“We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds our grasp. Deal with it.”
The cluetrain manifesto
Brunch anyone?
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
A quote from Peter Drucker and to that I think that we can also add that
“Service eats brand for lunch”
To prove my point look at the now famous 1 Billion USD purchase of a the two year old company with 13 employees that leveraged the Polaroid brand.
Is the IOC stumbling at the 2012 starting blocks?
As we enter in the the last 100 days before the launch of London 2012, we are starting to see the ramping up of communication. One thing that will make these games different from 2008 games is how the games and the brands around are going to use the social media to build relationships with consumers.
“Back in 2008, it was very much about paid media,” said Mark Renshaw, chief innovation officer at Leo Burnett, a unit of No. 3 advertising agency Publicis, referring to the last summer Olympics. “Now the reason they want to have a relationship (with consumers) is to generate shared media.”
Riding on this wave the International Olympic Committee has created their own social platform, the Olympic Athletes Hub, for competitors and fans to connect by integrating the fragmented Twitter and Facebook conversations into one stream.
But hold on here come the Branding Police.
As Esther Addley of The Guardian outlines, the sponsorship and branding contracts tied to the Olympics this year are so closely guarded and monitored, that ticket holders, athletes and businesses will have to tread carefully in order to avoid incurring the wrath of the branding ‘police’. They also run the risk of putting a stick in the wheel of the IOC being effective with shared and earned media.
An example of this is the video embedded below. The video is taken from the IOC’s YouTube channel to promote the Olympic Athletes Hub. However try to embed the video onto another site as I am here and well, just try to play the video and you will see what I mean.
Small Business Saturday
At the end of February this year Facebook held their first awards for marketing creativity that utilises Facebook’s platform. The highest accolade, the ‘blue’ award, was given to American Express for their 2010 Small Business Saturday campaign. American Express, together with CP&B and Digitas, created Small Business Saturday as a new shopping day to follow Black Friday driving attention as well as commerce to the American high streets and the small businesses that populate them.
For me what is so impressive is how they created simple tools via an online marketing kit, that encouraged small business owners to get active in social media channels in a simple and effective manner. The campaign dropped the usual barriers that stops business getting active in these channels, educating owners as to why and how they can use the social media channels to drive awareness, and sales. In a practical and simple manner they were able to set up Facebook pages, YouTube videos, twitter, foursquare accounts and create special deals in these channels to attract customers.
500,000 small business owners signed up to use the tools and attracted more than 103 million shoppers who turned out to support the event. The results were measurable not only via the usual proxy ROI measurements of ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘retweets’ but with a 23% raise in sales compared to the previous year. It also resulted in the US senate passing a bill to official support small business Saturday. Of course American Express benefitted with a 100% increase in sales with their cards during the event. This is a great example of why and how digital can help companies and brands in the long term, rather than delivering the usual short term PR. Read more about the awards here http://facebook-studio.com/awards/winners#/gallery/submission/small-business-saturday-1 here is the campaigns website http://smallbusinesssaturday.com/ some of the reported effects here http://www.businessinsider.com/small-business-saturday-2011-12
We are talking the talk as the US is walking the walk
Here are two slides from a Sildeshare deck about Pinterst I found a few weeks back. We all know that hype around Pintrest but what worries me the most is the demographics looking at the US and the UK From these two slides you can see that the UK is mainly made up of industry geeks who probably only join Pinterst because, like everyone else myself included, wanted to understand what they hype was all about. I am pretty sure that the European demograpic is pretty much the same as the UK’s. Where as in the US is made up of non-industry people, who joined to be a part of a group.
We seem to be talking the talk as they are walking the walk. This is worrying.
Don’t want to be a hater but….
This campaign for Mini is awful. The creators Dorsten&Lesser call it an innovative and real-time social sharing experience. Ok RFID bracelets were used, but really this campaign does not offer me anything I can’t already do with my own mobile and crow-bars Mini into the event in a totally irrelevant way. Guys this is NOT innovation!
