and I will continue to gather contributions over the next few months.  Look for the landing page to be up soon at www.thepersonalityproject.com.
2. Influential Marketing Friends Group - I am a big fan of Facebook and have been considering setting up a group around my blog for some time now.  To coincide with this post, I have finally done it and the group is called Influential Marketing Friends and is targeted to anyone who is in the field of marketing or sees themselves wanting to be in it.  Not sure how much discussion this group will yet yield, but I'm still glad to be launching it.  If you are on Facebook and find the idea interesting, feel free to join.
3. Amazon Book Page - Nothing makes you feel like your project is more "official" than when you finally get a page on Amazon.com.  The description of the book on this page is totally wrong (so please ignore it until I can get it changed), but I am learning there are lots of tools on Amazon that help authors to promote their book which many authors don't use.  I am already working on setting up an RSS feed of my blog as a companion to the book through the AmazonConnect program, tagging and listing the book in the right categories, and filling out descriptions wherever possible.  Considering the Amazon database is pulled from for lots of other sites, I am going to experiment with doing as much as I can with this page.
4. Social Network Connections - Borrowing a format from my colleague from Ogilvy UK, Giles Rys Jones - I have updated my list of social networks that I use in my sidebar and will be finding unique ways to engage people through each one as the time for the book launch comes closer.  For the time being, the main ones I am focused on are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Flickr - but I'll share more on some of the more wide reaching plans when the time comes.

Already, several brilliant folks have been kind enough to offer advice for me on the book or talk about their insights on the role personality should play in marketing (some in the form of contributions for The Personality Project).  I can't share all of their names quite yet, but there are more than ten bestselling authors, a few internationally recognized filmmakers, more than twenty top notch bloggers and several unexpected "wildcards."

I'll be soliciting more stories about brands marketing with personality and looking for additional contributors to The Personality Project throughout the next few months.   In the meantime, I'm looking forward to any feedback on the cover, title, thoughts on the premise of the book, or any other ideas you might have.

Influential Marketing Blog Featured in Wall Street Journal

Many of you may have already caught this yesterday, but this blog was cited in the Recommended Reading  section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article by Keith Huang.  As Jay Berkowitz from Ten Golden Rules shares on his team blog, my blog was one of 60 resources that they recommended to the journalist as part of their reading list and was selected from that list as a recommended resource for companies looking to "optimize their online presence."  Here's the writeup:

Influential Marketing Blog, rohitbhargava.typepad.com
Rohit Bhargava's blog is intellectual and educational. In a recent post, he discusses the art of stamp collection and how, even today, many smaller countries use stamps as a key marketing tool. He writes, 'Next time you pass a post office in any country, pay attention to how they are using their philately to promote the country, cater to tourists, or commemorate moments of significance.'

It is a great media hit and to be selected from a list of what I am guessing were 60 stellar resources is flattering.  I'm in awe at being included among the other bloggers and authors mentioned in the article - including Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Chris Anderson, Joseph Jaffe, and Danny Sullivan. Thanks to Jay for including me in this great list, and to Keith for selecting to include my blog!

8 Unique Reasons People Like Twitter (And Why Microblogging Matters)

On the surface, capturing what you are doing on daily, hourly or even minutely (double meaning intended) basis seems like a useless activity.  Who has the time to send these incessant "tweets" all day long?  As it turns out, lots of smart folks with respectable jobs, but that's besides the point.  Driven by Mark Simon's dismissal of Twitter and my hectic travel schedule of 5 cities in 5 days last week, I decided to give Twitter a real test run and become an active user of my dormant account I created several months ago but never really used.  This post is a compilation of the lessons I learned about Twitter and an inside look at the appeal of microblogging and why smart marketers should pay attention to this trend and some ideas for the possibilities it offers. 

