Star Wars storm troopers riding hover dogs (via Buzzfeed):
John Updike was one of my absolute favorite writers.
John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.
And, last but certainly not least, Lolcats sing "Love Cats" by The Cure:
...to stand out and be different and to fit in and be part of something.
How's that for a nifty paradox? We want to be unique and we want to be the same.
Josh Spear is rubbing elbows with world leaders and titans of industry at The World Economic Forum in Davos right now. This morning he tweeted this gem of wisdom from Shimon Peres, the President of Israel:
The world is both global and individual like never before.
Ain't that the truth. Digital technology has made it easier than ever for people to connect. And, simultaneously, all of our experiences are becoming more personalized.
These paradoxes are the reason why brands have to start focusing on passions instead of products. Our digital lives revolve around our personal passions. We read, view, and share the things that are most important to each of us. And, as Rob Walker points out, these choices are guided by a desire to fit in and a desire to be unique. We want to demonstrate what communities we are part of, and which people we stand out from. We also have incredible tools that allow us to follow our passions to connect with like-minded groups (all over the world), and to curate for ourselves a unique stream of information and inspiration.
This is the next evolution of branding.
"This brand helps me be unique because it's not for everyone." Stand for something more important than your product. Find something that you know lots of people are already passionate about that is a natural fit for your brand, and be a champion of it in everything that you do. Be willing to say that only people who share this interest are allowed to where this badge.
"This brand shows me how I can be a part of something bigger than myself." Use your money and power to illuminate the community. Introduce the people you're trying to reach to the groups of people who are already gathering around this shared interest.
"This brand empowers me to connect with people who share my interest." Work to transform the crowd into a community. Make use of tools that help individuals come together. A passionate group of people will take action, if a leader tells them what the mission is, and if the tools are in place to make it as easy as possible to get started.
"This brand enables me to participate in my own way." Making it easier for people to connect to each other, also means making it easier for individuals to connect in their own ways. Digital experiences are constructed by bits of data. This is a blessing, because that data can be broken apart, shared, and put back together in a million different ways. Embrace this, and let your audience put your experiences together in whatever way they prefer.
Yesterday, Seth Godin reminded me of one of the biggest obstacles that companies put in the way of achieving the goal of getting a life online. Companies allow common unspoken goals based on fears instead of aspirations to get in the way of accomplishing what they set out to do.
How often has this (spoken or un-spoken) goal gotten in the way of a company doing something great for its brand? "We don't want to offend anyone."
If you're brand is acceptable to everyone, then it won't be exciting to anyone.
Think about the brands that have rabid fans.
Think about the brands that everyone talks about.
Think about the brands that have become a status symbol (in spite of their deliberate lack of symbols in their branding).
If you want people to talk about your brand and what you stand for, then you have to be willing to offend someone. Offending people is a natural bi-product of saying something interesting.
This doesn't mean that you should go out of your way to offend people. You shouldn't offend people for the sake of offending them. But, you have to be willing to risk offending people in order to more clearly demonstrate how passionate you are about an interest that you share with the people you're trying to reach.
This morning I was reminded of this great quote from Helge Tennø, "Now marketers wouldn’t interrupt a phone call, but they try hard to interrupt social media – figure that one out?"
As companies have courageously stumbled into conversation platforms like Twitter and environments for networked relationships like Facebook, they have foolishly held on to their traditional mass-media methods of communication. Make noise. Get noticed. Distract. Interrupt. Even when companies attempt to engage in a more meaningful dialogue, they still end up initiating the conversation, and always forcing the conversation topic back to their product or service.
But, as any real live human being who's ever had a successful conversation with a group of strangers will tell you, it works much better when you listen before you speak.
Guess what? The internet has made it really really easy to listen to people!
Before you even set up a Twitter account, watch what people are saying about your company, product, or service on http://search.twitter.com. Also, watch what people are saying about your competitors. And most importantly, watch what people are saying about something that's personally important to them in their lives that is also important to your company (and the answer here has to be more important than your product!)
Before you reach out to bloggers, read their blogs. Search on http://blogsearch.google.com to see what people are already saying about you, your competition, and that big thing that's even more important to your consumers than your product.
Before you set up your Facebook page, search for other groups and pages that users have already set up for themselves. Be sure to search for groups and pages that are devoted to things that are bigger and more important to these users than your product, i.e. if your company sells hiking boots, don't just search for your brand name, search for groups devoted to hiking and camping.
Listen first. And when you start to have a good sense of what the people you want to talk to care about, then begin the conversation (and you better be ready to talk about something other than your product).
