Influential Marketing Blog

BzzAgent Tackles The Elusive Problem Of Brand Communities

What if all the people who were truly passionate about your brand had a single place to gather? Somewhere that they could share content and opinions, organize real life events, ask one another questions, and just about any other activity that happens in a real community. It's pretty obvious to see the value in something like that - which is probably why many companies have tried some version of it. Yahoo launched and then abandoned their Brand Universe concept. Sites like Squidoo, Ning and Alltop arguably had some version of this vision in mind when they launched as well.

Today, word of mouth marketing company BzzAgent is launching their effort, called BzzScapes. I had a chance to take a preview demo of it recently, and the thinking behind the site is that if you can give members of the BzzAgent community (who number over half a million and are already self-described "brand enthusiasts") a place to share content about their favourite brands, they will create a valuable community for any brand marketer (and advertiser) to be part of.

The real problem of creating communities like this, though, is taking a role as the primary destination that other brand content can fit under. Can any one brand community become the place to gather photos on Flickr, YouTube videos, passionate bloggers, individual tweets and just about any other form of content about a particular brand? In cases of extreme passion, sites like Moleskinerie ... but for most brands, this may be too much to hope for. So instead, someone needs to encourage customers to create these communities and make it easy. BzzAgent wants to be that someone.

In theory, the site is meant to sit at the intersection of what everyone wants:

1. Brands want to find people who are passionate about their products/services and help them spread the word.
2. People want to be recognized and supported (either through sample products or insider knowledge) by the brands they love.
3. BzzAgent wants to be the one to bring these two together in a measurable way (and charge for it).

If you are like most brand marketers, you might be skeptical about the potential for this because many people have tried it before, and failed. The difference, in my mind, is that this time around it's being launched by a company whose entire mission is to give people real experiences with actual products and services. In most communities that talk about brands, the way for a brand's marketing team to participate is not usually clear - and the benefit participants get (apart from conversations) isn't clear either. BzzAgent can add this clarity on both sides ... and help everyone get something out of it. If anything helps this effort to take off where others have failed, that will be it.

NOTE: This is reposted from the original version on the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence blog.

The Personality Project: Women of Personality

There are generally three kinds of ideas. The most popular two are the ones that you act on right away and those that you never do anything about. Those are the majority. Most of us love the third kind. Those are the ideas that are too big or complex or important to do quickly, but that you simply cannot let die because of how you feel about them. Today I finally launched that kind of idea. Since Personality Not Included came out about a year ago - I have been getting emails from people sharing their experience with the book and how they felt about it's main premise that businesses (like people) need to have a strong and authentic personality.

Soon after the book launched, I noticed that many of these emails were coming from women working in professional roles and those that had started their own businesses. These female entrepreneurs were responding to the message of personality in a way that I didn't expect. So since that moment I started thinking about bringing those voices together. Of course, part of the reason would be to promote my book ... but like most authors the important thing for me was for my idea to find a home and actually help people change their careers or make their business more successful.

So today, you can download a free ebook called "The Personality Project: Women of Personality." It is an extension of a site that I launched some time ago with a similar mission - to get visionary people in many industries to talk about why personality matters. This ebook features 20 business women that I respect and admire who each agreed to share their story as part of the ebook. These include founders and CEOs, best selling authors, popular bloggers and online personalities and even the first woman to ever row solo across the Atlantic Ocean (and she's now making her way across the Pacific).

See the ebook embedded below and click on it to download a free PDF copy:

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Books marketing blogs

Once you get a chance to read it, please visit each of the contributors sites and blogs, buy their books and support their efforts. The best thing you can do is to validate their ideas and use their examples to improve your own business and your career. And then let them know they made a difference.

PS - If you mention this ebook on your blog or twitter or facebook or anywhere else online, use the tag #wop (on Twitter) or "WOP" (anywhere else) as this is the one that all the contributors will be watching and responding to.

