the communication medium helps evolve the product

22 Jun, 2010 • posts i've written • 3 comments

Last week, Stephen Walker made the point to me that early print ads, with their large headlines, focused producers on the unique selling proposition of their products. And as advertising gained the advantage of moving pictures, the unique selling proposition became the emotional selling proposition and the modern concept of the brand.

I thought it over and re-watched this TED talk from David Byrne on how architecture has helped evolve musical form.

I think the point can be made that communication mediums help evolve the product (and not just the marketing). But if that is so, products should be evolving to be more social, or spreadable in digital communication mediums. Is that so? Well, there is Baker Tweets for one.

And products should be evolving to be more interactive with our handheld devices, those mini super computers we’re so fond of, is that so? Well, there was the Yelp augmented reality iPhone app for one.

All of which was an interesting afternoon thought for thirty seconds until I realized, dammit, that I was beaten to the punch by at least forty years.

As Faris would say, originality is a myth.

The lesson is that, in a new environment, products without these traits, spreadability and interactivity, are more likely to suffer the fate of the unlucky Dodo.

marketing to developing online communities

07 Apr, 2010 • posts i've written • 1 comment

a bit of a work in progress – click to see full size

I’m sharing this thought in-process: how do we identify community needs and satisfy those needs as brands/organizations?

Two attributes of communities seem absolutely essential to addressing their needs (the names aren’t quite right yet):

1. Findability on-line: how easy is it to search for and target members of a community and the digital centers of gravity for that community’s activities
2. Maturity of community identity & cohesion: how strong is the group’s identity (meaning how useful is it in defining individual identity), how tightly connected are the members of this community – is it a community or a dispersed crowd

In the diagram, I’ve plotted the rough trajectory of three types of communities. These are over-simplifications, to be sure, but I’m trying to demonstrate the maturation of different types of communities and how that maturation differentiates their needs:

1. Media Property Fan Communities: as an example, consider fans of Lost. These fans belonged to other communities before the show began, but were not declared Lost fans until the program aired. Moreover, as we use our fandom to define our identity online, in many digital networks it’s easy to spot fans of the program (b/c they joined a group or clicked ‘Like’) but in the early stages of the fan community, it was difficult to communicate with all Lost fans unless you were the producers themselves – the community needed time to develop connections.
2. Traditional Movements: or, put another way, grassroots movements pre-digital or without digital tools in early development. Perhaps early members of the movement have very few digital behaviors or participate in relatively few digital platforms. But as participation and awareness grows, the community may ultimately consist of members with more digital behaviors.
3. Modern Movements: Perhaps I’m over simplifying by plotting this progression at a 45-degree angle and of course very few communities would progress exactly so – but the Obama campaign, as an example, would seem to have developed in very  much this way. Please debate in the comments.

In addition to plotting the progression of communities along these two dimensions, I’ve begun considering marketing activities that take advantage of inflection points along the development of a community:

• Provide digital tools to grow and coordinate group: Groups that are forming without digital tools/behaviors and offline from digital platforms are typically regionally focused movements – to leapfrog borders and demographics, outside organizations/brands can use their digital pulpits to increase awareness of the nascent community (in the way niche music/art communities are used/propelled by brands) or by actually building/licensing tools to facilitate digital communications between members.
• Provide opportunities for cooperation and collaboration: At this point, community members need to be connected in more meaningful ways – and these connections can be made and strengthened through collaboration and cooperation. But to be honest, this type of activity, at this point in the community, has a higher success rate if begun by the media property or the fans themselves.
• Market spreadable products and content: Only when community members are both findable and tightly connected should an outside brand or organization begin to develop and deploy products and content for that community (you should also ask yourself if you’re targeting an actual community or a disconnected cluster of communities).

words to think by

25 Jan, 2010 • posts i've written • No comments

I’ve added a new page to my site: quotes on marketing, culture, and digital

The quotes are from some of my favorite thinkers on the intersection of those subjects, and people I quote all too-often without some kind of public shrine to smart thinking like this. Regardless of what you do, or where you do it, these folks tend to offer the kind of point of view that forces you to spin an argument around and take it in from all sides.

Of course, it’s just a start. And I’d love to hear your favorite quotes from your favorite thinkers, so please, drop a name, a link, and some love in the comments.

Jump to quotes by: Mike Arauz, danah boyd, William Gibson, Henry Jenkins, Grant McCracken, Clay Shirky, Faris Yakob

And if you dig the idea, and want to help advocate a bit more thinking in everyone’s day, please consider linking to the page. Thanks so much!

technology and sexuality

16 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 1 comment

Late yesterday afternoon I stumbled on a Techcrunch post for location-based technology start-up, FapMap. In case you didn’t know, fap is internet slang for the onomatopoeic representation of masturbation.