1. Broadcast Yourself For Real. This may be YouTube's tagline, but it really applies more to Twitter.  As you start sending these messages to update what you are doing right now and gain "followers" - you start to feel like you are broadcasting yourself.  When you're Twittering, you're on the grid and sharing your thoughts and actions real time.
2. Replace Invasive Instant Messaging. I don't use instant messaging at work, because it is interruptive.  Even when you set your status, you'll often get instant messages that are hard to ignore.  Twitter has the same qualities of instant messaging, without the interruptive qualities.  As a result, it lets you send quick short instant messages to people that they can view and answer when they have a moment.  I found myself quickly using direct tweets the way I might use instant messaging to ask a quick question to one of my contacts.
3. Build An Entourage Quickly.  With the easy import feature from Gmail and the relatively low barrier for following someone, I was up to more than 70 contacts in my Twitter account within 5 minutes of starting to use the site.  Not bad for a quick payoff, considering how long it would take to build a friends list of that many people for a new user of any other social network like Facebook or Linkedin.  Even better, the vast majority of people who you follow will start following you right away.
4. Get Satisfaction by Venting. Throughout the week last week I found myself occasionally annoyed at a stupid ad or a flight delay.  I would never "waste" a blog post on these topics most of the time, but found myself twittering them with great satisfaction.  Somehow, just sharing the negative experience of having to walk all the way to the last gate in the B terminal at O'hare made me feel better about it.
5. Always Find Out What's New.  With Twitter, I knew right away when Matt posted a photo of the guys from our panel at Promo Live, and when Gordon Moore finished his chat at IDF.  The running commentary of the latest news from my contacts was actually really useful and somewhat addictive.  Longer term, at the very least I'll be sending a Twitter update every time I publish a new blog post.
6. Fills A Gap Left By Blogging. Now that I have gained a few thousand consistent readers, I find myself considering more carefully what I write about.  The people who subscribe to this blog invest their time and expect to find something of use ... and there are often times when I abandon a topic because I don't have a strong point of view about it.  My blog has never been about pointing out things out there without some commentary.  Yet sometimes there is something that is interesting which I would just like to share a link on, but not necessarily write about.  Twitter is the perfect way to share those links and a quick thought without spending a whole blog post on it.
7. Highly Useful for Live Blogging. There are several events in the past few months that I have had the chance to attend and live blog.  For most, my live blogging consisted of taking notes during sessions, coming up with a point of view and posting a blog post on it.  This is what I did at the CCR event, and the Ogilvy Verge event.  At Intel's IDF and Promo Live, I tried using Twitter for live blogging instead and found it to be really useful because you can get your thoughts out much more quickly, you can really do it real time, and it forces you to focus on capturing the really key points.  I'll be Twittering many of my other upcoming events now as well.
8. Facilitate Meetups.  When I was heading to a media event after the first day of IDF, I was looking for bloggers to invite to the event.  Luckily Karl from ExperienceCurve spotted me on Twitter and suggested we meet up.  This is one of the earliest benefits that I realized some time ago about Twitter, but it was really nice to see it in action.  Imagine this blown out beyond cities to destinations and you can really visualize the potential power of Twitter.

So what does this all add up to?  For me, Twitter is a compelling platform that can easily become addictive once you start to use it ... a quality that many great sites share.  The marketing opportunity here is super simple:

1. Start following people that care about what you do
2. Respond to their messages where appropriate to start dialogue
3. Send consistent and substantial updates of your own
4. Use Twitter as a platform to inform your followers of news they might care about

Today the end of my week long experiment, I'll be continuing to use Twitter and I'd suggest you give it a go as well.  Now I need to go and send an update to my group letting them know this post is live ...

Add Your Votes To The New SxSW Panel Picker

For those who follow this blog, you know that I attend and speak at a lot of events.  Each has a different vibe and type of attendee - and I've been to some amazing events and heard many fantastic speakers.  This past year, one that stood out was the annual South by Southwest Festival that takes over the town of Austin, Texas for more than a week.  During that time, there is a film festival, a music festival and the interactive event - and the atmosphere around the event is unlike any other for interactive marketers.  Because of the combination of music, film and interactive - it is a haven for creativity and this past year it was a big venue for new sites and services to try and launch their betas and get them in front of influential individuals.  Many trace back the fast rise in popularity of Twitter back to SxSW this year.

Next year's event in March 2008 promises to be no different and is going to be very important timing for me because it is likely to coincide closely with the release of my new marketing book which I've been fairly silent about apart from announcing the deal back in June of this year. Look out early next week for much more detail about the book - but in the meantime I have several panel ideas up on the interactive panel picker for SxSW and there are more than 600 entries from great minds and influencers from across the interactive industry.  Visit the Panel Picker at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ and check out some of the great panels in the lineup. 

