In 2020, I launched a new digital consultancy, NextNow Digital. All of my new ideas and insights can be found at the new site. The Digital Influence Mapping Project has been a labor of love since I started it in 2005. This blog may continue to live on in some form or another.
For now, visit NextNow Digital Insights & Ideas. You will find fresh POVs on digital marketing and transformation to help startups, small and mid-size businesses, as well as continued thoughts for enterprise marketers.
I love reading fiction. Trouble is, I just don’t have that much time to read. I squeak in a bit each day but I am too embarrassed to admit how many pages (paragraphs?) I manage before I fall asleep. I am reading Roberto Bolano’s 2666. It is 893 pages long. Ask me in 2016 if I am still reading it. That’s why I am none too shocked to hear the French culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, admit she hasn’t read a novel in two years. According to the NYTimes,
"As France was celebrating its latest Nobel laureate, Patrick Modiano, the nation’s minister of culture, Fleur Pellerin, shocked the nation’s literati by admitting in a television interview this week that she had not read his novels or any others for the last two years."
Dear France, What Book Should I Read Next?
What a perfect circumstance for Fleur Pellerin to launch a crowdsourcing project to select the next book she will read. By letting the French people nominate books and then have them vote to move them up the reading list, Fleur Pellerin could remedy the problem – the Culture Minister must read French books to represent – and engage the country in a lively book-loving debate.
The list could become cultural homework for foreign students visiting France. It would elevate French authors in the world’s eyes as the crowdsourcing would happen on this lovely international Web we find ourselves on today. It might even jazz up the culture ministry's Web site which interestingly won't tranlsate via Google translate.
I have always been a fan of collaborating with emerging or non-traditional subject matter experts who may have influence on buying customers or other recommenders. Often these are people who have earned an audience over time because they consistently delivered valuable content on a subject that mattered to someone.
Mom bloggers like those at BlogHer shared about the true stories of mommyhood
Dad bloggers like OneDad3Girls shared content that distinguished them from moms and was ‘of-use’ to other dads
Home stylists like my sister, CBellfurnishings, delivered a POV on designing an interior worth living in
Writers like those at Copyblogger, shred useful ideas on creating compelling content and just being a writer in the age of digital
They are not attached to the usual institutions – big media companies or consultancies. They earned their audience by working social and creating worthwhile and share-worthy content.
CB2 Taps Influencers to Collaborate with Communities
I am a fan of Crate and Barrel. My still, relatively new living room would attest to that. The alternate brand CB2 “is affordable modern for apartment, loft, home.” They recently ran a great program - CB2 Apt - featured in Google Think! that invited influencers and celebrities to design a 5-room apartment via Pinterest and social media, in general.
Dubbed “The first apartment that Pinterest built”, the actual activity ran for a week in May. Five stylist/designers/Pinterest ‘pros’ were assigned a room. They researched looks they felt appropriate and pinned them in Pinterest boards. Followers voted. Ultimately, the stylists constructed their rooms in one 12 hour burst each, an activity that is entertainingly captured in time lapse on the site.
Access to a specific and relevant audience (the followers of our 5 stylists)
The third party credibility that CB2 furnishings meet a certain mark
The content created before, during and after the actual “styling” event
Applying an ‘Event Activation’ Model
We do a lot of events and are getting better about extending those experiences before, during and after the event via online content marketing. CB2 Apt made the exercise a live event by scheduling the room ‘builds’ all in one week on a compressed schedule. This happens in ‘design house’ events across the country where local stylist/designers are invited to design one room in a house or apartment that will then open to the public as a showcase for a period of time.
Before: the stylist amassed Pinterest pins of different directions, the crowd contributed, voted
During: the rooms were built using winning pins as the inspiration. The build was recorded in time-lapse.
After: the stylists posted about their experience on their own blogs and social platforms and extended the reach of the original content while also personalizing it
Three or four years ago, there was a lot of talk about whether mommybloggers had jumped the shark or more likely that they had become so in-demand that their inevitable professionalization might spoil the earned trust with their followers.
Smart subject matter experts won’t sell out. That doesn’t mean they won’t get paid. It simply means they are mindful of the trust they have built, the value of their reputation and the need to retain their independent POV. While it is not explicitly called out in an obvious way, I am certain that the CB2 Apt stylists were paid for their professional services. Athena Calderone does frame it in her post as being ‘commissioned.’
