Digital Influence Mapping Project

Tumblr Becomes the 4th Place for Brands

I just spent the last hour browsing my dashboard in Tumblr, “hearting” many posts and reblogging a couple that live up to what I am trying to publish in my Tumblr. I follow artists, designers, comic book artists, architects, map enthusiasts, photographers of empty spaces and much more.  For me, it’s about inspiration. And pausing from the frenetic pace and tension of my life to remember what I care about deeply.

"EVENT: Don't miss my interview this week with Tumblr founder, David Karp. 

A Conversation with David Karp, Founder of Tumblr: Brands Connecting Inside the Index of Passions -- Ogilvy & Mather Theater NYC February 20 -Time: 10:30am – 11:30am

Join us as for a candid conversation with David Karp who has created one of the fastest growing communities of people sharing what they care about most. How can brands participate in Tumblr with meaningful brand or business impact and how do we do it without spoiling the beauty of Tumblr? Join Social@Ogilvy’s John Bell as he asks David Karp about his vision for brands and Tumblr."

 

Tumblr is a place of passions, things we care about. Sure, it’s about “creators” but a broad, generous definition of creativity. As such it’s a network of people who care about the affinity that draws them there.

Many brands are more than experimenting with the site. You can browse some of the brand pages via the Brands on Tumblr page. The advantages are clear:

• Tumblr hosts interest and passion-driven content through the personalized dashboard
• Connecting with relevant microcommunities will become essential for brands in the next phase of data-driven social media marketing
• Tumblr pages are indexed by Google and enhance a brand’s discoverability
• They can be masked within a brand domain and therefore be part of the corporate domain
• The network of 150 million, highly engaged users has appreciable reach and a built-in social behavior - reblogging
• The simplicity of the platform supports brand ambitions to embrace content marketing
• They visual design of the service lends itself to visual expression and emotion
• There are some simple advertising solutions – two – that help brands be discovered

 

The 4^th Place

If Facebook is the key social network that brands want to master due to its broad global reach, Twitter is likely number two due to broad global relevance, it’s influencer status and suitability for service brand care. YouTube comes in next as the defacto platform for serving up video inside the world’s #2 search engine.

Pinterest? Instagram? Tumblr stands a better chance at earning the 4^th place position in social brand architecture for companies who know they need a searchable content place and who want to be inside a network of passions.

There are over 93 million Tumblrs (Tumblr blogs), users average 23 minutes on the platform per session and they clock 18 billion page views a month. It’s got reach and engagement. (Get some strong stats here)

Many arts-related brands have made a home here. Fashion brands are a strong niche.

Burberry: they established the Art of the Trench, the emotional “home” of the brand and are asking people to submit their photos of their ‘trench.’

Chanel: they keep it simple and post images that people can lust after and reblog

Dolce & Gabbana: An endless flow of fashion covers and spreads ready for reblogging and ‘hearting.’

Tory Burch: Torypedia is personal and luscious. Big, rebloggable pictures which si just what we want from fashion

Urban Outfitters: their pages start with the UP Community which aggregates a growing collection of pages that tie seamlessly into the ecommerce site. Check out the Swim Look Book in their site. Now check out the Tumblr.

 

Not just Fashion

Now is the time to explore in Tumblr. Brands like Ford, IBM, Amex and others are exploring how to use great content within this interest community.

The Lincoln Motor Company: our team did this work and created a poetic and beautiful site for Lincoln that taps the heritage of the brand.

Beautiful Creatures, the Movie: Hollywood embraces Tumblr as the platform of choice for new releases. Think about all those wasted dollars creating the Flash sites of yesteryear.

Coca Cola: the brand that embraced content marketing (see Content 2020) brings you a tumblr full of shareable images and gifs

Whole Foods: the Dark Rye Tumblr aggregates "pioneers of unconventional ideas..."  thus building on the brand story of Whole Foods as a disrupter. 

 

I know the guys/gals at Tumblr and have a lot of faith in their plans. They are embracing brands while staying committed to their original vision of a platform for creative-types. They have created an index of passions in my own words. That means emotion is part of what you will find there and as brands re-embrace the power of emotion and, perhaps, how to create great brand experience in a social world, Tumblr is the place to do that. They are innovating and working with brands now. That's why our team participates on their A-List and produces Tumblr-based ideas for Ford, IBM and other brands.

Facebook and Twitter serve to point to other content. Tumblr is content.

Related articles

Tumblr: David Karp's $800 Million Art Project

Tumblr's new notification feed: Is Tumblr trying to one-up Facebook?

