And with the New Year come the onslaught of best of lists for everything and anything, along with the soon to be forgotten personal and professional resolutions.

Then there are the predictions of things to come – where most insightful reports, trend spotting predictions on economic, political, business and cultural changes to come become too easily lost in the fray as the world picks after the holidays with work-lives and deadlines resume their normal course.

That said, I’d like to re-share and recirculate this nice compilation of insights and prognosis from 34 business and marketing leaders as part of Awareness Networks 2012 Social Marketing and New Media Predictions report. It’s written for marketing strategists, brand marketers and consults and those working in agencies.   I think its worth re-sharing in the New Year so it finds its way into new smart, capable  hands and minds, and out of the cacophony and morass of so many other 2012 year end predictions.

This ones a keeper and with some pretty savvy insights on not only things to come – but how to get there and how its going to effect business, brands and our culture today.

Here were some of my contribution and thoughts for the report:

On the subject of Big Data:

There is the ‘ole saying – “Information is Power.”   However, Information and Knowledge alone may no longer be enough.

For decades, the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing industry have been trying to deliver actionable data and information through crunching, segmenting and filtering “Big Data.”   No doubt, those initiatives will continue – with the goal of helping large businesses capture and respond to mega movements and trends over time.

Alas, today’s culture and economy have more become Socially & Relevancy driven – where time, immediacy, context, passion and value have become the gestalt-driven commodity that drives influence, commerce and authentic, raw power.

In 2012 and in years to come, Social will transform the value of “Big Data” – providing the depth, relevancy, color, resolution, context, personality and even time-sensitive geo-dynamics that will transform the current black & white, antiquated 12 point, pixaletd picture of a customer and market into a more actionable, real-time, life-engaging definition, providing a fuller dimension of their customers and the business opportunity ahead of them.  Alas, there is socially-driven cultural expectation and responsibility to companies – whose usage and response to shared “Social” data, Micro or Big, can become perilous or powerfully supportive, depending on how they respond – or don’t.

Social can provide immense value to the “Big Data” collected and analyzed by companies today.   But once you incorporate personal and Socially shared information into any business process – you must also be prepared to transform that process.   For the more socially driven your brand becomes online, purposeful or unplanned, the greater responsibility and expectation to acknowledge, recognize the voice and growing community.     Whether companies like it, or even are aware of it – the value of “Big Data” can no longer be solely realized within corporate walls and departments.   Big Data needs to be acted upon – openly – and fast and furiously.

On the Top Challenge for Marketers in Social:

Integration – Integration – Integration.    Tying together the business insight, value, knowledge, information and opportunities discovered from social business programs into and across business functions.    Social for social sake will no longer be enough.   A model and process on how social is helping drive sales, influence buying decisions, saving time, resources and transforming service support and changing the manner products and services are developed and brought to market.    If you can’t measure its impact – it will not hold the interest and funding of executive teams.

Though important to note: many times you need to reexamine what your measuring and the old school metrics that once drove programs and companies.   Getting back to business growth, sales, brand development and monies earner and saved and you’re on the right track

]]> http://collinsdna.com/are-we-there-yet-2012-social-marketing-new-media-predictions/feed/ 0 http://collinsdna.com/branding-marketing-take-note-the-best-experience-wins/ http://collinsdna.com/branding-marketing-take-note-the-best-experience-wins/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:02:14 +0000 Admin http://collinsdna.com/?p=210 With the advent of the iPhone 5 being launched this month, Advertising, Branding and Marketing firms take note – The Best Experience Wins.

After the launch of the initial iPhone back in ‘07, Creativity magazine a year later chose to honor the iPhone rather than an ad campaign. It marked the ad industry’s arrival at a critical juncture.  Moving forward with consumers in control of ever more of the marketing conversation and economic news getting worse, design is now displacing messaging as the engine of brand success.

Brilliant design cuts out the marketing middleman – the traditional agency writers and art directors – and creates its own media.
Like Occam’s Razor, it whittles the marketing equation down to simplest principles: the best experience wins.