Every good conversation starts with good listening.
Change is in the air, and it has a decidedly political slant. The third Hub Culture Zeitgeist Ranking debuts with a new No. 1, set amid a palpable shift in our collective expectations. Security, sober simplicity and quality of life are dominating the scene now, creating a very different vibe among the world's globerati. Hub Culture compiles this ranking as a measure of the moment, drawn from discussions, emails, and observations gathered from members around the world. What keeps coming up, and more importantly... where?
Data from CNN.com captured the uniqueness of the online surge. CNN said it provided more than 21.3 million video streams over a nine-hour span up to midafternoon. That blew past the 5.3 million streams provided during all of Election Day. At its peak, CNN.com fed 1.3 million live streams simultaneously, according to Jennifer Martin, a spokeswoman for the site.
Value arises [in The Matrix franchise] from the process of looking for meaning (and the elaboration of the story by the audience) and not purely from the intentionality of the Wachowski brothers. What the Wachowski brothers did was trigger a search for meaning; they did not determine where the audience would go to find their answers. - Henry Jenkins,Convergence Culture
This is why it's worthwhile for brands to embrace recombinant culture. Constructing your brand in many disparate pieces, as The Matrix did when they extended their fictional narrative through graphic novels, animated shorts, and video games, creates new value. Inviting your audience to have different experiences with your brand through different forms of media, gives them the opportunity to become collaborators and co-creators of the brand. This ties in to the discussion of Why is Discovery is So Much More Valuable than Interruption?
Conceiving of a brand as a loose collection of distinct experiences is now the right approach for the age of conversation. Brand success is now dependent on inspiring people to talk about your brand on the web. And the unique experiences that each participant brings with them fuel their conversation. If they both have identical experiences, then they don't have much to talk about. But, if they each have unique experiences, in different places, with different messages, then they share their knowledge and begin to create new meaning for the brand.
We live in a world where we expect things to be taken apart and put back together in new way. We expect things to be remixed. You can learn all about the history of Recombinant Culture in this video of/from Faris Yakob.
How should Recombinant Culture affect the way that brands are imagined, constructed, and brought to life?
This was the big question posed to me by Ben Alter, a grad student at VCU Brandcenter. It's a lot to think about, so I'll only attempt to kick off a discussion, and look to Bud Caddell and Faris Yakob to pick it up and add their two, four, eight cents.
Traditionally a brand is created by and defined by an authoritative organization. This organization creates a name, a graphic icon, perhaps a mission, a core message, and certain qualities. It is created by the owners/producers of the products or services and then disseminated to the audience.
The biggest implication of Recombinant Culture is the destruction of this monolithic approach to branding.
1. A brand must be inspired by the culture of the audience you hope to reach.
2. The brand is not owned by the owners of the products and services it represents. And it is not defined by the words in the company's brand strategy Power Point presentation. Brands are owned by the people who support them, and they are defined by each person's perception of the brand's place in the culture, e.g. Brand Tags.
3. The things that represent the brand (name, logo, messaging, etc.) will be co-opted by the culture and used to represent what the people of the culture want them to represent (not necessarily what the company intended). The elements of the brand will be taken apart and put back together in ways that the organization never imagined.
The challenge for organizations now create experiences that have cultural resonance, and design your communications to be easily taken apart and reconstructed. Encourage your audience to discover their own meaning in their own way.
Well, that's a start. How should this post be taken apart? Where to next?
For brands on the web: if I don't see your sources (what you read, watch, and listen to) and which things you think are important enough to pass on, then I don't know who you are.
As I was trying to hash out what's special about branding for the web yesterday, Nick's comment sparked this thought. In this digital world we live in, our identity is increasingly defined by the information we choose to share, and what that information reveals about our sources of information.
We each have an ever-growing river of information coming at us. Blogs we read, links passed to us by our friends on Facebook and the people we follow on Twitter, Youtube channels we subscribe to, websites we've bookmarked, podcasts, etc. We constantly tweak and carefully curate this collection of sources. All of this information comes flooding in to us day after day, and we choose to pay the most attention to the things that are most important to us. With the ease of a mouse click, and perhaps a few keystrokes, we can pass it on to any number of people through any channel we want, i.e. email, a blog, social bookmarking, Twitter, Facebook.
This is the structure of web communications. We get to know people on the web through this same behavior. We observe what information and links they choose to share and we observe where that information came from. And by doing this day after day, we begin to get a sense of who that person is (and how much we like them).