What is the FapMapper? It’s a utility created by the fun-loving folks at Pink Visual that allows you to put your sex acts, porn consumption habits and erotic fantasies on the map – literally. Have you and your girlfriend or boyfriend recently had sex in a location that was particularly interesting or exotic? Mark that spot on FapMapper and establish your bragging rights! Did you sneak in a quick jerk somewhere inappropriate? Well, Map that Fap, brother!

Humorous? Sure. But no one’s going to use it, right? Well, go check your city. New York already has dozens of pins with random sexual exploits and adult entertainment retail reviews ready for you to peruse.

Of course, technology and sexuality have always been close bedfellows.

Perhaps nothing proves this point more than the fact that the largest consumer electronics convention (CES) just happens to occur simultaneously with the largest adult entertainment convention (AVN), in the same city (Las Vegas) every year in early January. This year, Spike TV is heading to AVN with adult film star darling Sasha Grey for in-depth coverage.

Porn went mainstream a long time ago. There’s almost nothing in our society as universal as pornography, at least according to researchers at the University of Montreal.

The sex toy industry alone is valued annually at USD $15 billion with a growth rate of 30%. And which free-wheeling, sexually and technologically advanced culture produces up to 70% of the product? Well, that’d be China.

Advertising is premeditated on our desires: our desires to live, to feast, and to reproduce. Beyond beautiful bodies and perfect faces in their advertising, however, most brands are weary to tread too closely to our sexual desires. And as they’ve clung to that often resurgent American puritanical spirit, our sexual appetite has evolved with our adoption of high-speed internet and on-demand sexual indulgence.

Not to say, however, that porn and lust are 20th century inventions. Some of the very earliest forms of artistic work among the historical record are tokens of fertility and sexual expression. But given the option of stone statue or streaming internet video, well, let’s be grateful for electricity, internet connectivity, and modern convenience.

There’s at least one publicly traded American enterprise firmly standing for sexuality – American Apparel. American Apparel reported net sales for the third quarter of 2009 of $150.3 million. Not bad for a company that didn’t have a retail store until 2003.

On the web, Nerve.com has been publishing content at the intersection of technology, culture, and sexuality since its founding in 1997. Nerve has also been facilitating sex with their personals service (which now extends to over 100 publishers). As a New Yorker, one of the best conversations to have is to ask your friends for their embarrassing/interesting Nerve dating experiences (you’d be surprised at how many people have them). Nerve has experienced steady growth here in the US, but according to Quantcast they’re seeing a higher growth among global visitors. All in all, not too shabby for a near thirteen year old online publication considering the fate of a majority of their peers. Vice Magazine and VBS.tv are both excellent additional case studies on the matter.

As more and more brands find themselves entering the technology space to stay current with culture, it seems impossible for them to ignore the routine expression of our sexual selves through the same technology – and it seems less fruitful for them to do so.

velcro interactions

11 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Brands are starting to understand that in order to have an impact on people within online social networks (that’s where people spend their time online), they have to participate in decentralized channels, in decentralized ways, communicating to disparate niche audiences.

But what do to with that .com?

Well, first off, remember that its value is measured in the people that come there and the actions they take while there. And second, remember that if you aren’t leveraging your digital dollars to encourage spreadable behaviors, you’re not spending effectively.

A strategy I’d like to suggest is something I call Velcro Interactions (because all strategies need cool names) – essentially, creating interactions between your .com and those social networks that bridge and connect the two closer together in visible ways.

Here’s a very tactical example: Mashable.com, for their summer of social good, donated $1 to charity for every retweet of their content on Twitter. So actions within a network affected their hub in a very real and obvious way (and it was easy to watch and count the retweets as they happened).

Another example? The Shorty Awards required you to tweet for a nominee for the vote to register. It brought a good deal of attention/traffic for the .com (b/c it showed up within communities of twitter users) and it encouraged ongoing participation because of its persistence within Twitter.

But the effects don’t always have to go in that direction. Imagine if a brand provided a truly valuable or useful tool for a popular site or social network that only became active when enough actions were taken it on its hub .com.

Give it a mull. Got more examples? I’m actually looking for them, so please share!

how to define a marketing strategy

07 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 3 comments

Business Objectives – I want to be awesome, too, but… remember the difference between goals and objectives? Objectives should be measurable and objectives should be stated BEFORE anything is enacted. Your objectives define the desired future for your team, and create a vision everyone can work towards.

Business Constraints – I’d like to etch my likeness in the moon with a laser, too, but… Constraints can and should include budgets, timing, product availability, team availability, responsiveness, legal concerns, etc. Again, this should be understood, to your best ability, BEFORE anything is enacted.

Competitive Insights – I like to pretend I’m the only person in the world sometimes, too, but… The activities of your competitors matter; they’re seeking the same consideration, attention, and resources from your customers as you are. Look beyond numbers. Try to define their current strategy, its effectiveness, and how they’re accomplishing their objectives.

Consumer Insights – Sometimes I imagine myself as Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, too, but… Just because you build it, create it, or advertise it, doesn’t mean they’ll come. Understanding where people are, how they spend their time, why they share information, and what motivates all of these behaviors is essential; and the more that this work is outsourced the more disservice is done to the organization.