Oh, The Places Tumblr Can Go

We Need Big Data People (More Than the Data, Itself)

For all of the hullabaloo about BIG DATA (so BIG it requires capital letters), the tangible examples remain ghost-like and hard to grip. Yes, I am sure that all the wonderful data-crunching recommendations I receive when logged into Amazon are valid examples. I even believe the data collection, mashing and outputs that drive Progressive’s Snapshot (collects data on how you and 1mm other people drive to build a personalized insurance rate) is a decent example of BIG DATA applied.

Still, we need more examples to better understand its potential and what are the best practices of applying BIG DATA to business.HBR has a section online dedicated to just this. It features stories on predicting movie blockbusters via data and...well, not too many more examples actually.  

A story in the NY Times this past weekend highlighted the use of data to derive insights from literature.

A study from the University of Nebraska used technology to crunch 3600 19^th century literary novels to reveal that, among other things, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott are the proverbial ‘trail head’ of influence on other writers.

“The study, which involved statistical parsing and aggregation of thousands of novels, made other striking observations. For example, Austen’s works cluster tightly together in style and theme, while those of George Eliot (a k a Mary Ann Evans) range more broadly, and more closely resemble the patterns of male writers. Using similar criteria, Harriet Beecher Stowe was 20 years ahead of her time, said Mr. Jockers, whose research will soon be published in a book, “Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History” (University of Illinois Press).”

 

Big Data People

My vision of BIG DATA applied is not some automated process where if you simply combine the right massive feeds of data, even crunching them via some mind-bending algorithm, that actionable meaning shoots out the other side. If I simply look at my own world of digital intelligence derived form behavior and content online, it is all about the human analysis that converts it into meaning.

“Quantitative tools in the humanities and the social sciences, as in other fields, are most powerful when they are controlled by an intelligent human. Experts with deep knowledge of a subject are needed to ask the right questions and to recognize the shortcomings of statistical models.

“You’ll always need both,” says Mr. Jockers, the literary quant. “But we’re at a moment now when there is much greater acceptance of these methods than in the past. There will come a time when this kind of analysis is just part of the tool kit in the humanities, as in every other discipline.””

 We need to be growing new hybrid professionals who understand data analysis but understand other things as well.  Just look at assistant professor Matthew Jockers.  His qualifications span two unlikely worlds.

“Mr. Jockers, 46, personifies the digital advance in the humanities. He received a Ph.D. in English literature from Southern Illinois University, but was also fascinated by computing and became a self-taught programmer. Before he moved to the University of Nebraska last year, he spent more than a decade at Stanford, where he was a founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, which is dedicated to the digital exploration of books.“   

These guys and gals won’t graduate out of some “BIG DATA meets marketing” program, to focus on my industry as an example. We need to train and grow these experts now by investing, in my industry’s case, in “Digital Intelligence Teams” who are working with data sources everyday and applying them to real work. This applied innovation is where new, valuable capabilities will be born. It is also where the BIG DATA People will come from.

(image: thank you Brett Shollenberger for the perfect pic)

Related articles

The Human Face Of Big Data

Big Data Rears Its Head, And It's Beautiful

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The Quality of the Conversation Matters

Community management is the new black. Everybody is doing it. Everybody claims to do it well. But scan a random sample of brand Facebook pages and you will discover a broad spread of quality. Now check Twitter. Same thing. Brands get that they should be on these platforms. They understand the mechanism of growing or acquiring fans and followers. They even understand that the metrics of an engaged fanbase comes in some form of the “People Talking About This” number in Facebook, for example.

Well. Sort of. I am not convinced that enough brand marketers are committed to learning and codifying the nuanced differences of what makes for great interactions. The NYTimes covered how a Hollywood agency, theAudience, is doing it for stars and studios alike. They are using social networks to strengthen the value of celebrity “brands” including Russell Brand and appear to be paying close attention to the quality of the content and conversation they are generating.   

“The goal, explains Jeff Pressman, the chief operating officer of theAudience is “to develop long term emotional relationships.” He adds, “So when it does come time to ask something of these highly engaged fans – buy a ticket, click on a link – you have earned their trust and attention and they are willing to do it.”"

Pretty basic but true. Too many brands are trying to find that “high performing” campaign inside Facebook or even the single post that everyone clicks on versus playing the long game.

Here are three pitfalls that I have noticed lately in community management for brands: 

Pitfall #1: Letting industry stats drive the strategy. No big mystery but, statistically speaking photographs, drive more sharing on Facebook than other types of media. Sharing is what shows up in our own personal streams and depending on the vagaries of EdgeRank, it’s what shows up to our friends who follow you.  Does that mean you should use lots of photographs in your posts?