Here is a direct link to go directly to my three panel submissions: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/2/q:ogilvy

Also, here are the descriptions that I provided for each idea that you can read on the panel picker:

1. 10 Easy Ways To Piss Off a Blogger (and Other Mistakes Marketers Make) - The short history of blogging is filled with the examples of clueless marketers who have suffered being flamed, outed or ignored by the "cruel" blogosphere. Yet approaching bloggers is not as risky as it might seem -- it just requires a new approach. In this session, you will see real examples of 10 of the most common mistakes marketers make when approaching bloggers and how to avoid them. Vote for this panel now - http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/20
2. Creating the Ultimate Personal Brand With Social Media - Starting a blog is easy, but getting it to stand out among millions of blogs is going to be tougher and tougher. In this session, you will get real tips for how you can make your blog, social networks and online profiles all work together to help you build the ultimate personal brand -- to help you make money, get your dream job, sell that big book deal or rank first on Google for your name. Vote for this panel now - http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/19
3. The Authentic Business: Making Your Personality the Secret Weapon - Despite what you might have heard, transparency doesn't matter. In an age of authenticity, the rise of social media means that customers are looking for the true identity behind a company or a product and just letting them in is not enough. This session will show you how to make your business stand out by using your real personality.  Vote for this panel now - http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/21

If any of these seems interesting to you, I hope you register on the site and add your vote.  In addition to my own submissions, there are lots of other great panels worth voting for.  I have not yet had time to go through all of the more than 600 panel ideas, but I already cast my vote for several that stood out for me.  Here are a few of the ones I recommend checking out (I'll put in links when I get a chance to do the cutting and pasting - but for now you can use the search feature to find any of these):

• Michelle Osorio, DivX - How Filmmakers Got Their Voice Back
• Anastasia Goodstein, Ypulse.com - Totally Wired Teens: How Teens are Using Your Applications
• Zadi Diaz, Smashface - Immersive Entertainment: The Next Step in New Media Production
• G. Kofi Annan, Annansi LL - Africa 2.0: Affecting Change Using Technology
• Tim Ferriss, Author - The Art of Speed         
• Daniel Hope, MotivateMedia - Blog on Company Time Without Getting Dooced
• Henry Copeland, Blogads - The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007
• Rachel Clarke, Behind the Buzz - Stories, Games and Your Brand         
• Mike Monello, Campfire - Persistent Engagement: Why Your _____ Isn't Enough
• Ned Desmond, Time Inc. - Cover Story: Building Brands for a Digital World

Happy voting and hope to see you at SxSW next year!

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New York's Papaya Branding Problem

If I gave you two words, papaya and new york (ok, three words), what would you think of?  If you are American, chances are these odd combination of words would conjure up images of hot dogs known as "papaya dogs," which are as iconic as you can get about American pop fast food culture.  The only problem is, there are three different places to get them ... Papaya King, Gray's Papaya and Papaya Dog:

Now which one is the real authentic papaya dog?  It really doesn't matter.  When you have something as distinctive as papaya dogs, the name and experience alone should be enough to make you stand out.  And it does ... until two others come along and open the same business with the same things that make them as unique as you.  When everyone is unique for the same thing no one is.

Papaya King was the first, originally serving just tropical fruit drinks (hence the name papaya) and later expanded into hot dogs.  The other competitors came later, leading to the confusing papaya dog situation in NY today.  Now only the true connoisseurs know the difference and choose one over the other.  For everyone else, one papaya dog is as good as another.

Photo Credits:
Papaya Dog - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kmikeym/250937868/
Gray's Papaya - http://www.flickr.com/photos/gatsbye53/885417808/
Papaya King - http://www.flickr.com/photos/aturkus/244963908/

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Branding the Subcontinent: India's Inspiring 60th Anniversary Celebration

Today is India's 60th Anniversary of Independence and there is lots of discussion on Indian blogs about the significance of this day and what it means for the country.  It will come as no surprise for admirers of the Bollywood film industry that India's culture is one driven by film and music.  The blockbuster Bollywood films incite passion amongst most people in India that is incomparable to any film release anywhere else in the world.  It is fitting, then, that the voices of this 60 year anniversary are not the politicians, but the artists.  In the only country in the world where films with local origins still far outpace Hollywood movies on opening weekend, the national identity of India is inseparable from its love affair with film and music.   