4 Ways Social Media Could Save The Arts

Last week I had the fortune to be part of an event that we should all care about. It was a meeting of the National Arts Marketing Project, a conference sponsored by the Americans for the Arts and designed to help art based organizations around the country use marketing to drive more engagement, subscriptions, and attendance with patrons (a much better word than consumer, by the way). To understand the vibe of the event you need to look no further than a colllection of titles from some of the sessions put on during the three day conference:

• Are You An Urbanite? Attracting Young Ticket Buyers and Donors
• Hacking Copyright: Making "Free" Work In The Arts
• She Says Pithy, I Say Prissy. Let's Call The Whole Thing Off: How Marketing And Development Can Sing In Harmony
• I Can't Do That! How To Make The Big Ask For A Major Gift
• Release Your Organization's Inner Blogger
• Strategies For Countering The Reasons Patrons Resist Subscribing

My own session was called "Embracing Your Accidental Spokespeople: How Obama Let His Best Supporters Speak For Him, And Why You Should Too" and in the roundtable format, we talked about how to find the voices that are passionate about what you do, and unlocking them to share their experiences more widely online and through social media. Over the course of two round table discussions, I learned a lot about the unique challenges that many arts based organizations are facing, as well as discussed several engaging ideas for solutions. Here are a few of the creative solutions that we all came together and discussed as a group about how social media and interactive marketing techniques might help arts based organizations to better promote themselves:

1. Create a sonic brand. Though more specific to groups that create or promote music, one idea that we collectively talked about was what it might be like if every venue or group had a sonic brand. So, for example, like you might hear the Intel jingle at the end of an ad, you would hear a signature piece of music to signal the end of intermission. Something that offers a recognizable brand for a music based organization, while offering an apt extension of a brand based on something that is inherently a part of it.
2. Offer creative material openly for mashups. As more and more people create content online, they will need material like music, still images, and video clips to incorporate. One of the marketing tactics I am fond of at istockphoto.com (a site I use all the time to purchase images to use in my posts and presentations) is having an image for free download each day. What if an arts organization created their own collection of content and offered it for free reuse, dependent on giving credit back to the organization? It could be a great way to spread some brand awareness, as well as offer something viral and useful to content creators.
3. Invite social capital donations. Many people using social media tools are supporters of the arts, but not necessarily donors or people to go to art events. Though it may be difficult to convince them to open their wallets, it may be much more acceptable to have them donate their influence. One brilliant example was a campaign run across both parties during the recent election where you could "donate your Facebook status" to remind people to vote for your guy on election day. It's an example of letting people donate their social capital instead of real money.
4. Allow patrons to share their experience. This topic raised some concerns among the group for a variety of reasons. The two most vocal were that sometimes performers have union contracts that prevent any recording, and that sometimes the artists are afraid of negative criticism that may come with letting their work be freely shared. Still, there are other ways to let people share their experiences - perhaps through live Twittering, or making a cast available after a performance for flipcam interviews with video bloggers. The point is that every arts group needs to find a way of helping word of mouth about what they are doing to travel.

The Softer Side Of Measuring Social Media

How do you measure your social media efforts? How should you? Most people in the industry talk generally about measuring engagement as a concept and cite examples such as time spent on a site or number of comments, or inbound links as ways to track this. Others talk about ad equivalency (ie how much you saved by avoiding paying for advertising to achieve the same results) or even tie social media efforts directly back to sales and conversions. All are good models and we use a combination of these on just about every client engagement.

Today at the Executing Social Media event in Atlanta, I shared a thought that I have been having over the past few weeks about a missing element of measurement that has been surprisingly important to many clients we have worked with. Consider it the "softer" side of social media measurement. Here are a few examples:

Metric: Internal Bragging Rights
Depending on where you work, this can be a big motivator. Being able to talk internally about a new social media effort or innovative marketing program is something that can build reputations of those involved, as well as lead to better internal responsibilities and possibly promotions and other good things.