The CB2 Apt content experience is terrific. Their use of ‘subject matter experts w/audience’ demonstrates their appreciation for a new type of industry influencer.
Recently, Burger King Norway purged its Facebook fanbase. They reduced it from 38,000 fans to 8,000...on purpose. Their stated goal was to encourage fickle deal-hunters to exit their addressable fanbase leaving those who really cared and preferred Burger King (over McDonalds).
For a quick service restaurant (QSR) or a fast moving consumer goods company (FMCG) this is a radical move. Brand loyalty isn’t what it used to be and many of us are happy enough to ask for Pepsi as Coke. Can a Burger King fan also be a McDonald’s fan? Chances are there is quite a bit of overlap. Still, the move to be more intentional about who is in your Facebook fanbase and your Twitter follower-base is right minded.
The Pendulum Swings
In 2012 and 2013, many brands chased large fan and follower counts in social media. After all, a big addressable audience is good, right? More possibilities for people to share content via their social graph. Brands who made fan acquisition their number one key performance indicator (KPI) were likely not all that discriminate about who was there. They used paid media to augment organic growth. Some energy was applied to refining their “buys’ to drive down fan acquisition costs because that just made common sense.
Now many marketers are letting go of sheer numbers of fans or followers in favor of achieving high engagement numbers – shares, comments, retweets, @replies and yes, even, content “likes”.
If we value engagement as a barometer not just for how relevant our content is but also an indicator of actual preference for our brand, then catering to those who will be most involved with our content and brand makes sense. Would you rather have 1m fans who rarely engage or 100K who comment, share or retweet a few times a week?
“Media Bistro reported that 60 percent of marketing agencies feel engagement is “the deepest level at which they could track return on investment from their social campaign,” according to a 2012 study. But as social marketers are realizing more and more, not all engagement is created equal. Spam and cheap like-baiting tactics (Like this post if you enjoy sunshine!) don’t actually move the needle. In that light, trolls can absolutely destroy a brand’s ability to generate meaningful engagement. What do you think?”
So, as the pendulum swings, we need to find that productive spot in between the arc. We do want sizable addressable audiences. Big fanbases of the right fans are valuable as they are the pool of folks who have the potential to be engaged in the first place. Defining who the “right fans” are rather than just seeing who shows up as you publish out coupons or Happy New Years’ messages is the next ‘job-to-be-done.’
For a mass brand like Coke, there probably aren’t too many wrong fans to have. But for other brands like financial services brands, automobile manufacturers, and airlines, who is in that addressable audience matters.
“Confirm that social age and gender demographics match your target audience. If you’re a B2C brand, use sales data to investigate which products your social audience is likely to be interested in.
Once you have established a baseline, go beyond fan demographics by establishing buyer personas that map to certain products or content topics. Measure engagement performance with content that maps back to personas, as part of your regular audience analysis.”
For a service brand selling to consumers, it would make sense to build personas for the customer base, for the dealer community (if you sell through dealers or some other intermediary), for influencers (these can be folks who influence the purchase decision in some way or another), and employees. How big should your fanbase be? Facebook would have you think about your market share in a particular market and aspire to a fanbase that matches. That clearly leads to a big base and one that inevitably requires Facebook advertising to achieve. Another way is to benchmark yourself against three competitors and one “ideal brand” (this could be a brand outside your category whom you think is doing a particularly good job). You then establish goals that are ambitious yet attainable at some reasonable level of investment.
Next Steps
Defining who you want to intentionally build a sustained and profitable relationship with isn’t as easy as it sounds. Keeping an eye on the complexion of that fan/follower base takes extra effort.
Companies like Fanbridge, FollowerWonk and Xeerpa are developing practical ways to segment or group fan bases to make it easy to send specific messages to meaningful groups. This is the next logical step towards the ultimate destination of social CRM where we can address all of our customers and prospects individually.
By deciding who we want to follow us, how we can deliver the most valuable content and experience to them, we can head down the path towards building highly engaged fanbases of the right fans not just those who liked us for a free burger.
We examined brand advocacy across 23 brands in 4 categories.
We looked at over 7 million mentions across China, Brazil, the UK and the US.