Not the best promise. Not the cleverest copy. Not the Big Idea or the biggest budget.

The best experience wins.

Apple didn’t invent the smart phone. They simply transformed the users’ experience. iPhone demonstrates how focused, user-driven design thinking can be more profound than any “equal” amount of creativity applied to traditional marketing communications.

Let’s count the ways:

1. Design Has the Potency to Rearrange Markets. The iPhone dramatically accelerated the world market for smart phones as well as capturing market share for Apple. The iPhone experience also transformed the way we envision phones and our personal connectivity to everything and everyone around us.  The usability to actually make a quality call became a secondary feature set, often a negligible criteria all together.  And for an advanced digital driven product, it brought back the ‘ole Five & Dime Woolworth retail trademark, bringing products out from behind counters, allowing customers to inspect, touch and handle it before they buy.   (Interestingly enough, software has taken on a similar sensory, synaptic path in no longer just needing to solve a specific problem, entertain or fulfill a need – it needs to drive and deliver an experience.   And now, Google Takes on Apples Stores with London Chromezone)

2. Design Ain’t Cosmetics. Smarter companies have finally realized that design isn’t pretty. It’s strategy for making remarkable things happen. Tarted-up Blackberrys like “Curve” and “Pearl” outsold the original, but employees at Fortune 500 companies are clamoring for iPhones – with 93% F-500 testing or deploying them.  The iPhone design paved the way for the successful Google Android movement – it will be interesting to see which will deliver the better experience.

3. Design creates an architecture of participation. Great brands turn audiences into participants because experience is personal in ways that media can’t be. (I was with my son at the video store, yes they still exist, where he said -”Look, a new Disney movie.  He was pointing out ‘Mars Needs Moms’ and I told him I heard it wasn’t very good.  He turned to me and said, “But Dad – It’s Disney!  It has to be good.”  After further back and forth he said, “Okay Dad, we won’t rent it today – I’ll just catch it on your phone later.”) Good Design experience drives participation and brings the brand to life.   The iPhone (as well as Disney) has a top gear that most competitors don’t have. Apple opened up the platform for independent application developers and inventive users and look what happened.  It’s the market leading smart phone, over 500,000 apps available, 1 billion downloads per month, 100,000 developers have received $3 billion to date.  It grows every day, often in unexpected ways like a coral reef, as user/participants add their mites of knowledge. Sure, Apple may be controlling as to what gets released and approved as an App – but its primarily concerned with ensuring a designed experience that propels the brand.

4. Design drives the conversation. In law, res ipsa loquitur means “the thing speaks for itself” better than any argument could. A design like the iPhone speaks for itself. Sure, Apple ran ads for iPhone. But their campaign had none of the “insights” and slick imagery that are 21st century arguments for technology brands. It didn’t promise to make us cool or more productive. Instead, iPhone ads are throwbacks to Ron Popeil’s Vegematic TV demonstrations – “It slices! It dices!” – of the 1970’s that simply showed the thing in action. (Check apple.com to see an irresistible fifteen-minute version of those initial ads.)   And the new series of Google Chrome Ads deliver the same type of hands-on and personalized user experience storytelling.

WHAT SHOULD SCARE thinking people at the world’s ad & digital agencies is that these ads could easily have been done in-house.

Today’s smartest brands are working miles upstream from most agencies. They are putting more intelligence, more imagination and more money into the product experiences they provide.

Brands like Apple and Google are harbingers of a tectonic shift in what matters to people; and even today’s best Digital and Social only shops have as much to fear as any legacy agency. The social digital age is an all-way street, and creatives are no longer in control. The pathways that transmit viral messages can doom a new entry as quickly as they can build buzz. Those “Come see our cool new thing” website, blog or Pre-Galilean model of the universe driven behavior is an outdated strategy.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but clicks don’t necessarily represent real participation any more than using the TV remote to change channels. YouTube is growing ( and fall under the increasingly silly term “new media” ) but 99% of the experience is still passive viewing, like network TV on steroids. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

NEW MEDIA or OLD – DIGITAL or SOCIAL, crappy products can still look great in advertising and great products still work better in real life. By “products” I mean all the artifacts and actions of a brand – the item itself and how it does what it does, the website, its packaging, the store, how its people say “hello” through out every experienced touchpoint, on and off-line, the ease and beauty and rightness of every step of the consumer’s journey.