Metric: Industry Recognition
Recognition from peers is a big deal as well, particularly the higher up in the marketing chain you go. Though some CMOs may not admit it, getting the envy or appreciation from other CMOs is just about the best compliment you can get. This doesn't necessarily need to be about winning some sort of award, just getting industry credit.

Metric: Lessons Learned
Sometimes failures can be the best thing to happen to a social media campaign. Doing something wrong gives you the chance to learn from your mistakes and perhaps even make your next campaign much more successful. The problem is that most metrics would record a campaign like this as having no redeeming qualities. That's not quite true and though most marketers know it, many don't have a way to share it.

Metric: Media Non-Coverage
An obvious numbers-based metric is about volume of coverage but there is a softer side of social media measurement when it comes to media. This could include avoiding negative coverage - for example if there is a journalist seeking brands that "don't get it" and your brand is not on the list because of your efforts. Another similar example might be having your brand's point of view portrayed more accurately as a result of social media content you have online.

Metric: Testimonials
One of the most powerful effects of social media is the testimonials that you often get from customers, employees and just about anyone else. These testimonials provide powerful stories that can be retold within an organization. Even if there is only one great video or a single great blog post, these can take on outsized importance when reported as part of social media measurement for a campaign.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the "real" social media metrics we might report don't matter. Only that there may be a softer side of metrics that we too often forget, but that do make a difference.

The Do NOT Vote Campaign

As a parent, I appreciate reverse psychology. My kids are still at the age where it works, so I'm a big fan. Apparently when they become teenagers, it still works but only if you tell them not to do something. The problem is that it is usually something that you actually don't want them to do (ie - drive the car, try drugs, drink alcohol, etc.) Using the fact that teens and many young people can't help doing exactly what adults tell them not to, Hollywood has a new message for these young people. Don't Vote. It doesn't matter. It won't make a difference. Or so the video below tells you:

Actually, it ends up being a brilliant campaign not so much because of the creative message, but because it actually delivers a more important message that many campaigns targeted at getting people to vote don't mention ... that you need to REGISTER in order to vote. I wonder how many young people wanting to vote for the first time don't get the chance because they didn't register in time? As this video points out, the deadline to register in some states is as early as this weekend. So if you don't care about the issues and election, or if you do, go ahead and register at www.declareyourself.com. Consider this my public service announcement for the weekend. And I'll wait while you register too.

7 Ways To Publish A Book For Marketing

I love books. Not just for the power of conveying an idea through a printed form, but also for the emotional significance of actually holding a book in your hands. More and more recently I have been books become a brilliant marketing tool for everyone, from political candidates to technology companies. Along the way, there are several ideas that I have collected for how using a book could be an effective part of a marketing strategy. Here are a few:

1. Explain a complex idea - Some businesses or product lines are based on something complex that is not easily understood. One example of using a book to explain a concept like this was a book Microsoft was handing out earlier this year at CES about their Windows Home Server product. It was called "Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?" and took a kids book approach to explaining why anyone would want a server in their home.
2. Commission an existing author or writer - This can be a great way to build on an existing author's profile and audience by working with him or her to commission a new piece. Hilton Hotels used this strategy as part of their Olympic marketing effort when they commissioned an award-winning kids author named Todd Parr to create a new book for them around their marketing tagline "Be Hospitable." Johnson & Johnson used a similar strategy back in 2002 with Understanding Children, a book they supported the creation of from Richard Saul Wurman (well known author and creator of the TED conference).
3. Partner with a "co-author" - There are two types of situations to use a co-author - the first is if you are actually a team and share similar ideas that you want to publish together. The second is to get someone who will do the actual writing while you help to provide direction and content. This second method is the one usually preferred by politician or famous person when they get a writer to help them create a "tell-all" biography of their lives.
4. Offer a book template - Though in a very different category, the Disease Control Priorities Project has an interesting way of distributing their content in a book form. You can go online, select various chapters from a group of publications and create your own book. The model of offering a template and letting people assemble their own books with your branding/message integrated is one that could work in many other industries.
5. Commemorate an experience - Art galleries use this technique often, creating limited edition books that commemorate their exhibits and the artwork contained in them. They work well because the art is so visual and many of these exhibits can be gatherings of work that will be dispersed after the exhibit and never again brought together - so the book seems very archival and worthwhile.
6. Organize a collaboration - There are some great examples of this technique - from Seth Godin's The Big Moo collaborative book a few years ago, to the Age of Conversation parts 1 and 2 (Disclaimer - I am a contributing author to Part II) which gathered together lots of contributors and invited them to write on a related theme to bring all these pieces together into a book. The resulting publication is often something that has built in marketing support as all the contributors will promote it to their networks.
7. Sponsor a branded printing - This may be the simplest way to use a book for marketing as you are basically using a book that has already been published which aligns to your product or brand in some way and reprinting a branded edition. Pretty much any book ever published can be reprinted in a branded version, usually with a new custom foreword or different cover depending on the number of units purchased.