We wanted to understand what drove brand advocacy – what do people really talk
about when they share about brands. This is all found in the Social@Ogilvy Brand Advocacy Study: How to Build a Global Passion Brand
And there were some surprises along the way. Apparently
there is a broad social advocacy gap for many brands. For all the “brand
satisfaction” racked up by hotels, for example, they are only driving 1 in a
100 customer stays to an actual brand mention.
Most brands have a lot of work to do to close this gap.
Know what people love
One of our key findings surprised us. In the US especially,
I think we all believe people talk about advertisements a lot - especially the
funny or provocative ones. And people clearly do share about ads.
“We looked at advocacy mentions of ads, benefits, features,
costs and customer service. In all markets, features (e.g. the characteristics
of skin cream) were the most often mentioned. In comparison, mentions of
ads/commercials typically garnered the fewest mentions.”
It turns out, there are big differences across countries,
product categories and individual brands in terms of what people are most
likely to share about.
The table compares discussion breakout vs. category averages
for the two highest advocacy passion brands: Kimpton and Kiehls (US only).
Kimpton Hotels over indexes in the hotel category on
benefits and customer service. Conversely, they under index on advocacy
associated with the more rational based features and advertising. Conversely,
Kiehls over indexes in the skincare category for Features.
The value of brand advocacy is becoming clearer everyday.
Intuitively we believe in the positive mentions and the passion people share
about brands they care about is key to purchase decision and loyalty. The
evidence is mounting that our belief is well placed.
“Brands that do not generate substantial advocacy will need
to pay more for reach and consequently have costs substantially higher
than those brands that drive high advocacy. In an environment where costs to reach consumers continue to escalate, this advantage could make the difference between a
company with outstanding shareholder returns and one that fails to
perform.”
Or how to really engage the true brand fans to become more
productive advocates (and save you money while selling more).
So much energy and money is being spent on
building what we all describe as big “fanbases” in Facebook, Twitter, or other
social networks, that we lose sight of the fact that not all fans are created
equal.
In our soon-to-be-released international study on brand
advocacy, one finding is clear – the number of highly active and vocal fans for
particular brands is quite small. So
what are you doing for your best, most connected customers (here “best” might
mean most vocal advocates and not necessarily the biggest spenders)? What are
you doing for the 1-5% of your fan or follower base who are actually sharing a
lot and championing the brand?
Certainly acknowledging them with replies on Facebook or
Twitter is good practice. But if you really want to cultivate strong advocacy
from those most inclined to express themselves you may want to go further.
Fan Loyalty Programs
Brand have run loyalty programs for centuries. Most are
geared towards encouraging customers to spend more. Data programs are run to
filter and identify big spenders with tons of nuance about what they spend on
and so forth. Our own Lasek Group are expert at designing and running some of
the world’s top loyalty programs.
What are relatively new are programs designed to inspire and
drive more focused advocacy from the most active advocates. These programs need
three components to succeed:
A technological platform that makes it easy to deliver
messages and build insightful profiles
A steady stream of content, offers and access that the best
advocates would find worth their time and their social capital
A program design and execution discipline based upon the key
drivers of behavior
Technology platforms
We designed our own Insider Circle as a way to subscribe a
group of ‘super-fans’ to a private club where they receive exclusives – content
before anyone else, access to interesting people and experiences, product and
service offers and experiences. We saw other platforms on the market but none
really reflected the feature-set that we had learned from experience were not
only valuable but also ‘right-sized’ to the market. That means baking-in social
drivers like game mechanics and rewards and making it easy to use other
behavior-drivers.
There are other good choices out there now. Social Chorus is
one. Greg Shove, CEO, has led a great team to create a useful platform that
helps brands identify ‘social influencers’ and then subscribe them via the
platform. There is a significant distinction between fans and influencers.
Clearly having fans who have the attributes of potential influence (i.e.
high-reach and relevance) is ideal. Still, identifying your most vocal fans and
being mindful that they likely span the spectrum of high potential influence
and to low potential influence is okay.
“LoyaltyPlus empowers you to present your customers with
relevant incentives, such as rewards, points, status, recognition, and
exclusive access and promotions. Engage your customers at each stage of their
lifecycle, from the time they become aware of your brand through conversion to
loyalty and ultimately advocacy.”
The platform combines customer rewards, advocacy stimulants
(they make it easy and provide incentives), and a way to capture reviews and
other consumer generated content.