As an example, here are two (1 2) of the many videos floating around YouTube showing how the country is finding and projecting its voice and brand to each other and to the world. 

These may be a bit over the top, but they are clearly working.  In the 2006 Country Brand Index published by FutureBrand, India was the only third world country in the top ten list of the strongest global country brands.  Despite any social or political problems, there is a strong national identity for India and the country seems likely to move higher on this list of strong country brands this year.  Branding a country is an activity that is on a scale hard for most marketers to imagine, but at the end of the day is comes down to the most basic marketing lesson of all ... giving people something to believe in.

Note: If you want to continue your journey into India today, check out this great list of Indian bloggers (I'm in the Entrepreneurs and Innovators category).

6 Dream Features Of The Ideal Social Network For Your Family

Almost everyone I know is sharing photos online with family, and some more web savvy families have full groups set up online to correspond with other family members across the world.  Over the last few weeks, I have come across several social networks aimed at helping families to communicate with one another.  The solutions range from slick interfaces to creating your family tree (Geni.com) to sites focused on bringing out the life stories of family members and sharing them with others (OurStory.com).  There are fairly good services for creating your family website (MyFamily.com*, TheFamilyPost.com or PongYang.com) as well as newer social media sites like Vox.com designed to help you create a family or personal blog.  Along with these are long running genealogy sites like Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com or OneGreatFamily.com - all of which let you add your family members and find out more about your ancestry. 

All of these sites have their own niche of great features, but the problem is there is no single destination that puts all of this together.  It's not easy to do, when you consider that a family social network (unlike any other kind of social network) is not held together by people with the same interest, or people of the same generation.  Familes are complex groups of people that in some cases share nothing more than a last name.  It therefore needs to translate well across generations, genders, interests, and even countries.  I have been seeking the ideal site to create my own network for my family - and have come up short so far.  This weekend I started thinking about what my ideal family social network would look like, and came up with some core features:

1. Visual Family Tree - This is the most readily available already, but it's an important and fun tool to see how everyone is related.  Features would be very easy to use with drag and drop simplicity, perfect for letting a member of my family from any generation participate.  Integrated into this would be the smarts of family history and ancestry look ups, as well as the types of identity look ups used by ZoomInfo to map profiles of individuals to existing content online under the same name.
2. Tiered Relationships - I don't know all of my family equally.  There is my immediate family of my wife, parents and brother.  Then there is a outward circle of family, such as cousins, that I am very close to.  And then there is the wider circle of family that I either have only met once, or am related to by name but don't know.  The ideal family social network would let me tier my relationships with family into one of three categories depending on the closeness of my relationship.  Every feature across the site would then be available for me to share with my 1st, 2nd, or 3rd tier relationships, as well as with everyone in my network.  VisiblePath has a good model for this tiered system and Linkedin has the original "degrees of separation" model.
3. Family Email Database - Probably one of the most frequently used and needed applications of a family social network would be a way to email all family or subsets of family.  It would have all the grouping and webmail features you would expect, but also integrate to popular online email programs and allow you to segment family into the tiers to determine who gets particular emails.  Finally, the ability to import email lists and synch between programs would be vital.  Yahoo Groups has one of the most popular interfaces today for people to manage these activities. 
4. Group Calendaring - This is probably the most useful function of an online network, namely to store everyone's birthdays and anniversaries.  Beyond this, however, there are many times when I have been on the road in San Francisco, for example, and wondering if a cousin of mine might also be travelling there.  Of course, we could email each other - but it would be so much more useful to see their whereabouts on a calendar.  Privacy would be in place to control what family level sees what information, and tools would be available to synch to Outlook or other calendar programs.  Examples of cool calendaring applications include 30Boxes or Calgoo.
5. Integrated Other Social Networks - Realizing that family spread across the world probably have profiles on one or more other social networks, a key tool of the ideal family social network would be the ability for all of these profiles to be linked to and included as part of people's profiles.  For the most common social networks, such as Flickr or MySpace or YouTube, the site would allow you to create a "family channel" that aggregates RSS content from all the sites into a single location and lets people subscribe based on their tiered relationships (ie - only subscribe to content from 1st tier family in your "family channel" page.
6. Recommendation Engine - People have always recommended products to one another and family members can be powerful voices to influence purchasing decisions.  Added to that, everyone has an Uncle that is good with cars, or a cousin who is a professional photographer.  Harnessing these expertises, the family social network would have a feature where people could create pages or recommendations about products or areas that they are passionate about.  This could also create the revenue model for the site, as people recommending products in an authentic environment like this is exactly the type of impression advertisers are dying to pay for.  Squidoo.com has a good model for sharing this type of expert content within an online community, and the now seemingly abandoned eFamily.com probably had a similar idea.