One coffee brand who shall remain nameless has produced an endless supply of images of coffee cups, some in clever scenes you’re meant to guess the reference of and absolutely all of them packaged carefully in consistent brand colors. I can just see the junior art directors sweating over their style guides now. In short, I think they may have over done the medium – photographs – in lieu of delivering a valuable relationship.

Sure use images. Russell Brand’s page is full of images and, yes, most of them feature images of Russell Brand. But they represent a mix of shots from the show, impromptu shots of him at home, internet meme postcards, the “gift” he gave David Spade for appearing on his show. It may not be fair to compare a celebrity page with a consumer product page.  But still there are lessons of great community management that can be found everywhere and have some application to other brands.

 

Pitfall #2: Letting your own data drive the strategy. Everyone should be analyzing Facebook Insights and other data to really understand how their content is doing. From the time of day for a post to the type of call-to–action to the “story” behind  series of posts, there’s plenty to watch. Still, if you are not careful, you can let your stats dictate too much of your strategy.

For instance, many brands have discovered the light-weight, conversational post commemorating a holiday or shared cultural phenomena. Nothing wrong with that. When you discover that your most engaging post in a while was Happy Valentines Day, don’t revert your content calendar to feature 50% innocuous posts on daily holidays. You might get a bunch of clicks and even shares but what that’s got to do with your brand and what your followers value from you is another matter.

Let your data inform your strategy, not become it.

 

Pitfall #3: Forgetting to define a brand voice. I like Hugo Boss. I have bought a fair amount of merchandise over the years (not that the brand ever noticed or cares who I am). So, I have an affinity for the brand. But visit their Facebook page and you’ll see that they resort to generic corp comms voice and haven’t put any apparent thought into the voice and personality behind the page.

Compare that to San Pellegrino. Their page is not only clearly focused on an enduring effort to bring us all closer to an Italian experience, the actual voice of the page is consistent and distinctive. H/she is friendly:

“When was your last San Pellegrino Moment?

Our friend Ellen sent us hers

San Pellegrino Moments - Send us yours!”

A hint: write a single paragraph personality statement that describes who the brand is as manifested in the social network of choice. Write another on the tone of the voice – are you playful, friendly, politely helpful, sassy, etc… Finally write a two-column grid of “Do’s” and “Don’ts” – what the brand will say and what it won’t say that brings the voice to life. Clear guidance like this will help you choose a distinctive and appropriate voice and guide the work of community managers ongoing.

 

The quality of the conversation matters. That's why brands should be investing more and more into their community managers and the content at their fingertips. We can use all the data in the world to make our approach to these communities smart. We just cant delegate judgment to data. Community managers begin to understand the community and what makes them interested.  They are perfectly suited to becoming accountable for quality not just performance metrics. 

Getting Internal Experts to Create Content

I am a firm believer in the business value of enterprise-level content marketing programs. That means working across communications, marketing, product development and more to have a unified approach to telling stories via a “social content plan”.

We look at this whole process of using content against real business objectives (e.g. reputation management, demand generation, lead generation, sales, building preference and/or intent to purchase, enabling the workforce, and more) comprised of four big stages: Strategy & Planning, Creation, Distribution, and Optimization. It’s a simple but big idea. When you look at it more closely, there is so much we do to make a successful content marketing program for a brand.

Getting Content from Insiders 

One of the challenges within the “Creation” stage is getting content from your experts. IBM is actively enabling and coaching its IBM Experts to create relevant content around business problems. Ford involves many of its experts in vehicle design, environmental initiatives and technology innovations. It can be hard. It can be like “pulling teeth from a dead-horse.” Here are four considerations to make it easier.

Find and enable your self-motivated contributors

We launched an ambitious content marketing program for a big, multi-national B2B company a couple of years ago. They wanted to establish their internal product and service experts as externally-recognized experts via a content marketing play. They have hard-core business goals from driving consideration and even lead generation.

They had plenty of smart people. Articulate, too. But there were so many barriers to actually sparing these guys and gals to create valuable, shareable content. These included:

• While they were smart and articulate, writing blog posts or outlines for useful infographics was beyond their current skill set. (forget about videos)
• The hours needed to write a cogent article, never mind a series, was beyond their current job description and how they were evaluated by their managers. Writing and publishing content was, for the moment, the “extra” thing to do.
• Many did not have loads of experience operating in social networks like LinkedIn , Facebook or even conversing across the world of pro-am blogs. They lacked confidence and were a bit paralyzed.