Now, Dropify adds some functionality to Facebook to deliver
content to your community. You can literally lay on an exclusive downloadable
video or white paper to your fanbase. It’s not clear of the platform will
support targeting that to specific members of your community – like your 1%.
It’s also not clear if this functionality is really a step above how we deliver
content now through the Facebook Newsfeed. But its inevitable that Facebook and
or the network of developers working within that environment will try to get
real about the different levels of advocates in the myriad of brand fanbases
out there and develop tools to treat them special.
A steady stream of value
Many brands are redefining budgets and staff to support the
content needed to mange always-on social networks. It isn’t easy or a trivial
matter. But its happening. Now, comes the question of what are you going to
hold back and release exclusively to your best advocates?
Most brands are struggling to keep good stuff in the
pipeline for the mass Facebook fanbase. Choosing to create exclusives for an
even smaller group is tough. They must believe in the power of the ‘super-fan’
over the myth of the mass-engaged fanbase (my bias is pretty clear)
Key drivers of behavior
The more things change the more they stay the same. If your
goal is to drive your most vocal fans to action, then you would use the proven
drivers of social behaviors. Think Cialdini, Health Brothers, Ariely. If you
just start with Cialdini’s ‘6 drivers of persuasion,’ you can see instantly how
we bring those to bear. ‘Scarcity’ is what exclusive and limited run offers are
all about. These are the assets we make available via the technology platform
for a limited time. ‘Social Proof’ lets other advocates see what their peers
are doing this reinforcing their own impulse to share particular content.
As you plan out the rest of your 2013 plan and identify next
priorities on into 2014, what are you doing to embrace and activate your 1%?
Yup, they’re back (The Constellations, above, are a great band in the service). Many in the trades will get snarky about
the rising from the ashes of the flameout social network that lost its way. In
the apparent triumph of Facebook as the primary social plumbing of our lives,
they might be right. Many more will criticize the celebrity backing of Justin
Timberlake as a hail-mary pass of brand beyond hope.
I don’t think MySpace should be mistaken for Twinkies. That
product brand is part of our history but hopelessly out of step with our healthful
present. The New MySpace (I shall call it the “New MySpace” for about a year
and then we can go back to just saying “MySpace”) is trying to be something new
while at the same time getting back to its knitting – music.
Beta Beta
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot that’s messed up here.
While wonderfully visual (I love the big type in the search function), the
interface is a messy work-in-progress. Still, I give them credit for trying to
mesh the big picture-swipes of the tablet world with an almost simple dashboard
design.
Building a playlist that is a mix of songs, videos and full
albums is do-able. The significance of what are “Connections” is not clear.
That is the primary activity like Facebook’s “Like” or Twitter’s “Follow.” I
can Connect with another user by also with any type of media. I got tired
connecting to all the Nick Cave songs displayed. Unfortunately, no matter what
or who I connected to, nothing ever appeared in my stream. Then I realized the
interesting user experience twist – it’s all based upon a horizontal scroll.
Clearly a way to distinguish from Facebook but also connect to the horizontal
scroll/swipe of iTunes and many tablet functions including our own Web site at
Social@Ogilvy.
Music Fans First
Upon registering, you will be asked to self-identify to a
stack of creative titles (or the ubiquitous “fan” category). Even though they
hint at serving visual artists, too, the actual content and experience appears
to be all music focus now. Again, that’s the territory that “old” MySpace
staked out at one time.
As a music fan, I hate being force fed a ‘top-of-the-charts’
experience. That’s what we have today in the service. I respect Beyonce, Adele,
and even Justin Timberlake. That’s just not my turf. I suspect this is simply
how the service launches. It took me only a few minutes to find J Roddy Walston
tracks and a simply awesome Social Distortion video.
Forget Facebook. That’s not the territory for the New
MySpace. They seem to have staked out some interesting white space wedged
between Pandora and YouTube. I love being able to build a playlist that is a
mix of songs, albums and videos. It plays in the background. Once in a while, I
will watch the video. Of course, Pandora’s magic sauce is the recommendations
from their wonderful human-powered DNA analysis. Hard to beat that for music
discovery. Currently, there is no real way to discover new music short of
browsing endless pages of album art and photo thumbnails or selecting a handful
of “related” links. I like recommendations pushed to me.
I have a confession. I love music videos. As corny as they
can be, I grew up when MTV was born (“old” MTV) and worked on some of the first
music videos seen on the channel. There just isn’t a great experience to find
and watch music videos. I know YouTube has everything, but I like a bit of
quality curation. I imagine that is what I get in the New MySpace.