I’m trying to convey something simple with this simple diagram – these are the ingredients you need before you can begin firing off missives to your internal and external teams. I wish this were more apparent to more companies.

There’s quite a bit that this diagram doesn’t communicate.

First, everything is interdependent. Objectives cannot be defined without an understanding of constraints, consumers, and your competitors, and your ability to dive deeply into insights is a factor of your time, money, and resources.

Second, this becomes a fluid process when you apply and enforce measurement. Strategies should only evolve once you have an understanding of their performance towards stated objectives.

Third and last of all, this kind of paradigm can produce a suite of strategies that can be tested, measured, refined, and eliminated as necessary.

there’s more time than the present

11 Nov, 2009 • posts i've written • 5 comments

How do we design experiences with an understanding for how humans perceive time?

I’ve been obsessed with this deck from Matt Jones ever since I posted it last week. Presented with a few days off myself, my obsession was allowed to run rampant. I cherry picked quite a few things from his presentation and then dug a little deeper with the help of a couple books and the internet.

I would have liked to spend a wee bit more time with this one, but I’m trying out this new philosophy of not letting ‘the perfect be the enemy of the good.’

I’d love to hear some thoughts on this one, so donate your two cents in the comments.

hopes and fears

26 Oct, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

image credit

Had a phone interview today with a gent named David Parsons about the future of the whole social media thing. David is getting his Masters in Interactive Media and also happens to be one of our Fiesta agents.

David asked an interesting question, so I thought I’d pose it to you, dear reader…

What’s your greatest hope and your greatest fear for the next five years when it comes to the intersection of business and digital technologies?

To be fair, I’ll start us off with my answers to David… (before you rip me to shreds, I had all of ten seconds to make these up, you give it a shot!)

Greatest hope: consumers truly control production. Digital technologies allow consumers to cooperate together and communicate their needs to corporations which (using superior production technologies) can service smaller and smaller consumer segments. Aaron also pointed out that wouldn’t it be nice if companies got better at serving those needs of ours we don’t clearly recognize or ask for.

Greatest fear: companies just get really good at faking it. Astro-turfing, town-halling, fabricating consumer opinion and using it to bullshit a demand (we want our guns to be extra shoot-ie)

fans: the rising tide

08 Jul, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Plenty of brilliant folks have carried the banner of fans long before I jumped in – and I’m beginning to see more mainstream (or simply more popular) voices echo the sentiment: fans are the future of digital marketing.

Two posts on fans today, the first from Seth Godin, asks “how big is the gap between customer and die-hard fan? In other words, between engaging and loving, between attending and craving?” (alright that one might be less about fans, and more in the normal Seth vein of saying ‘you could go status-quo, or you could be super awesome fantastic’)

The second post, from MediaPost, really hits the goomba on the head:

What makes top brands so valuable? It’s not just that they sell a lot of volume. The most valuable consumer brands are successful because of the relationships they form with their customers.

And while ‘relationship’ is the promise of the social Web, most brands have missed the boat when it comes to their social marketing initiatives. Instead of investing in relationships, brands have largely invested in a token presence on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. It’s no wonder they haven’t seen an ROI.

….

It’s clear why this matters to brands and should matter to you: your biggest fans are your most valuable and authentic social marketing vehicle. If you invest in a true relationship with them, you’ll be able to move and react quickly to their ever-changing needs, and even ask them for help. It doesn’t take much to keep them happy – just creating a special and honored place and engaging in honest dialogue. When you invite them in, you unleash their willingness and desire to recruit other fans that will gush and rave online with them.

Well said.

robotweets

06 Jul, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments

Twitter could easily become far less about one-to-one conversations, and more centered around information delivered by automatic sources.

For instance, posting will become more automatic.

Apps running in the background (someday) will push notifications to my Twitter feed, like my location, what I’m listening to, calories I’m burning, content I’m capturing, etc.

Responses will become more automatic, too.

Beyond brands trying to act like real human beings, they’ll also push to create automatic feeds offering real value. If you mention a location you should get a coupon or competing offer. If you mention wanting a product, Amazon or eBay may try to sell it to you. If you get annoyed by the offer, you’ll tweet back with something like “@amazon UNSUBSCRIBE”.

Twitter will become the little loyalty card you get punched every time you buy a coffee. Agencies will sprout up with the capability to build these services for brands and their brick and mortar stores. I know I must sound naive – this has been the basic premise behind anything mobile for the last few years, but I’m really beginning to doubt that people will accept messaging without having consciously pushed out related content. Twitter is the perfect channel to play eavesdropper and it’s still easy enough for people to ignore you when they choose.

Brands will retain their main handles for the conversation stuff, the back and forth with their super fans, but they’ll soon start generating dozens of automatic accounts to pump out deals and news. (Dell on Twitter is the first mover here)

This was a quick bake, so I want to hear your thoughts here…