The same rules for cultivating your online identity apply for brands. In a poster, bill board, or even TV commercial, it's enough to leave the audience with a feeling. If you're lucky, they might learn something, too, but most of the time all you can accomplish is affecting an emotion. If that emotion is powerful and it sticks, then you've done your job. But, if you approach web marketing the same way that you approach traditional advertising, you will be ignored. A brand can't define itself on the web simply by sparking a fleeting emotion, whether it's through a 5 second banner experience or even a 5 minute microsite experience.
Sharing information has become so fundamental to constructing and recognizing identity on the web, that without a continuous stream of outgoing information demonstrating what's important to you (beyond your product!), your audience will never know who you are.
If you describe your brand's personality as youthful, fun, optimistic, sophisticated, energetic, humorous, irreverent, or any other general term that people rarely use to describe themselves, then, in the words of Seth Godin, "you're boring."
As brands are brought to life online, through blogs, YouTube, Twitter profiles, and Facebook pages, they need to show as much personality as the real live human beings they interact with.
If you're a silly or funny brand, then you need to choose a particular kind of funny. Are you funny like Dane Cook? Or are you funny like Zach Galifianakis? (And, NO, you can not be both.)
If you're a fancy brand, then either be fancy like a fur coat or fancy like a new pair of Bathing Ape kicks.
The hard part is making choices. But, once you've made some decisions, the good news is that the internet makes it really easy for you to tell other people about yourself.
This is what we all do everyday across all these new communication platforms. We are cultivating and defining our identity through the information and content we choose to share.
As Rob Walker likes to point out, we are constantly striving to show each other how we're unique and how we fit in. I'm like these people, and I'm unlike those people. I like this movie, but I hate that movie. I like this presidential candidate, but I can't stand that one. I really care about helping children who are living in poverty, but I don't really care about the new Apple product announcement.
We carefully curate our personality as it comes to life on the web through every link we post, every message we send, every email we forward, and every blog we read. We cultivate our identity by choosing certain sources for our information, passing all of that information through a very personal filter, and choosing certain things to pass on to the people who follow us.
It's time for brands to start thinking this way, too.
I love this video as a metaphor for how building relationships on the web works. You've got to put in the time, be patient, keep going to the end of the pencil and the edge of the page.
"Fundamentally, languages are clusters of meaning - that is what grammar is about. This is also why languages interest me so much. My mind is interested in breaking things down and understanding complex relationships." - Daniel Tammet
The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's December 2008 tracking survey.
According to a Nov. 2008 report, 65% of teens, 12-17, have a social network profile. Which means there's a higher percentage of 18-24 year olds on these sites than teens.
In Feb. 2005, only 8% of adults had a profile, in 2006 it was up to 16%. Now 35% of all online adults have profiles.
In case anyone thought that this was just a fad...
What's really important here is not that people have Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn profiles. What's important is that the behavior of collecting and curating relationships in a searchable database, and the ability to access these relationships for increasingly real-time communication from anywhere at anytime is becoming normal. Wow.
Many brands have a nasty habit of throwing lavish online parties without ever getting to meet any of the attendees.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the eponymous host is famous for throwing fabulous parties at his mansion on East Egg, Long Island. Gatsby has created a mystique for himself because the parties are always full of strangers. They're incredibly fun and exciting, the food, the music, the drinks, the scenery, the people; none of the guests, however, ever get to meet Gatsby. No one even knows who Gatsby is.
This reminds me a lot of how many brands operate on the web. Create an incredible micro-site, tons of people visit it and have a great time. ...And then they go away and never come back. The same goes for stunts in social spaces like Facebook or MySpace. Do a big promotion, get lots of fans, and then disappear without ever actually meeting anyone.
This used to be ok. When your only measures of success were site visits (a one-time-only count) and the amount of time each visitor spends on your site, then all you need to do is make a big splash. You get your numbers and you start saving up for the next big marketing event.
But, if you're still measuring success on these terms you're going to wake up a year from now wondering what happened to your business.
Brands need to shift their focus from impressions to relationships. Every experience a brand creates should leave the brand with a larger community of supporters/fans than they had going in.
And I mean real relationships. Relationships that require true dialogue with a real live human being on the brand side. Relationships that are inspired by a feeling that we taking part in something bigger than ourselves, and more important than the brand (OMG!). Relationships that are fostered by sharing something of value with the community consistently over a long period of time.
Your business won't change overnight. But, the brands who embrace this way of thinking are going to be in the lead when we come out of this economic hairpin turn.