Microsoft Finally Tries To Tell The Story Of Vista

During my time in Beijing for the Olympics, I was using a Lenovo Ideapad U110 to blog, capture and upload images and video and video chat with my family. Loaded on the machine was Microsoft Vista, and so I had my first experience using the much maligned new operating system from Microsoft. About the same time, Marc from BizBox (a site where I am now a contributor) pointed me to a viral campaign Microsoft had put together online around their "newest" operating system code named Microsoft Mojave. They invited customers to come and test out the new operating system, and also interviewed them about their perceptions of Microsoft and Vista. All said relatively the same thing, that they didn't like Vista, but were excited to see what Microsoft had next.

Most loved using the new Mojave ... and later learned that Mojave was just a made up name and that the operating system they had used during their sessions was actually Microsoft Vista. The videos are below, but they feature an insight that I myself had a chance to experience over my three weeks of using Vista, it is actually a really cool operating system that is easy to use and offers features that take it beyond earlier versions of Microsoft's operating system. Their challenge is to redefine their brand that Apple has basically defined for them through their popular series of "Hi, I'm a Mac" ads.

It will be interesting to watch if they do manage to make some progress on telling the real story of Vista more broadly. I, for one, left impressed as a user at the capability of the new operating system and actually miss some of the features now that I'm back on my own Thinkpad X61 running Windows NT. Perhaps it really is buggy and difficult to install in coporate environments (as some people complain), but I honestly had no such problems as an individual user. That's the real secret of Vista that Apple has worked hard (and successfully) to counter. The majority of people who think Vista sucks believe that because of crafted messages such as Apple's marketing, and not based on their own direct experience. That's the perfect incentive to focus on doing some more experiential marketing. Now it's just up to Microsoft to tell it's own story rather than letting Apple tell it for them.

The Great #080808 Beijing Olympic Twitter Campaign Catches Fire

Anyone who has been to enough events with social media creators knows that it is inevitable that people will find a way to connect and find one another. To a degree, Twitter first caught on from this need a year and a half ago at SXSW in 2007. I have witnessed it over and over, through examples like attendees of four conferences finding one another to share an evening of Korean BBQ in NYC a few months ago, or finding someone to hang out with as you are travelling to a foreign city for business. Social media creators are not just creating content, they are becoming experts at connecting with one another.

So I wasn't surprised to see that the tag 080808 is catching on as a way for all of us in Beijing at the Olympics to find and connect with one another. Started by three Chinese bloggers (Flypig, Webleon and Babechloe) and described on http://tag080808.com/, this campaign is already bringing together not just everyone here in Beijing who is creating social media content, but is also becoming a brilliant way to follow all these live voices of the Games in a real time stream. As the Olympics kicks off tonight, this tag and the resulting conversations on Twitter will accelerate dramatically. For my part, I have already started tagging my content with this and will soon revise my Twitter icon to use the 080808 template created for the campaign (the image below is a compilation of current icons from a post about the campaign on Read Write Web).