Most of these features exist in other sites, but no one has yet put all the pieces together.  The family social network could be the next big thing - after all, everyone has a family.  Now you have a list of the features and even a revenue model.  If you do find or build a site like this, let me know so I can be first in line to be a beta tester ...

* MyFamily has a "2.0" version that has recently launched which is worth checking out and seems to have many (but not all) of the features I mention above.

Inside the Art of Brand Personality: A Preview of Ad-Tech Panel

Tomorrow I will be leading a fantastic panel of social media personalities talking about the art of creating and fostering a brand personality through social media.  As I have shared before, I am extremely excited about this session and in particular about learning from the panelists who are participating about how they have managed to build their own brand personalities through social media.  They each bring some very different perspectives to the mix:

Steve Hall | Adrants
Steve at Adrants has taken his many years of experience inside the advertising world and used it to publish one of the most popular blogs about advertising.  Adrants is an irreverent look at the world of advertising that offers opinion along with breaking news about everything from new campaigns to the latest rumors.  Along the way, Steve has created a unique personality for his blog, isn't afraid to take a shot at a poorly executed campaign or feature controversial efforts, and has developed a highly successful foundation for his own publishing network.  In many ways, the rise of Adrants as a resource within the advertising industry is a case study for anyone wanting to supplant the media in their own vertical industry with a unique and unconventional voice.

Jeremiah Owyang | Podtech
Jeremiah has had a personal blog on marketing and web strategy for several years and recently left his role as online community manager at Hitachi to join the growing team at Podtech.  His story is an interesting one in brand personality, ranging from his extremely smart efforts on behalf of Hitachi to help them connect with customers and potential customers through creating wikis on data storage and fostering strong relationships between Hitachi and key influencers.  Alongside these efforts, Jeremiah built up his personal blog and personal brand.  Now in a new role with Podtech, he attends industry events, publishing interviews for Podtech and writes about his efforts on his own blog as well.  He should offer some interesting insight for any corporate bloggers who may not necessarily be an official spokesperson for their companies, but like him, want to uncover new ways to use leverage their personal brand as part of their "day job."

Kent Nichols | Ask A Ninja
Kent is one of the founders of what some consider one of the most popular video blogs on the internet, Ask a Ninja.  The program generates a hugely loyal following among it's target audience of young males and is an advertisers dream for reaching that elusive demographic.  Ask A Ninja is also an interesting case study because although the brand is built online, it has branched out into the "real world" as an iconic brand.  You can buy DVDs, T-shirts, and other merchandise all to demonstrate your affinity for Ask A Ninja.  As a result, they are one of the great crossover stories that have taken a social media only brand, and extended it into the real world and beyond.  Kent will likely share some stories about getting to that point and advice for aspiring creators to build their own successful brands through having a unique personality and standing out.

Karl Long | ExperienceCurve
Karl leads a pioneering group at Nokia called nGage and also has a similar background to Jeremiah in terms of creating his personal brand through ExperienceCurve as well as leading many smart efforts on behalf of Nokia to integrate social media into their marketing for video game initiatives.  More and more, we are seeing individuals who have a highly successful personal blog driving efforts from their employers to use blogs and social media in smart ways.  Karl represents a new kind of brand marketer who is at the crossroads of product marketing, new technologies, and social media.  He also produces a weekly podcast show on the topic.  In the mix, he will likely have some great advice for anyone struggling with integrating personal media more into their own current roles and dealing with any ensuing "big company paralysis" that often comes with a desire to dedicate efforts to personal media.