Lots of policy and infrastructure issues nestled in this list of obstacles. Rather than set out to resolve all of this immediately, it may be more productive to identify the handful of folks – maybe 1-2 people – who are self-motivated to make this work. They are enthusiastic and ambitious product managers or researchers who are willing to write and rewrite their first blog posts within that 11^th hour of the day. They are the ones that seem to immediately get a kick out of interacting directly with colleagues and professionals online.

Make them productive rock stars first. That success will help prove out the value of the content marketing efforts to leadership who are responsible for sanctioning content creation a s a core job responsibility. Their success will also create envy amongst their peers and will likely attract others to becoming content creators.

Train & coach the next class of contributors  

Creating valuable content in social-sized formats and chunks takes skill.  Just because your experts are successful at communicating internally doesn’t mean they are all prepared to write a great blog post, create a valuable 2 minute video or concept a shareable infographic.

Train your experts on great blog writing, self-publishing/promoting techniques, and on more advanced content creation capabilities like video and graphics (its more important for them to have concepting capabilities in the more complex visual arts than being a one-man-band of production). We have writing courses internally meant to train experienced writers to succeed in blog writing. We have scaled these into simple 20-minute on-demand training modules.

Having a coach or editor to encourage and improve the writing is also key. Before content creation becomes a sanctioned act by management, your early adopters could use a inspirational voice cheering them on, showing them analytics of how their posts are doing and also keeping the pressure of productivity and deadlines on.

Establish official and behavioral incentives

As content marketing programs prove out their results, it will be important to identify officially sanctioned time commitments. Writing and creating content must become an official art of people’s jobs. If you establish that 10% of an expert’s job should be committed to content creation, you are saying that between 4-5 hours a week of their time should be spent on it. Simple. Pretending they don’t need that time is a destructive cycle.

Here’s a place where game mechanics actually plays a great role. Creating a simple dashboard that highlights the top content or posts from a corporate blog or content site gets writers competing. Putting that dashboard in a pretty public location like an intranet or featured in a group meeting shines a light on contributors.

Hire a brand journalist

Paul Marcum, Director of Global Digital Marketing & Programming at GE, and I recently spoke at the LinkedIn BrandConnect conference as part of Advertising Week. He made a great point about the value of brand reporters.  Hiring actual journalists to find and report on the stories within a GE, a DuPont, a Ford or wherever, ensures you are getting great content and maximizes the contribution of many experts within an organization.

Asking a product designer 3-4 questions on a brand-relevant topic is light years-easier than begging that poor guy for a 300-500 word blog post.

Brand journalists can elevate C-suite executives to social media naturals without putting those execs into the driver seat. Scott Monty at Ford does a terrific job enabling and providing access to CEO Alan Mulally. The CEO wouldn’t really gain that much of an advantage by starting his own social accounts. Brand reporters can achieve a similar affect on senior leadership as well as other voices within a company.

 

Here are some other folks thinking about how to successfully stimulate great social content from within the enterprise: 

Who Will Create Your Content? 10 Essential Content Creation Skills By Heidi Cohen

Dealership Employees Blogging in the Land of Unicorns and Rainbows By Jeff Kershner 

Tap Your Organizational Knowledge to Produce Content By Toby Murdock 

Managing Large Teams of Writers Under Short Deadlines By Sarah Mitchell 

What is brand journalism, exactly, and is brand journalism the same thing as journalism? By Thomas Scott

7 Mobile Apps for Recognizing and Rewarding Employees by Liz Magill

The Art and Science of Social Media 3.0

At the heart of our work over the past 7 years in social media and digital marketing is a collection of behavioral economics and network science. We needed a way to understand and therefore plan how ideas move across networks and what drives people to some type of behavior change in response to engagement in social activities. We frequently simply this to just say ‘ what causes people to care to share.’

We looked to researchers and “synthesizers” like Robert Cialdini, Dan Ariely, the Heath Brothers and Charles Duhigg amongst others. We took ideas like the Drivers of Influence and made them into heuristics – rule of thumb models – that teams could use to plan and execute predictably great programs. This “art and science” also served as the antidote to the unrealistic expectations of marketers who were shopping for "viral videos" – assets that would magically inflame an epidemic of sharing and retweets. To reliably spark word of mouth experience proved there are some rules to follow.