But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if TheNew York Times goes out of business—like, this May? It’s certainly plausible. Earnings reports released by the New York Times Company in October indicate that drastic measures will have to be taken over the next five months or the paper will default on some $400million in debt. With more than $1billion in debt already on the books, only $46million in cash reserves as of October, and no clear way to tap into the capital markets (the company’s debt was recently reduced to junk status), the paper’s future doesn’t look good.
A member of the “Optimalist” heath club hacks a hole into the ice covering a canal near the village of Viazynka, Belarus on December 28, 2008. The club promotes a healthy way of living, encouraging its members to spend most of their free time in the countryside. (via The Big Picture - Boston.com)
A couple weeks ago, I mentioned this fantastic collection of 50 truths and insights by Graham Brown at mobileYouth. I've picked out a few of my favorite lines that I think get to the heart of forging meaningful connections.
1. Attention is your biggest cost.
2. IVORY TOWER Let's get it into our heads that youth don't wake up thinking about our brands.
3. Ask yourself, "What is the social currency of my product?"
4. Marketing is no longer something you do to youth, but something you do with them.
7. Awareness means nothing. When was the last time you bought a Cadillac?
11. Patient youth marketing strategies will win out. Focus on building a beachhead of passionate supporters who love your product.
14. DRIVERS Can you help me belong? Can you help me be significant? These are two timeless and culturally-independent requests youth have for your brand.
19. Good youth marketing is focused on share of customer, not share of market.
49. TRENDS Don't waste your efforts on searching for the next great thing. It is the same as the last one: a product that delivered more social currency to youth than all of its rivals.
50. Lifestyle or Product? Red Bull will become the gold standard of youth marketing because it understands its business is "energy" not "energy drinks" just as mobile companies need to consider their business as the social fabric of youth not a mobile product.
These thoughts illustrate what I believe are a few of the central tenets of marketing in 2009:
People's lives don't revolve around your brand, they revolve around life. People's behavior and decisions are motivated by their relationships, their careers, by love, by passions, by hobbies. Brands can only hope to become a part of it after they begin to respect it.
Pass-along is made of people. The internet is awesome at making it easier for people to tell other people about the things that are important to them. But, people only choose to share your brand with other people if it has social value, i.e. Will this help me to fit in, or show how I'm unique?
Invest in long term relationships. The internet is awesome for building relationships, creating fans, and earning advocates. But, every successful blogger will tell you that you can't do it with one great blog post. It takes hundreds of great blog posts, every day, for a year.
Well, the other day, I read this short article from the Economist about how companies are learning to adapt to the expectations and take advantage of the unique talents of their younger employees. Best Buy has been using their young employee's tech-savvy to save them millions of dollars and to make useful additions to their web-presence:
Net Geners’ knowledge of internet technology can also help companies save money. Consider the case of Best Buy, a big American consumer-electronics retailer. Keen to create a new employee portal, the firm contacted an external consultancy that quoted it a price of several million dollars. Shocked by this, a group of young Best Buy employees put together a small team of developers from their own networks who produced a new portal for about $250,000. Another Net Gener at the company cobbled together a mobile-phone version of Best Buy’s website for fun in seven days in his spare time.
Guess who built that mobile version of Best Buy's website in a week? None other than Ben Hedrington, the web development elf. I sent Ben an email and asked him how m.bestbuy.com came to be?
The mobile site was conceived of, prototyped, and built almost 2 years ago largely on my spare time. The site was quickly put together in seven days [using] very rudimentary data feeds from BestBuy.com, enough to be dangerous, but not do everything I wished. I was trying to show people I work with that these concepts are simple to execute, Mobile HTML sites are about equivalent to sites in 1998 :), and can be prototyped in production inexpensively and quickly rather than a big IT project where you needed to flesh out "requirements" for a channel that is in it's infancy and would change 10 times before you finish your too long and too expensive project.
The mobile site is primarily informational, allowing people in a store to look up product specs and user reviews from their phone while they're browsing.
The tools are out there to let anyone deliver competent web applications with less and less work that actually add value and can be iterated and grown over time rather than big IT efforts looking to deliver the world that falter under their own weight.
Big corporations are so used to working with big agencies on big projects that it's difficult for them to adapt to this new way of working. Small projects. Iterative process. Limited bureaucracy. But, best of all, small budgets and limited risk.
Every corporation in the world should be seeking out this kind of embedded intelligence, and making effective use of it. Create systems for discovering these talents. Create regular rewards for employees who share these talents. And create ways for groups of employees to find each other and begin collaborating.