Clearly, New MySpace starts with music and music fans. The
ambition seems to be a space for all types of creators/creatives. In that
regard they may be aiming for some of the territory currently blowing up in
Tumblr where we are all asked to “Follow the World’s Creators.” Interestingly,
it may just be the user experience that keeps those services apart. Tumblr is the
epitome of simple (I love my Tumblr – Smoldering Embers). My Space requires
more investment. Tumblr is also great as
it holds wonderful content – often visual – that the world can access and link
to. I tried for 10 minutes to send a link to my wife to the Social Distortion
video and gave up.
We’ll See
I don’t know if the New MySpace will flourish and survive. I
don’t think anyone knows. It feels fresh to me. I hope that it evolves to allow
more connections outside the service (e.g. Facebook Connect, Tweets).
I suppose part of their success depends on their ability to
lure artists back into MySpace to interact (The Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
page is empty). I don’t think Top40 or even Top500 radio artists can carry the
service. Lastly, many services have tried to navigate the licensing and legal
quagmire of music rights and ownership and died trying. I hope they know what
they are doing.
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.
How is the US government using social and digital media and
data to bring value to the people? Too often criticized for bureaucratic
sluggishness and cross-interest paralysis, the US government is doing some
surprising things to innovate. Just look at the Health Data Initiative (HDI), a
public-private initiative whose founding membership includes the US Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Todd Park, the infectious (in a good way) US Chief
Technology Officer, recently kicked off the Health Datapalooza in Washington
DC. It’s one manifestation of the HDI, “the public-private collaboration that
encourages innovators to utilize health data to develop applications that raise
awareness of health system performance and spark community action to improve
health.” The Health Datapalooza is all about opening up data and hosting
crowdsourcing efforts that inspire the best and brightest to make use of that
data. The DC-based event has inspired other health data, “hackathon”
crowdsourcing events across the country.
Check out the Cajun Code Fest held in Louisiana. It brought
300 coders together to wrestle with code sets from the government that
included:
SCHOOL NUTRITION DIETARY ASSESSMENT STUDY
BEHAVIORAL RISK FACTOR SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM
NATIONAL SURVEY OF CHILDREN'S HEALTH
FOOD ENVIRONMENT ATLAS
Among other issues, they rallied their brainpower to crunch
data towards useful solutions to childhood obesity. Check out their Web site
and browse through the descriptions of the 37 datasets like those mentioned
above. Even a layman (non-coder; non-data junkie) can start to imagine some of
the possibilities if we could just bash some of this data together to extract
insight and utility.
The Fanboy of Health Data
Todd Park is a force to be reckoned with. Just watch his
introductory speech to the 2012 Health Datapalooza. A self-avowed “fanboy of health data,” his brightness and
enthusiasm is just what is needed to inspire 1600 entrepreneurs to convene for
two days and lay the foundation for innovation that uses government data in
creative and useful ways.
His proof point for opening up data or as Thomas Goetz,
Executive Editor of Wired Magazine, called it converting ‘latent data into
powerful, actionable data’, is the opening of weather and subsequently GPS
data. Those moves created $90b of “massive awesomeness.” That’s innovation
creating jobs, better outcomes for farmers and others who rely on weather, and
just a ton of entrepreneurship (think Weather Channel, think Google Maps).
“Awesome” is clearly Todd's favorite word. Hearing someone so
effusive and passionate speak from a government pulpit is a breath of fresh
air. He seems to have grabbed onto a behavior made popular in Silicon Valley in
the private sector and figured out a way to elevate it to public-service-meets-the-next-wave-of-entrepreneurs. I hope other governments around the world pay
attention to this model and try to apply it to solve the big thorny
issues.
If you want to get a sense of some of the emerging solutions
that were highlighted during the event, Read David Maris’ article at
Forbes.com. He covers off on the winners and some of the interesting
highlights. The value of the event goes far beyond those that won.
I am particularly fond of data visualization as part of a
behavior strategy. David highlights the team from Indiana University who “entered
a mobile app that provides images and information about the overall health of
the population of each state. So calling
up an image of Mississippi, pulls up an obesity-adjusted outline of a person
with other health statistics, while the Colorado outline is noticeably thinner.”