A New Model

Our science grew as we gained experience that needed to be codified or discovered new research to inform our approach. While all of this was quite relevant, it became a bit unwieldy. We ended up with a list of lists. Meanwhile, Facebook began promoting the concept of “social by design” amongst its brand and agency partners. This was a fairly random subset of what we were using to design against. They also talk about it two ways - as a POV on product design and as an approach to creating marketing solutions driven by Facebook advertising. We think of t as a new way to design completely integrated solutions. Still, their exposition ratified that what we were doing was “designing” great programs. So, we have simplified our approach to designing successful social media-based programs into the Principles of Social Design. 

The Principles of Social Design

The new model has two complimentary parts: The Network Influence Model and the Drivers of Word of Mouth.  The first explains how ideas move through influencers or networks. The second combines the most useful rules of behavioral economics into sets of descriptors that explain why people share. In their simplest form they serve as valuable rules for evaluating ideas. They can also serve to build belief across an integrated team about the strengths of designing creative ideas meant to stimulate word of mouth. 

The Network Influence Model

• Influencers: who are the pro-am, relevant influencers who we can engage? 
• Community: how can we use communities to drive social behaviors? 
• Owned ecosystem: How can we use our owned and controlled online and offline properties to extend the model?
• Paid eco-system: How do we use our advertising channels and tactics to extend the reach of our influencers + network? 

The Drivers of Word of Mouth

• Value Exchange: Have we offered a clear value exchange?
• Disrupting Idea: Have we surprised or challenged expectations?
• Great Story: Do we have a great story with emotional and rational interest?
• Fresh Interest: Do we have something new or interesting to talk about?
• Social Proof: Can people show their involvement?
• Creative Participation: Do we invite people to play a creative role?
• Simple Advocacy: Do we remind people to share and make it easy?

 

Each of these ideas has a simple set of qualities in a list that help guide program design. Not every program needs all the boxes checked. But the more the merrier. Trying to design and deploy a great program without enough of this stuff is guaranteed disaster. 

Our model will continue to evolve. It is constantly fed by our own experience with what works and what doesn't not just teh great academic research going on out there. 

How B2B Socially Enables Small Medium Business

Think about all of the big brands working hard to prove out and then operationalize their best practices in social media. They (we) are all spending a fair amount of money and time to understand the ROI of social applied to many parts of the business.

And the evidence is coming in. Here’s a recent finding from a successful Facebook program from a major FMCG in the Philippines:

 “97% fans were more willing to drink (brand) after engaging with the brand on Facebook. The Page attracted a following of 1.6 million, is the top branded Philippines FB page, and sales in 2011 rose more than 9%.”

Now think about all of the small and medium-sized businesses who could also accelerate some parts of their business if they just knew more precisely where to apply their limited budgets. For every poster-child-for-social small business there are probably 100 that just don’t know what to do or cannot invest the money to do so ahead of proven results. 

How do different businesses that serve SMB actually help them succeed?

 

American Express Small Business Saturday

“American Express offers small business tools and DIY promotional material (through their OPEN program) and incentives for customers looking to shop local. These messages were presented in tandem on Small Business Saturday’s Facebook Page and @ShopSmall Twitter account. Small businesses were also encouraged to sign up for free Facebook advertising of their brands, paid for in full by American Express…." from Mashable. 

• more than 2.7 million people “Liked” the program’s Facebook page and nearly 195,000 tweets were sent in support
• An estimated 103 million Americans shopped at a small business on 2011 Small Business Saturday. American Express saw a 23% increase in transactions.

 

L’Oreal Salon Pages

“L’Oreal provided a set of tools with which salons could begin enhancing their Facebook Pages, allowing L’Oreal to measure traction and furnish content for all of its salon locations.

 Salons can set up a separate tab with a number of customizable modules that allow them to display their respective logos, business hours, a menu of services, inspirational and how-to videos (many of which will be supplied by L’Oreal), as well advertise products.

L’Oreal is supplying salons with plenty of educational resources, including a how-to book for promoting salons on Facebook and instructional videos," from Mashable

Ford Dealer Training

Ford developed custom social media marketing and communications training fro its 3200 North American Dealers. The training was delivered through the established dealer communications channel. The goal is to enable dealers to use social media to drive their own business goals – foot traffic, test drives and repeat customers. 

 

Be Of-Service 

How can big brands who serve small and medium-sized businesses help them be successful applying social media and digital marketing to their business? Can they take the learnings from their own investment and turn those lessons into helpful programs for their SMB customers to use in their own business? If these three examples are the beginning of that, where do we head next? 

Brands: Stop Publishing Content on Facebook!

No, this isn't another 'Facebook as a disappointment' story. It's about how we best use Facebook or, more broadly, our content marketing. 

With over 3.5 Billion pieces of content shared each week on Facebook, brands first impulse is to jump in and add another few thousand pieces of clutter to the fray. Many start by thinking about social networks as another platform to publish out news the brand feels is of interest.