Advertising and Marketing can play a crucial role, but design is the broader platform because it is our experiences that shape our actions, beliefs and stories we share.

As more marketers apply design thinking to their brands, budgets may become the price that their competitors pay for mediocre design – a tax on laggards. This is good news for some of us. Products that will still need to be pushed, will keep agency creative departments busy and media shops flush.

IN A TALK at the Web 2.0 Conference, NYU media topologist Clay Shirky calculated that Americans spend 100 million hours each weekend just watching TV commercials. 100 million hours. That’s a lot of passive viewing. Especially when you figure that “only” 100 million hours of active individual intellectual effort went into creating Wikipedia so far. (If America put its mind to it, we could build another Wikipedia during the commercial breaks in a single weekend.)

The larger point is this: Your mother was right. There are much better things to do than watch TV. Most of us just don’t know what those better things are until somebody designs them for us.

Like consumers, 21st century advertisers have lots more channels on their remote, but what they really want is for their brand to be one of the consumer’s Fab Five, and have the consumer put some energy into the relationship. Brands want participation, not passivity, and the 200 billion hours that U.S. consumers now spend watching TV is where the time will come from as more compelling experiences are designed.

The question that design asks is: “What would you like consumers to do with you?” instead of “how many more messages can get them to watch?”

DO YOU WANT a “persuasion score”? Or do you want to actually change minds and shape behavior? The pressures on clients to maintain meaningful, differentiated brands in this economy will be mind-bending. As GE’s Geoffrey Immelt told the IBM CEO survey, “We’re now all just one step away from Commodity Hell.”

Not quite all. There’s only one Apple. There’s only one Google. One Facebook. They each deliver a singular experience.

And the Best Experience Wins.

More than ever we are seeing the term “Media” becoming disassociated with the “Social” online movement of today – and that’s a good thing.  Social is not a marketing media channel as it has been overly referenced.  The real power of Social is its ability to build worlds of engaged communities on a scaleable basis.

One of the most vibrant examples of Social today is within the rapidly expanding Social Gaming industry.   It has become the one of the fastest growing market sectors and expected to increase fivefold to $5 billion between now and 2015.

Our next Social Media Breakfast will feature presentations by some of the most advanced thinkers and executives in Social Gaming - bringing a fresh variety of first hand experiences, insights and stories to share. From social gaming platform developers to online social game communities – our group of speakers will share a full spectrum of perspectives on the state of the movement.

SMB23: Social Gaming – The Evolution of Business

• Jeff Anderson – Founder and CEO of QuickHit
  
• Monty Sharma - VP/GM Founder at Vivox
  
• Jon Radoff – CEO of Disruptor Beam and author of “Game On”
  
• Dale Strang - CEO of Viximo

Boston’s Social Media Breakfast is organized by Bob Collins and brings together business leaders, marketers and entrepreneurs for a morning of networking and sharing of ideas and innovation.

Groupon, the so-called social buying site (even though there is very little social going on outside of the manipulation of basic human behaviors like their reaction to a situation where there is sense of scarcity) and the fastest growing company in history, is bad for your business.

It’s bad for your business for a number of reasons.

1) It destroys the profitability within your market

Coupons trigger people’s pleasure side of their brain, that is the site that gets addicted to things and that requires more over time in order to get the same satisfaction.  So if you run a 50% off campaign in your local area or in your industry it will be very hard for anyone in your sector to come back to the pricing levels that you used to get. In effect you destroy profitability not just for you, but for all involved. If you don’t believe that, check out Utpal Dkolakia’s recent study on Groupon. 32% of companies said that the Groupon campaign was unprofitable with only 25% of redeemers buying additional products beyond the ones offered through the coupon and only 15% of coupon users coming back.