Also, the winner, VaxNation from Baylor, Rice and University of Texas students is "an app designed to make it easier for people to keep up with their families’ immunizations"
One of CMO's top concerns in teh private sector is how to manage - make use of - the flood of data now avaialble to them. Perhaps there is a lesson in these open inititaives or the technology hackathons that came before them.
Why do brands find it hard to respond to community requests? Recently, a grassroots effort started by Jane Bingham and Rebecca Sypin, each who lost daughters to cancer, manifested in the Facebook Page, Beautiful and Bald Barbie. They have earned 158K fans to date all rallied around the idea of motivating Mattel to create a bald Barbie for girls struggling from hair loss associated from cancer treatments and other situations.
Four months later, Mattel has signaled that they will create and give away “a bald friend” of Barbie in 2012. This is after the Bratz doll line announced they are delivering a series of bald dolls this June.
Deborah Weinstein over at the SocialCMO summarized the “we were going to do this anyhow” tone response from Mattel when they finally pulled the trigger,
“This week – some four months later – Mattel finally stepped up to the plate and announced the creation of a Bald Barbie Friend of Barbie for distribution to children’s hospitals and charities in 2013. Company spokesman Alan Hilowitz was quick to point out that Mattel did NOT create the doll in response to the Facebook page, but rather because “they helped us realize how important this was for us to do.”
Hard to Surrender to the Community
As much as I share Deb Weinstein’s POV that Mattel missed a bigger opportunity to acknowledge the community discussion immediately, respond and finally pull the trigger to meet the clear demand, the fact that they did at all is probably progress for a traditional business like Mattel. When companies like Threadless have an entire business model around crowdsourced and voted-on t-shirts, why is it so much harder for the Mattel’s of the world to just say, “wow, you guys are bringing up an awesome idea and we really want to make this happen…?”
The problem of ownership
Can you say legal, intellectual property(IP), and post-war industrial enterprise? Threadless is different. They are soliciting designs under a clear terms of service that protects all parties. They also weren’t born out of the culture of the fifties. As much as Mattel may have wanted to rush with a positive response, their whole infrastructure has been designed to protect IP. An idea from an outside source suddenly puts them at risk. Who would own the doll suggested by two moms behind a Facebook page? Should they manufacture and sell it, are they at risk for ownership? Does that risk dilute the protections on the golden goose core Barbie line?
The problem of management
And then there is the curse of the industrial age, creative company. Toy companies are creative businesses who are designed to deliver valuable ideas. Agencies are the same way. If it wasn’t created at Mattel then what the heck are all those employees doing in the design department? I know it’s not logical and we really aren’t talking about a creative breakthrough here (just look at the photo mock-ups people have made of Barbie with no hair – pretty simple, right). Still post-war, industrial-scale companies are where management became king. And management is meant to control and manage. Creative is meant to create. The impulse to reject outside thinking is pretty strong because that’s the way they roll.
The problem of dialogue
Some companies have a hard time talking to people in anything but that highly-protected tone of the PR department. If there is one lesson that social media has taught brands it must be that learning how to have a conversation like a human being actually does matter to customers. Barbie’s Facebook page is largely about the character’s voice. Mattel’s page, on the other hand, is about engaging and natural as the accountants who come out at every Oscar Awards show to explain the judging procedures.
“As the world’s largest toy company, we receive thousands of product suggestions every year. Given this volume, it’s likely yours is the same or substantially similar to concepts we’ve already received or developed. While we appreciate hearing from our consumers, we rely on our large staff of designers for product ideas. Therefore, it’s our policy to not review any unsolicited concepts and we cannot retain your submission. We don’t assume any obligation in connection with your unsolicited concept. If you’d like to learn more about how to get into the toy business, you may wish to contact the Toy Industry Association at http://www.Toy-Tia.org.”
Part of the problem with Mattel’s response was how long it took. Four months is about 3 months and 29 days too long. They needn’t have assented right away. A simple “we hear you” and “we appreciate what you are all going through with your children and your love for Barbie…” would have started the ball rolling in the right direction. Part of the problem is the established tone of voice.
Perhaps Mattel still believes there is only one way to protect their position - the cardboard statement. So many other brands have found ways to talk like human beings without losing their commercial advantage. Could Mattel have done better? Certainly. I only hope they examine this situation with enough candor to see what the true opportunities for change are.