Some get more sophisticated and actually start thinking about what types of content their customers and advocates would find most interesting and actionable. Some wrestle with brand character issues such as what the “voice” is of the publisher and how a page looks and works.

Many evolve to creating complex content calendars that aim to sort through all the potential content that could be published and dole it out in a sensible manner.  We look at the data and figure out what drives the most “People Talking About” metrics (engagement).

 

Start Publishing Stories

Few think about stories. Each content nugget is just that, an isolated nugget. It likely points to content elsewhere on an owned site. But for the most part each content unit is judged in it’s own. That’s where you see brands discovering some of the simple rules of social media like pictures drive more involvement than simple text blurbs, especially ones with no clear call-to-action.

If we are trying to drive behavior, we had best use the most persuasive means to do so.  That means story. And likely today in the social age, it means stories that people can get involved in. One of my key takeaways from talking with Thomas Gensemer from Blue State Digital following their successful work on the first “Obama for America” campaign was the idea of “story arcs” in their messaging or content strategy. Actually, they called them “email arcs.” I abstracted it up one level since many of us are now communicating with customers and constituents via many platforms beyond email. Story arcs are simply a series of content postings tied together in a story that drive people to some action or series of actions.

Let’s say that your brand is staging a kids DIY event like Carhartt did. Rather than simply inviting people to the store for the event, you might start by soliciting dream DIY projects from the fan base (parents), or what projects did they create when they were kids – the sort of thing that drives comments and even shares.  The “story” might all be around those parents giving their kids the gift of self-discovery and creativity. Then, of course, they celebrate what they made at the story by posting online. Carhartt owners (I own one) are ‘makers.’ Lets build stories for makers. Carhartt actually does do that. 

The emotional value of stories is stronger that orphaned content. If we are trying to drive behavior and even belief. We ought to be anchoring our content strategies in stories. The neurosciencemarketing blog has a great pov in general and this in particular, 

"Researchers Philip Mazzocco and Melanie Green draw a contrast between rhetorical persuasion, in essence arguing with facts and logic, and the use of narratives to influence decisions. They conclude that stories are more effective at changing emotional beliefs that logical arguments have difficulty reaching."

 

And as you think about what makes for great stories ,tons have been written on this bit I like this little summary from Phil Johnson in Forbes :

"Whether you’re working on a brand story, an advertising campaign, or standing up to talk at a conference, here are three suggestions:

• If your story does not reveal something personal and unknown about the person or brand, it’s going to be boring.
• If your story does not tap into a specific emotion – whether it be fear, desire, anger, or happiness – it will not move people to action.
• If your story does not take people on a journey where there is a transformation between the beginning, middle, and the end, it’s not a story.

The best stories represent a simplicity of purpose and tap into the audience’s imagination so that they willingly go along for the journey. And the shortest ones can sometimes be the best. Ernest Hemingway famously wrote the six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

 

More great story reference:

• The Power of Story - John Kotter
• The Science of Storytelling - Steve Denning 
• The Art of Business Storytelling - Kelsey Ruger 

1 in 100 Slides from Cannes 2012 Tells a Bigger Story

There’s a ton of slideology at Cannes. We all heard some of the highlights whether there or, as I was, sidelined back at home – JR’s presentation of his tremendous giant faces peeking out from some of the most tense places; and Paul Adams for Facebook.

Jesse Desjardins pulled together his annual 100 best slides from that onslaught. That meta-presentation is at the bottom of the post. 

The one slide that really stuck out to me (beyond the JR piece which must be in the favella’s in Rio) was this one simple blender slide from the Kraft presentation. I didn’t see the rest of the presentation. I almost don’t want to. This slide by itself is likely more aspirational than real but still speaks worlds about a key innovation happening around us.

We need new models of working together to produce the most effective, the most digitally-enabled, the most organically social, the absolute best new creative. It’s not just team structure, its not just a fresh organizational chart, its more. It’s a different business model. It’s social that is horizontal (vs. hierarchical) and networked. It’s incubated and special. It’s tied to a different measure of profitability on the agency side that stretches beyond the timesheet, the mark-up, and the procurement-optimized rate card.

Here Kraft crosses out workshops and think tanks to get to what fascinates all of marketing-dom now – silicon valley models of incubators and start-ups. Marketers are entranced by the apparent agility of small tech start-ups. They do move faster generally unencumbered by the bureaucracy of big, established businesses. But is it realistic that Kraft can establish a start-up set of behaviors?