In addition, I just sent out a Tweet about a blogger meetup that will be sponsored by Ogilvy and Lenovo where we can try to get some of the many diverse bloggers here in Beijing together for a drink and chat. If you happen to be here, send me a message at @rohitbhargava and let me know if you can make it to The Bookworm in downtown Beijing on Sunday, August 10th at 7pm. And even if you're not in Beijing, you'll want to start using this tag to find the best content and impressions from social media creators here at the Games. This is a case study in the making ...

Official Image from the Tag080808 Site:

The Rise of "Egommunication"

There is a magic power that a growing number of people are starting to have. It's happening all around us with social media and yet most of the time it is going without notice. I can now communicate with someone without communicating with them. I can tell them something without talking to them. And I can virtually guarantee that my message gets through to them no matter how flooded their inbox. Welcome to the world of something I would call egommunication.

Egommunication is a form of communication where you can share a message or piece of content with someone based on their own consistent habit of checking mentions of themselves and their content online ... in other words, relying on their ego as a channel for your message to get through. It is a tacit form of communication. In effect, you take advantage of the fact that just about everyone in social media is self-googling on a frequent basis.

Here are a few examples of what I would call egommunication:

1. Tagging someone in a photo, note or other content on Facebook so they will go and check out that content
2. Writing a blog post mentioning someone's blog post and counting on the fact that they will check their Google alerts to see that mention
3. Writing a tweet on twitter mentioning someone or something so that you can reach the audience of people that are doing searches for those terms

The nicest thing about egommunication is that the more popular the person you are trying to reach, the more likely it is that this form of communication will work because they often have the biggest egos (and I don't mean that in a negative way). It's the only communication form I can think of where ease of connection is inversely proportional to the internet fame of the person you are trying to connect with. Think Guy Kawasaki is unreachable? Send a tweet mentioning his name and see what happens. Dream of capturing the attention of Robert Scoble? Write a blog post mentioning him and link to his blog. Of course, it's not a substitute for direct communication and any of the examples above are people you could also email. 

Yet as volume of email goes up for us all, sometimes egommunication becomes a much more efficient way to communicate. Instead of emailing Guy and Robert about this post, I'm linking to both of their blogs - as well as Jeremiah Owyang, John Bell, Ann Handley, David Vinjamuri, Andy Sernovitz, Virginia Miracle and Doc Searls (all people I respect that I want to read this post and possibly comment on the idea).  I suspect it won't take any of them long to see this post and read it. They may or may not comment, but I'm just about 100% sure that the idea of egommunication won't be lost in their inbox ... and at the end of the day, that's a really interesting phenomenon to watch.

Introducing the Nametag 2.0 ...

Earlier today I wrote about standing out at an event and creating smart event marketing strategy. Tonight I'll be at the Mashmeet San Francisco event as a sponsor for my book and trying to create some buzz at the event. As I saw it, here were my key challenges:

1. How do I get people to walk up to a table selling books at a cocktail party?
2. What can I give to people as a free incentive to get them interested in the book (without spending a lot of money)?
3. How do I get across the premise of the book very quickly and get people interested?
4. And finally, how can I make the sponsorship that I paid for work harder and do more with it?

My solution was to try and offer something that would be both useful and relate to the premise of the book ... a "Nametag 2.0."  A Nametag 2.0 offers more than just your name - it also gives a snapshot of who you are and why people would want to interact with you, as well as giving them the vital "2.0-style" information of what keyword you would like to have used as a tag online for content about you. If you've been to many of these events, you know that often they don't have nametags and if they do, they are usually useless white stickers where you write your name and little else.  A Nametag 2.0 is a lower tech version of what pioneering nametag companies like nTAG offer (Full disclaimer - my brother works with nTAG).

Here's what the Nametag 2.0 I'll be giving out looks like:

Hopefully party goers will find the nametags useful and choose to fill them out and use them.  Also, as people take lots of photos of one another, hopefully the nametags are big enough to be seen and I'll get some extra exposure on Flickr.  What do you think about this idea?  I'll be sure to post an update on the event tomorrow for those won't be there and let you know how it goes.