3) You destroy all customer loyalty

It is a well documented fact that coupons destroy customer loyalty.  It is the one differentiator that can easily be copied by others. So if you shift your business to one where the differentiator is price (or coupons), you destroy customer loyalty – not just for you but for all parties in your market.

Instead of focusing on discounts and coupons companies should focus their efforts on longer lasting competitive differentiators like delivering amazing service, products of real value, that entice and excite people to share their experiences with friends, workmates and within their industry.

Generating awareness for a brand is one thing – having to lure customers in with the promise of value through a 50% discount diminishes everyone and everything involved in the long-haul.

We hear about these successes within consumer focused and B2C social programs all to often.  Dell, Jet Blue, P&G, Home Depot, Sharpieand H&R Block are all such examples.

Yet the same unique strategy of listening, storytelling and sharing that make B2C digital engagement programs a success hold true for B2B, perhaps even more.   They tend to be less well known for the unique nature of B2B which tend to be focused on addressing niche vertical market needs.

Making Big Iron Fun & Worth Talking About

Not every household needs an IBM Mainframe or aGerman engineered, industrial level, self-cleaning toilet system.  But you will find ideas and eventual success within B2B business by encouraging personal and professional interests from within the company’s employee base who have a keen drive and unique knowledge to share.  A sense of humor, personal touch and authenticity help as well.
These invaluable resources have no unique title, hold no particular degree, years of training or experience and most often are not part of the communications or executive teams.  They are within your R&D, Customer Service, Product Development, Human Relations, IT, Sales, Training, Financial, Operations, Marketing, Branding and even Legal departments.

Emerging social teams within B2B companies today need to ensure they tap into all resources, divisions, departments and business units to educate and harness these invaluable gems.  Social media is not another department within a company.  No more silos.  Social dynamics can become the Digital Bridge that runs through every touch point of a company and then out to your customers, partners, market influencers and industry.  This happens just like the energy of one of natures most powerful elements – water.  Tap into and harness it.   Identify those rich giving resources within your employee base – encourage, support them.

How do you tap into the your teams’ potential and harness it?

I’ve been meeting with a variety B2B companies lately.  All of these companies are very successful and market movers within their industries.

As we’ve been planning out ways to build their digital channel, extend their brand equity online and help grow their business – part of our conversations have lead to storytelling.

At its very core, good marketing is storytelling.   The best marketing programs – service engagements, product experiences take us on an emotional journey appealing to our wants, needs and passions for something larger, deeper, more personal and connected. All the while, connecting with their customers – with the best traits of good storytelling.

Grabbing your attention from the start, pulling us in and taking us on an adventure along with characters and situations you can believe in and associate with elements of humor, drama, spectacle, action or mystery as catalysts to spark attention and interest. All the while cutting through any marketing hyperbole and inwardly focused messaging because good storytelling is about engaging with an audience – tapping into their needs, passions, fears – not talking about yourself.

Storytelling Can Become Your Differentiator

Facts and figures, function, specifications and price all still matter, for certain. But it takes stories to connect with customers on an emotional level. The motivation to choose one brand, solution provider over another – when the choices are vast.

Now Comes The Creative Content Strategy
Theme Focus: Humor

IBM used Humor to humanize their Mainframe business.  A mainstay and very profitable business line for IBM but perhaps not the coolest or easiest to excite people about.

IBM turned to Tim Washer , a bona fide, professional comedian and storyteller to humanize their complex product line.   I met Tim last month at a Harvard Business School event where he spoke about his role as head of social media productions for IBM.  What first attracted my attention to Tim works was an article in TEXAS magazine, followed by a blog post about this viral video he helped produce for IBM.    And to Tim and IBM’s credit, they’ve measured the impact of these humorous Office like produced videos.

More recently, software giant, Infor, launched an interesting marketing campaign against their competitors, SAP and Oracle.   The campaign revolves around an Infor sponsored website called DownWithBigERP.com.