If they really set up a start-up it is. That means removing the burdens of a traditional brand marketing team whose job revolves around incremental sales targets and where “innovation” is defined by a new package design or 50% less sugar.

We need new ways of working. I am not sure the blender model is the roadmap more than an artifact of one company trying something different. I had the chance to work at a major FMCG last week. We used their process to bring multi-disciplinary groups together to work on marketing and solution problems. It was one of those models that downplay channel choices till much later, focuses on ideas and generally tries to get smart people to set aside their narrower commercial interests to get to the best ideas. 

It worked pretty well. Still, it was designed “pre-social” and put no specific emphasis on driving advocacy. Would that process look different if the most important measure beyond sales was growth of positive customer advocacy?  

 

100 Beautiful Slides From Cannes Lions '12

View more presentations from Jesse Desjardins - @jessedee

Lessons from the Cannes Lions 2012 Winners

I missed my chance to be at Cannes this year. Family matters kept me away and that was the right decision. Advertising awards used to be a bit of a closed loop with the same people congratulating themselves. At least that’s how I remember them. Not so anymore. 

The judging rigor is there (see Thomas Crampton’s video with Barney Loehnis). The digital pros now find themselves as judges. The discipline categories keep expanding. The quality of the entrants are strong.

Check out the winners here. It will be eye-opening. As I reviewed the winners three ideas and three cases stuck out.

 

Should Curators of Sweden have won the Cyber Lions?

The Twitter handle-relay where different Swedes earn the responsibility of publishing out via @Sweden twitter handle is owned by the Visit Sweden and Swedish Institute. (see case video here)  It’s a neat concept for meeting the people of Sweden. Here’s how they put it: 

“Every week, someone in Sweden is @Sweden: sole ruler of the world’s most democratic Twitter account. For seven days, he or she recommends things to do and places to see, sharing diverse opinions, and ideas along the way. After that, someone else does the same—but differently. Follow all nine million of us. Welcome to Sweden.”

They have grown to 66K followers (from 5K) and have a 500%+ rate of “conversation” (replies and retweets). What’s not to like?

They’re tweeting an awful lot and most is the banter between the host and others which has little to do with Sweden. The concept is cool. Righteous even. But I am not certain that the value of the Twitter stream is delivering beyond the “get to know some Swedish citizens.” 

Then, of course, came @sweden/Sonja who kept people guessing with her inflammatory and maybe a bit naïve comments about Jews, gays and so forth. But the real issue isn’t whether this expression of democracy leads to a few extremist/borderline-offensive hosts but whether it raises interest in visiting Sweden. 

Back-seat judging is no fun. Should it have won? It did. I think it is a compelling concept that likely is raising awareness for Sweden and in its own quirky way driving people to now consider a trip. It’s a great case, and I love that a purely earned/owned effort shared the Cyber Lion. It’s a creative idea brought to life in a very different way than the Cannes Lions are used to. Big ideas that don’t end up as luscious images or videos can win at Cannes. That’s great. 

There is another model for using Twitter for tourism and country branding that I find compelling. Wizard of Istanbul aims to answer tweets from visitors with questions immediately and to build a cadre of Istanbul enthusiasts to offer their suggestions for the best place for lunch up the coast or the most authentic whirling dervish ceremony. It’s a bit more spot-on for  the traveler and since it is run by regular folks supported by other Istanbul enthusiasts, it retains a personal nature.

 

Is Honda’s Connecting Lifelines the Wave of Future Winners?

Getting creative with data and technology is the next great wave. The Connecting Lifelines ‘experience’ does just that by mining traffic data from all of the Honda’s on the road in Japan during the earthquake and visualizing the status of roads.  Were they passable? How bad was traffic? Were new roads getting opened up post-crisis?

Beyond the social good role of the effort, it demonstrates how to be smart and creative with the web of connectivity and sensors around us. Digital is no longer a media choice but an infrastructure that is leading to very interesting innovations that can also serve a communications or marketing purpose.

We had a program for Dove that used technology in a great creative way. The Dove Ad Makeover continued the signature self-esteem territory by figuring out how to manipulate the Facebook ad-serving marketplace and let consumers replace shaming diet ads targeted to women with positive messages.

How are we, as agencies, going to stimulate this type of creativity? Have we done enough to change the perception of just what is creative in our own ranks?

 

How do you repeat/rinse/scale the greatest B2B campaign?

American Express’ program Small Business Saturday is more than a simple awareness program driving people to buy from local and small business on November 26th. (see the case video here) It’s a program that has tapped into the unique qualities of social networks to spread a cause while enabling the beneficiaries (small businesses) and the proponents (consumers) to do what they really want to do.