I will be sure to post a recap of this great session for those who can't make it out to Ad-Tech and am sure that my fellow panelists will do the same.  Until then ...

Are You Marketing Your Product Backstory?

Several weeks ago, I noted an interesting story about how Dole is offering "farm codes" printed onto stickers that are placed on organic bananas offering consumers the chance to get to know more about the farm that grew the banana by visiting www.doleorganic.com.  On Dole Organic, you can see such information as a description of the banana plantation, photos of workers, and Google Earth images.  Despite the site's average design and limited functionality (no ability for users to interact with the content or add their voice) - the effort represents a great example of new thinking that product marketers are using to capitalize on the global trend towards ethical consumerism.  As more and more attention is being paid to the manufacturing or acquisition process for products, as well as the carbon footprint behind these processes, offering insight into the backstory for how your product is made is becoming more and more necessary.  Certification programs like Dole's Farm Code effort, or the international movement to create a certification for conflict-free diamonds are just two examples.  Soon, the "Made in Tiawan" stickers so often seen and ridiculed through the 80s and 90s may be replaced by reports on the factory, images from the floors, and interviews with the workers.  Social responsibility and ethical consumerism is not just about buying green products, but also understanding the process that they are created with and choosing based on this information.

Yet product backstories have more potential than just offering environmental or societal impact assessments for products.  Backstories are a cultural trend.  More and more films are taking a different approach to the traditional beginning to end timetable for telling a story.  Lost is perhaps the best example of the rise of the backstory, as the hit television show has used the engaging format of weaving a backstory of one of the show's characters into each episode to allow viewers to learn more about each character.  The backstories fill in the details and deepen the emotional connection of a viewer, or a consumer.  You might say it's a stretch to say we will care more about our bananas after having seen images from the farm ... but on some level, it has an impact.  Having worked with BuzzAgent (a word of mouth marketing company) on a number of campaigns, I know that when it comes to WOM, the backstory is particularly important.  Knowing more about a product or company's origins make you more likely to tell others about it.  In many cases, the backstory becomes the marketing story.  Most marketing today focuses on product attributes and uses or creating a need for consumers to purchase.  What if more of our efforts focused on a product's backstory?  At least one marketer is betting that's the way to sell a whole lot more bananas.

Update (06/06/07): Dole also has a blog about this effort at http://doleorganic.blogspot.com/

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The Death of the Invisible Agency

There was a time when, apart from industry awards shows and the occasional book from an advertising or PR industry legend - agencies were largely invisible to consumers.  Marketing agencies created advertisements, managed relationships with the press, and generated campaign strategy on behalf of a client, but remained in the background.  Since then, you have agencies rising as creative powerhouses.  You have CP+B launching campaigns that as much demonstrate and further their own identity as they do for their clients.  You have agencies talking about their clients and client work online and through social media.  There are more and more people in leadership roles in agencies creating their own blogs and online identities.  The invisible agency of the past that sits in the background and puts out the ghost written press releases and marketing seems gone forever.

The agencies that are succeding today are the ones that have an identity and have a personality.  Along with that public personality comes the need for recognition and the danger of negative recognition.  The good side is that now agencies might have a more public facing profile where people outside of the world of marketing and advertising might know who they are.  The rising star of Crispin, Porter & Bogusky is a great example of that.  The danger comes in situations like the troubles Edelman had over the past few months with their role in work for Walmart and Microsoft.  These were considered by many to be failures of Edelman, and not failures of Walmart or Microsoft.  The agency was front and center in this situation and though there are bound to be many other situations where having a more public role in client's work can be risky, I think the benefits can be far more.  Here are just a few of the reasons why I feel the death of the invisible agency is actually a good thing for everyone involved:

1. More visibility often means more respect. In most situations, this is true.  The more you work in the background for anyone and have an obscured identity, the less valuable you are perceived to be.  If your agency has a bigger profile, you can more easily command respect.
2. Agencies have more "skin in the game." This strange American expression refers to how committed an agency is likely to be in a client's business.  By being more visible in marketing efforts, an agency must become more vested in the success of a client's business.
3. It is tougher for agencies to pursue indirectly competing work.  Most agencies resolve client conflicts by dropping the account worth less to them.  More visibility makes it more difficult, however, to pursue indirectly competing work.  Ultimately this is of more benefit to the client than an agency, but it is a direct result of the death of the invisible agency. 
4. It is tougher for clients to fire an agency doing good work. Marketing used to be one of the few worlds where you can do a great job, meet all expectations, On the flip side, the more visibility an agency has, the more people know about the good work they are doing.  When it comes to evaluating an agency, clients now have to think twice about firing an agency - mainly because they will probably be sending a good team with inside information to a competitor to hire.