The campaign includes a “Declaration of Software Independence” and describes their competitors as “Big ERP”.   And they’ve  moved their storytelling beyond its main website – establishing its main messaging persona on Twitter and cross multiple social and digital channels.

To be a successful brand storyteller, you must first understand how your brand’s products and services meet a customer’s emotional needs.  Even business-to-business products and services fulfill emotional needs:  I will get promoted. I won’t get fired.  I will be a hero if this works.
Next, understand not only where your customer will be exposed to your message, but what their emotional state will be when engaged with that media.

Lastly, tell a consistent story about your company, your product or your service regardless of where the message is delivered.  Inconsistencies degrade the power of the story and cause mistrust.

Every brand has a story.  Tell it well, and you’ll give your customers a reason to believe.

Photo Credit: Sean Drellinger

When it came to sports, I grew up with Jim McKay and ABC’s Wide World of Sports.   The stories, the action, different cultures and the world it brought into my living room through our small color Zenith TV.   ??When not picking up a game of street hockey, neighborhood football down at the old park or summer little league, sports came into my life through the television.   I was never drawn into listening to classic announcer Johnny Most calling a Celtics game on the radio – or reading the Sports section of the Boston Globe or even read one article in Sports Illustrated.  To me, sports was hands on and a visual media to be experienced – not via print or radio.

Traditional print content producers are starting to realize this as well.  Some are a little too late to the game, not evolving quickly enough, but others are embracing development of different digital channels and content formats to reach a wider audience.   Providing different choices for choice audiences to experience and immerse themselves in great content through different media options.

This is why I love the recent Time Inc. vision of the future magazine using a tablet device.  If you can’t view the video below, you can also check it out on YouTube.

It seems that every major magazine publisher has an idea of how their magazines should look on the upcoming tablet of newspaper salvation.  The demo showcases interactivity, video, and several different ways of browsing through the content.

Outside of the disturbingly inhuman looking, slow moving hand that flips through the pages – I find myself for the first time wanting to immerse myself within Sports Illustrated content.  In time, I may find myself loving the style of writing that they’ve been recognized for and get to know some of the sub-brands within SI which would encourage me to spend more time with their journalists and reporters and pick up an issue (read: more money for Sports Illustrated).

When the content is great, it lives to be freed.   And with the variety of creative ways content can be developed, engaged and distributed through digital and social channels, the future of great publishing could be and should bright.    The new generation of eBook readers showcased at CES earlier this month is another step in the right direction - creating a virtual newsstand in your hand.

The Future of Publishing Should Localize, Specialize and Socialize

Consumer and B2B magazines may have been on the ropes this year, but custom content had a record-setting 2009.

According to a Custom Publishing Council study, more than $1.8 million was spent on branded content this year per company surveyed. Of that budget, print still ruled, garnering 51% of the spend, with Internet content accounting for 27%.  Another 22% went to developing audio and video assets on a company’s behalf.  The share of marketing budgets going to custom media was at 32% in 2009, the highest share ever, beating the previous bar set at 27% in 2007.

Customize your voice, promote your niche, and engage more personally with great content while adding local relevancy.   And of course – provide multiple choice, creative, rich content and multiple media formats for a growing customer base to rejuvenate brands and grow an audience, revenues and business.

What are your thoughts?

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I learn a lot about life from my son – and strive to embrace new adventures and opportunities with as much uninhibited passion and joy as he. And that’s my wish to all this fine week.

Go paint, swim, sing, sail, dive into a pumpkin patch, write a story, make chocolate pizza or learn to ride a bike.

Everyone was a great artist one time – they’re work proudly displayed on refrigerators across the Globe.  

Why not again?  

Try that new position or venture with friends, make Lemonade, put on a play and rediscover yourself and what drives you. 

In the age of social marketing – we’re seeing that type of engagement & wonder slowly seeping back into the corporate culture – and not just B2C.   Alas – we need to move beyond the Speeds and Feeds marketing and start sharing and telling stories once again. 

Where have all the storytellers gone?   Where are the Don Draper’s of the marketing age gone?     Check out this clip where he talks about the power of emotion in communications.