The case is great. Just the quotes from small business owners raving about 20% and greater increases in sales are worth their weight in gold. Will it win next year? Where can the Shop Small program go from here?

Well, American Express has been developing its role as partner to small business for years. They won’t stop here but rather expand what small businesses can do for themselves via resources supplied by Amex (check out their Facebook tab that collects a bunch of social assets for small business people including grants for Twitter advertising.)

They have created an annual ‘tent pole’ with the public and government support earned and now just need to expand with a diligent eye towards what actually delivers more and more value to their small business customers/merchants.  

Programs that build enduring bonds with customers are the true gems of the work we all do. I hope we see more programs like this honored in prestigious award events once reserved for he who hath the biggest….TV commercial.

 

(thanks to Creative Social Blog for pic)

Study: With Healthy Skepticism of Engagement, Sales Matter

The term “engagement” has easily become one of the most overused terms in marketing over the past few years. Even in it’s simplest, least frothy meaning it relies on the belief that more time spent and more interactions with a brand ultimately drives sales. Of all of the metrics available in Facebook, it’s the engagement metrics, principally the People Talking About This metrics, that brands care about most. Okay, truth be told, they care equally about all of the reach metrics but they go hand-in-glove. No one really wants a high fan count with no interaction. But if reach is actually a measure of the actual fans plus friends reached via specific content then that content must have been engaging to begin with to be passed along.

We care about engagement. We want more engaging brands. We want customers finding content important enough to pass along to their friends. 

A study from AdMap says that engagement is stupid.

Sure, I could have put that more diplomatically. But read the study. Essentially it calls out what many of us struggle with everyday – different understandings of what the term ‘engagement’ can actually mean, connecting any form of engaged behavior to sales-related outcomes, and the mad rush to celebrate or condemn Facebook depending on what day of the week it is.

What do low levels of engagement mean?

The study examined the top 200 brand pages in Facebook and concluded that given a rolling week, fans engaged for FMCG-type brands around .30% while car brands pulled in .98%. No brand crested 1% average engagement. And it was not much better for “passion brands” which hopped from an average of .51% to .64%. 

Without disputing their research, I have to question their conclusion that engagement doesn’t matter. It may be that engagement as a goal is faulty logic or a semantic slip. If brands are able to deliver valuable content and service through social platforms like Facebook they can actually build stronger bonds with customers that will translate into additional sales and valuable customer advocacy. Do customers interacting with valuable content constitute ‘engagement?’ Sure.

It is common knowledge that a minority of people lean forward enough to actually interact with brands in social media. It is that active minority that we work to engage everyday since we know they will spread the word via their social graph. Does that mean that a fan base of 1m people really only has 10,000 – 50,000 active fans? Probably. But that’s okay. The power of this minority is appreciable. I would also hypothesize that we are all learning new behaviors as consumers. That means that engagement levels may rise as brands do a better job of delivering value and we, as consumers, learn that we can expect more from brands. 

Does engagement matter as a metric?

The AdMap study would say no,

“Overall, the results demonstrating low levels of interaction with brands, knowledge of repertoire rather than loyal brand buying behaviour and the fundamental uncertainty about what engagement is, or achieves, suggest that brands need to proceed with caution. They should focus instead on measurement of the sales effects of exposure to advertising with social media, tempering the expectation of finding high engagement that leads to sales.”

But I think the answer is actually a resounding “yes.” We want a productive relationship with customers. Productive for them and for the brand. Productivity for the brand can be summed up as sales today, sales tomorrow and customer advocacy. Engagement with brand content in Facebook is not only indicative of more brain space for brands strengthening awareness, consideration and even intent to purchase, but it is also directly correlative to reach via the more trusted channel of our friends, family and social connections.

You want sales, here’s sales

Facebook has been quiet due to the ‘quiet period’ surrounding the IPO. That doesn’t mean they haven’t been diligently collecting effectiveness measures. They know that marketers want hardcore evidence of Facebook’s efficacy as a business platform.

So, while engagement metrics matter as useful, daily KPIs indicative of the stronger bonds we are building with customers and the social advocacy we are earning, there are tangible sales results as well:

• In the four weeks after seeing “coffee house brand” messages on Facebook, fans and their friends overall bought at “coffee house brand” 38% more frequently than the unexposed group of fans and friends of fans 
• In the four weeks after seeing “mass retailer” messages on Facebook, “mass retailer” fans and their friends overall bought at the store 21% more frequently

 

Both engagement and sales matter. And so, by the way, does social media.