The 30 seconds pitch
In the mobile context, you need to explain what you do in 30 seconds or less because people move on to the next shiny object.
Kevin Systrom, CEO and Founder, Instagram
Apptivity by Mattel
Mattel is launching a new concept toy range called Apptivity. I am sure that this is going to be a success, the concept manges to win on three levels,
- That it makes physical the characters from the app gaming world. One thing that angry birds has had a huge success with thanks to my colleague Claus at Grow.
- That it provides game developers to possibility to bring another level of interactivity to their already existing platforms.
- That mattel can provide an attractive digital experience for their physical toys as you can see they have done for their Hotwheels toys in the video below.
Digital brand strategy framework
Working at Grow, one of my main responsibilities has been to align the digital offer with Grow’s over all offer. This article is a walk through the model that I created to illustrate what goes into a digital strategy and the effects of the possible output.
(You can click on the images to see them larger)
1. Goals and objectives
First we need to start with digital goals and objectives. I strongly believe that a companies digital presence should support it’s brand platform and be a facilitator of it’s business strategy. This might sound like common sense, but so often the main brief from many clients is a need for a graphical facelift or the modernisation of the technical platform. These of course are valid starting points, but any project to redesign a companies web presence should look at the wider opportunities that web can provide as being a central tool for it’s brands communication.
2. Brand culture
After setting the goals and objectives, you next have to look at the relevance for the digital channels not only externally but also, more importantly, internally. Externally you must build an understanding of where your audience is and what they are doing online. Similarly mapping the internal usage of the digital channels can reveal the if the site is relevant internally and if not why not. Also to map out what resources are needed / available to run effective communication.
3. Brand communication
At this stage we need to define where and how a brand should be active online. This needs to be balanced against the findings that came from mapping out the brand culture and more specifically,
- Where the audience is online
- What kind of content will being produced
- The resources available
At this point I think the model needs some explanation.
It is important to note the scale at the bottom right. I have laid out the different channels by level of customer engagement rather than level of importance. This is not to say that a brand needs to be active in all of these channels, rather you need to create a total vision over the total digital footprint.Defining the roles between paid, earned and owned media and how they can feed into each other.
- The main site acts as the digital hub to be a central point where a brand can create deep engagement.
- Mobile apps, are mobile specific applications and not mobile ready sites. The general finding so far is infrequent connection with a brand in the mobile is best done through the main site which goes without saying should be mobile ready. Where as a specific mobile app should provide a deeper engagement to more devoted and frequent customers.
- Blogs and content feeds contains sites that can act as content host providers such as YouTube, Vimeo, tumblr e.t.c. as well as the brands on blog or similar news feed.
- Social networks here include sites such as Facebook, G+, Twitter etc. even though these sites provide great awareness, they rely on micro content and micro interactions, making it hard to drive a deeper engagement.
- Microsites are loosing ground to social media channels but still exist.
- Digital ads are everything from traditional banners to mobile through to padverts.
- Developing a strong SEO and SEM strategy is of course hugely important but in the terms of customer engagement it is quite low, which is why on this model it is out on the edge.
If you look to the left hand side of the model you will see the introduction of Innovation into the goals and objectives. The digital channels are fast moving, and a brand needs to be able to judge if the new platform is right to jump into. You also need a reason to revisit the strategy at regular intervals and innovation, both external and internal, provides the catalysis for the revisit.
4. Digital Brand innovation
Finally through the digital channels a brand has the possibility to move into service design. Here you can explore the possibility of your brand delivering high level of engagement by providing digital services for their customers that are either driven from the core of the brand or taking opportunities from the peripheral edges.
So that is a quick overview of my framework with which to develop a digital strategy. I use this model to describe Grow’s digital offer as well as to provide clients with an understanding of developing a digital strategy.
Copy, right?
The problem in this business is not to keep people from stealing your ideas, but to make them steal them