I have focused here on the positive side, but there is certainly a downside as well.  For readers of this blog from agencies or consulting groups, what do you think?  Is the death of the invisible agency really a good thing?

How to Create a Microbrand Like GapingVoid

It might sometimes seem like everything is going micro.  With microlending, loans are getting smaller.  With online video, entertainment is getting shorter.  Technology devices are, of course, getting smaller. Micro is hot.  So it should come as no surprise that the next big thing coming fast into the marketing world is actually a little thing: microbrands.  This idea of a microbrand was explored in a panel I attended yesterday where two of the participants - Hugh McLeod from GapingVoid and Kathy Sierra from Creating Passionate Users are bloggers that I have read often.  In the panel, several thoughts emerged about how best to create a microbrand and what up and coming bloggers should do to build microbrands (and more traffic, by the way) to their own sites.  Here are a few key thoughts they shared:

1. Don't be afraid to get flamed. Mostly about avoiding self censorship, this is about the growth stage that most bloggers face when their writing is popular enough to attract passionate detractors.  These are the folks that come onto your previously peaceful little blog and start to blast holes in your arguments, add their own interpretations and expose any slightly weak or overstated argument.  As a reaction, the wrong thing to do is self censor and avoid writing about polarizing topics.  If some people really hate your stuff, you're probably doing something right.
2. Let go of the Technorati obsession. With so much attention these days on "linkbaiting" and other dodgy methods that bloggers are using to amplify their ratings and rankings on Technorati, this piece of advice is particularly important.  Yes, getting linked on Slashdot or having a popular article on Digg or Techmeme is great.  But focusing on your content and not on winning the high school popularlity contest that can be the blogosphere is a much wiser decision.  As Gabe Rivera from Techmeme shared on the panel, you might actually find your rankings will improve once you stop obsessing about them.  (By the way, I finally learned that "meme" is pronounced "meem" - in case you were like me and had only read it 1 million times but sounded like an idiot saying it aloud).
3. Avoid adding to the "echo chamber." This is another great soundbite from Hugh out of the conference, and offers a valuable piece of advice and an argument for being unique and offering more than just a celebration of the "wonder of me" as John Bell likes to call that type of writing.  Gaping Void is unique.  Putting out a blog that is an echo chamber doesn't stand out, and it isn't unique. 
4. Be grateful and respect your readers.  The first part of this is about thanking your readers and giving them incentives to keep up the dialogue with you.  The second part is about knowing what your readers care about.  My readers care about ideas in marketing.  I had the chance to see a great an interesting independent film at SxSW today called "A Lawyer Walks into a bar ..." and thought about writing about it.  The only problem is, I didn't have a specific thought relating to the marketing and the movie, so instead of dedicating a post to the film, I'm just sneaking a plug in here and recommending that you check it out. 

In retrospect after looking at my notes - these points don't really offer guidance on creating a global microbrand, as I originally thought they did.  They do, however, offer valuable insight into how to grow your blog traffic and become more successful, which will lead to growing your microbrand.  To this list, I would add two more thoughts about actually building your successful blog into a microbrand:

1. Create a brand, not a title.  This is obvious, right?  Well, think about it - your blog probably has a title, but this is not necessarily a brand.  Sometimes a brand can be your name - but sometimes it needs to be something topical to what you write about.  Seth Godin's brand is his name.  Heather Armstrong's brand is Dooce.  Figure out what works best for you and use that.
2. Have an identity and be consistent.  So much of branding is consistency.  Using your brand in the same way everywhere and signing every piece of communications and dialogue with the same tag.  Microbrands are the same way, and consistency can help to build awareness and recognition.