More and more you will find that this is how people expect to work - flexible interests, collaborative, non-hierarchical - because this is how the internet works. Adapt.
Best Buy is continuing to embrace this thinking. Ben has a challenge for you (and your companies):
This thinking continues to progress with remix.bestbuy.com where we are putting the data into publicly available APIs. I challenge your readers [to] sign up for Best Buy Remix and create a better mobile site than I could at the time... it very is possible with the tools at your finger tips.
Their discussion focused on social production, how participants are valued, and how they can work with each other or with commercial entities to create things of worth. At the end I was lucky enough to have Benkler answer my question:
How does participation in these user-powered content environments shape the way we value ourselves-as-the-crowd?
I concur with Benkler's relatively rosy outlook. You can already see evidence of it when you look at something like Obama's "crowd" of supporters.
Basically, Benkler's saying that it used to be that something was created by some kind of unified authoritative source. And then the audience was passively supportive or invested in that thing.
But now, "the increasingly widespread practice of people coming together for effective purposes" is changing how audiences or crowds perceive themselves and what they're capable of. Think about how a generation of people who have grown up taking Wikipedia for granted will think about themselves differently. They recognize the power in many people coming together, each making small contributions, and their collective work adding up to something huge and meaningful.
Benkler posits that the result of this shift is that individuals are beginning to perceive other individuals differently. Other people now are seen as potential collaborators and participants in a conversation, and we see ourselves as more effective agents because of our ability to work with others.
Benkler then optimistically asserts that this societal shift may lead to the adoption of a new class of virtues, The Virtues of Collective Action and Collaboration. Benkler alludes to generosity and friendship being among these virtues, but I wonder what these really would be. What are the virtues of the blogosphere? of Twitter? of being a good Facebook citizen? Certainly each environment has its own virtues, but are there also overarching virtues across all of these environments?
This past week was a little slow in the internet, so instead of posting the usual best of Tumblr, I'm sharing a collection of my favorite comments left on this blog.
Without readers, any blog might as well just be an offline notebook. Thanks so much for reading this blog, and sharing such thoughtful and thought provoking feedback.
The first three blog posts are easy. Tweeting for a few weeks - no sweat. But what are you doing 6 months, 2 years from now? That takes commitment. A commitment most brand managers aren't ready to make or don't understand the need for.
What's interesting to think about is the concept of resources. What's being consumed in the rapid growth of content dissemination? Surely there's the element of social currency, or the sense that you've shared something that the recipient hasn't seen before, or in essence, you've beaten the clock to disseminate something before someone else. Each piece of content carries with it only so much potential social currency (maybe physics is a better analogy, like potential energy) and the act of spreading it is dispensing that energy through kinetic motion...
It was fascinating to see how the hype for Napoleon Dynamite grew over the next few months, from people quoting the movie to the magnets on my mom's fridge that she got at Hot Topic (don't ask). I think this hype machine did make a lot of people automatically dismiss the movie itself, which is a shame. ... I know this post isn't really about Napolean Dynamite, but it's funny, because the films that are apparently hard to predict ratings on are really represent classic themes and storylines, just wrapped in a different package. But I guess most people just see moon boots and chapstick, Tokyo karaoke in a pink wig, CGI fish and a yellow jumpsuit.
Off the top of my head, engagement is good and positive, but it is the tip of the iceberg. It transforms into participation when you are actually caught up in the two-way flow of conversation (eg when you comment or receive a comment). But affinity (to me) is where it transforms, yet again, into something deeper. Something personal. Where the link between the brand and the consumer (or the brand and my sense of self) intertwines.
I've been pushing a number of projects towards a multi-platform-distribution approach for some time. Yet we're only skimming the surface of transmedia planning in such situations. Because we generally don't allow for Recombinant behavior. We want clean and easy UGC. Upload your stories, videos. And maybe we'll include them in our sexy, sculpted piece. But what about encouraging users to mash up our media "properties"? What about encouraging users to distort and change our work?
This is a post from Mike's old blog, from 2007-2009. You can read Mike's current blog at mikearauz.wordpress.com.
Visit mikearauz.com for lots more good stuff from Mike's Twitter, Tumblr, Google Reader and more.
About Mike
Mike Arauz is a Senior Strategist at Undercurrent, and lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Mike's interested in media, marketing, technology, photography, film, food, and politics. This blog is where Mike goes to collect his thoughts. Email: him[at]mikearauz[dot]com
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