One of my favourite examples of a microbrand (aside from GapingVoid) that is not only simple, but also sexy, is PSFK and their range of sites (iF!, Marktd, etc.).  Attending their conference a few weeks ago was a study in smart branding - from the look of the event overall to the little blogger cards that each of us got in our personalized welcome folders.  If great brands are iconic then microbrands need to at least have great icons.  PSFK has one of the best.  Any other lessons from microbrands you admire?

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5 Brilliant Marketing Ideas from SxSW

Over the next week, I'll posting some of the other insights I will be taking from the event, but in the meantime here are just a few marketing ideas that struck me as remarkable or noteworthy from SxSW:

1. Using the tag as the tagline.  Everywhere you look there are signs posted telling you what tag (identifier word or series of words) to use when posting content to social networks, uploading images online, or blogging. The tags add order to the vast amounts of content that are being created as a result of this event.  I am tagging this post with "sxsw" and "sxswi" as recommended by the conference organizers, adding to the library of content created by those at the event.  Without tags, users are forced to rely on inexact methods to find content such as search algorithms.  With them your content is part of the community and consumed by others at the event.  The tag is the new tagline for marketing signs all over SxSW.
2. Sponsoring something useful. Unfortunately for everyone, as part of each of the three events at SxSW - each attendee received a magazine quality program for the conference.  I say "unfortunately" because each of these programs was heavier than a May issue of a Bridal magazine filled with ads.  The end result was that no one could carry this around on a daily basis.  In any situation of information overload, everyone will seek the "hack" or summary to help make sense of it all.  To solve the problem, Iconbuffet had the brilliant idea of sponsoring a handy pocket guide - the ultimate widget for the interactive conference.  This was the only thing I saw people carrying around, and Iconbuffet was the only sponsor.  The lesson?  Think outside the program and do something useful for your audience and you will stand out.
3. Selling old stuff as "vintage." At the conference shop, you can buy t-shirts from last year's SxSW event.  Conference t-shirts at events are usually one of two things; a mark of ultimate dorkiness, or a signature of coolness that declares to the world that you were there.  SxSW is an event that fits into the second category - and what could be cooler than pretending you were as cool last year as you are this year?  Now I'm just waiting for the shirts that have the SxSW logo on the front and the simple tagline on the back: "I was cool before you."  Now anyone know where I can get a SxSW 1987 t-shirt?
4. Integrating open source marketing. Sponsorships are a big part of every event - and we have all been to events where these sponsorships and the exclusivity arrangements negotiated put a strangle hold on all other marketing efforts.  Here at SxSW in the convention center on the main floor are tables where anyone can place their posters, flyers, promotional cards, and just about anything else.  The tables were packed with marketing materials for other Film Festivals, services for artists, films, stickers and even samples of books and music.  The tables were the chance for anyone with a service, film, song or book to market their wares.  Strewn across the table were the many voices of the little guys, the nonsponsors who still had a chance to put their message in front of the SxSW population.  And anyone could take that message and spread it to others.
5. Drawing audience with the drum solo. At an event focused on live music in a city that thrives on live music, you would think the every bar would get a band to play live every evening.  Surprisingly, there were several bars on 6th street without live music.  Shame for them, since the bars that were packed with people inside and out were the ones where the drummer was by the window and had drum solos often.  The lesson here is to find the equivalent of the drum solo in your business and help it spread by making it highly visible.

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Introducing The Best Panel at Ad-Tech San Francisco

I know there's not usually supposed to be a competition between panels, but yesterday we just put the finishing touches on what I think is going to be one of the best panel lineups of the upcoming ad-Tech event in San Francisco at the Moscone Center from April 24 to 26th.  The panel, which I have the pleasure of moderating, will focus on the topic of brand personality and how social media is helping all kinds of brands have an identity and share it with their customers.  Confirmed panelists are:

• Steve Hall, Publisher and Founder – Adrants
• Jeremiah Owyang, Director of Corporate Media Strategy at PodTech
• Kent Nichols, co-Creator AskaNinja.com
• Karl Long, Web/Social Media Integration Manager for N-Gage at Nokia

And here's a session description that I wrote for pitching purposes (this has yet to go through final editorial filters so this may be different from the final description in conference materials):

Trench Warfare: Using Blogs, Vlogs and Podcasts to Have a Brand Personality
Personal media is about personality - having one and sharing one.  Blogs, Vlogs and Podcasts are all some of the tools available to